At Peace Parents Podcast

When autonomy is low, meaning has to be high. That is what I learned during the two years I spent as a full-time caregiver for my older son, isolated in our home, and putting myself physically between him and his eighteen-month-old brother when things got bad.
In this episode I share how I found a sustaining "why" during that period, and how other families I have worked with have found theirs. I also introduce a practical tool I call the "hang your hat on the day" goal: a way of redirecting from goals that depend on another person's behavior to goals that are entirely within your own control, so that you can give yourself genuine credit for what you are doing every single day.

Key Takeaways

When Autonomy Is Low, Meaning Has to Be High | 00:00:00 Parenting a PDA child or teen introduces an almost constant rock-and-a-hard-place dynamic: every choice has a cost, and there is no option that gives you genuine autonomy without a trade-off. When you want to go to the gym, there is a cost when you come back. When your partner takes over for a few hours, there is a cost to their energy level. That sustained low autonomy is depleting in a way most people around us will never understand, and what I have found, from my own experience and across the families I work with, is that meaning is the variable that makes it sustainable. We need a "why" that gets us through the day.


How I Found My "Why" in the Basement | 00:01:46 I was in the basement of our home in Michigan, putting myself between my older and younger sons when things got violent, feeling my own violent rage moving through me that I want to name as normal rather than shameful. My older son needed constant undivided attention and dopamine or he would go after his brother, and I was isolated, sensory overwhelmed, and out of resources. I had been reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and had a seed planted about the idea that a clear why makes almost anything endurable. In that moment in the basement I realized: my entire doctorate had been on nonviolence and grassroots peace building and there I was, finally practicing it. Not theoretically. In my own basement. That was enough meaning to sustain me through that period.


What Other Families Have Found as Their Why | 00:06:27 The meaning does not have to be mine. Across the thousands of families I have worked with, the sustaining whys have included: healing intergenerational trauma, becoming the parent they wished they had, practicing becoming a less judgmental person, learning non-reactivity as a skill, learning about disability and neurodiversity in a way that changes how they move through the world, and healing themselves through the relationship with their child. None of these are about outcomes for the child. They are about what the parent is becoming through the practice of showing up, which is the only part any of us actually controls.


Why Goals That Depend on Your Child Will Undermine You | 00:08:29 One of the most consistent patterns I see across the families I work with, and in myself, is attaching goals to things another person has to do: my child will go back to school in the fall, my child will be independent by this age, my partner will come on board if I explain it clearly enough. When these goals drive our sense of progress, we are setting ourselves up for a particular kind of suffering, because we have no control over another person's nervous system or choices. The shift I ask parents to make is not to stop wanting those things. It is to stop basing today's measure of success on whether they happened.


The Hang Your Hat on the Day Goal | 00:10:06 This is the practical tool that helped me through the most acute period of caregiving and that I return to now in harder seasons. The hang your hat goal is the one thing within your own control that you can point to at the end of a day and say: I did that. Some days it is "I showed up more regulated than I would have a year ago." Some days it is "I stayed in the PDA lens for most of the day even though I fell back into the old pattern at bedtime." Some days it is "I brushed my teeth, I ate enough to stay alive, and I did not scream at my kids." All of these count. None of them depend on what your child did. And giving yourself genuine credit for what you did, even when no one else can see it, is one of the most sustainable things you can do for your own nervous system over the long term.


Relevant Resources

Finding Meaning — Free class where I go deeper into the meaning-making framework described in this episode, including how to identify a sustaining why that is true for your specific life and journey.
Burnout — Free class with context for the burnout period I describe, including the two years of intensive caregiving that led me to Viktor Frankl and the hang your hat goal.
Paradigm Shift Program — My signature program where meaning-making, the hang your hat goal, and the full accommodation framework are practiced together across twelve weeks with live coaching and a community of families in the same season.
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What does shame have to do with PDA? And why do behavioral approaches fail so consistently for this neurotype even when implemented well? I speak with Dr. Gillian Boudreau, a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in autism, ADHD, and anxiety across children, families, and adults, to explore the roles of shame and power in PDA children and teens.
Dr. Boudreau draws on her early career supporting high-need autistic students in a school system, her psychodynamic training, and her work with families to explain why these children frustrate adults, why that frustration is data, and what it looks like to help parents construct a resilient narrative from a place of compassion rather than blame.

Key Takeaways

What the Adults Around PDA Children Are Feeling and Why It Matters | 00:12:00 In her second year supporting high-need students in a school system, Dr. Boudreau shifted from behavioral interventions to asking the adults on the team a different question: what is this child bringing up in you? The answers were consistent: I feel like I don't know what I'm doing, I feel powerless, I feel like I'm going to lose control. Through a psychodynamic lens, clients often make helpers feel the very way they feel inside and cannot express. When the adults named their own feelings of shame and powerlessness, and the team began offering children more autonomy and genuine collaboration before demanding compliance, the big behaviors began to shift in ways that star charts had not produced.


Shame Is at the Root on Both Sides | 00:52:00 PDA children often carry years of cumulative shame - due to numerous factors - and w hen a child in that much pain escalates, adults respond from their own activated shame response. This produces a shame-blame cycle that makes everything worse.


Hurt People Hurt People | 01:00:00 One of the most common fears parents bring to Dr. Boudreau is whether their child has empathy, whether they are raising someone who will become abusive. Her response is direct: true sociopathy is extraordinarily rare, and PDA nervous systems are characterized by overactive fear and often hyperempathy. She uses an example from my own family to illustrate radical empathy as a clinical stance: if a child locked someone in a basement, the question to ask is not what is wrong with this child, but what level of threat must they have been perceiving in their body to do that?

Why PDA Children Cannot Help But Call Out Arbitrary Power Structures | 01:05:39 Dr. Boudreau describes PDA as a nervous system that is exquisitely sensitive to the emotional electricity of agenda and control. From an evolutionary perspective, she suggests that the presence of PDA across the population may serve a function: some nervous systems are wired to detect and resist arbitrary or exploitative power dynamics that others have learned to tolerate. The problem is not the sensitivity. The problem is that schools and many family systems are not built to respond to it without escalating into shame cycles.

What Parents Need Most: A Resilient Narrative and Permission to Grieve | 01:15:15 When Dr. Boudreau works with parents of PDA children, she starts by helping them catch their own shame response at the root before it cycles back toward the child. She holds space for grief, including grief for the life and the parenting experience that was expected. She also shares what she knows from seeing many PDA journeys longitudinally: this will likely turn out to be pretty cool at some point. The goal is not to minimize the hardship but to help parents construct a narrative that has room for the full palette of human emotion.

Relevant Resources

Clear Connection Psychology on Instagram — Dr. Gillian Boudreau's Instagram where she shares content and resources on emotional safety, connection, and supporting all brains and hearts across children, families, and school systems.
PDA North America: PDA-Affirming Providers Directory — A directory of PDA-affirming providers maintained by PDA North America, referenced in this episode as a resource for families looking for clinicians who understand the PDA profile.
Turning Passive Into Active: A Building Block of Ego and Fundamental Mechanism of Defense — Reference document on the concept Dr. Boudreau introduces in this episode as the psychological term underlying what I call equalizing behavior in PDA children and teens.
Understanding PDA — Free class where I teach the nervous system disability framework and the neuroception logic that underlies the shame and power dynamics Dr. Boudreau describes in this episode.
Burnout — Free class with context for the burnout period I describe in this episode, including the six months with my younger son and why the shame-blame cycle is most dangerous when a child is deepest in burnout.

Mentioned in this episode:
July Try Before You Buy Special Offer!
For a whole month you can trial all the pre-recorded parts of our proven effective coaching program - including over 500 private podcast episodes - for just $49. This special offer ends July 31. Use the link below to learn more.
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If you've lowered demands for your PDA child or teen but still aren't seeing much progress, this episode is for you. It explains one of the most common sticking points I hear from families: that due to the name - Pathological Demand Avoidance - parents focused on lowering demands, when what their child needs more is increased autonomy and equality.
This episode is an excerpt from my free Understanding PDA Masterclass. In it I walk through the distinction between demands as a surface-level behavior and autonomy and equality as the root-level mechanism. To help make the difference clear, I describe how in a typical morning autonomy losses often accumulate before a child even gets out the door.
Key Takeaways

Demands Are the Surface. Autonomy Is the Root | 00:00:00 The name Pathological Demand Avoidance points toward the behavior: avoidance of demands. But if we think about PDA as a pervasive drive for autonomy, we get closer to the actual mechanism. Parents who have lowered demands and are not seeing progress are often still inadvertently signaling a loss of autonomy through expectation, energy, agenda, or position of authority, even when the demand itself has been removed. The surface level behavior is demand avoidance. The root level cause is neuroception of a loss of autonomy or equality.


My Younger Son's School Refusal: The Autonomy Mechanism in Real Time | 00:01:33 For two weeks, my younger son could not get his body to go to school. Each evening he would tell me he genuinely wanted to go the next morning, naming specific things he looked forward to. When I asked whether he would like me to prompt him in the morning, he said no, because if you do, then I will not go. That is the PDA mechanism: in his thinking brain, with full autonomy and no external expectation, going to school felt possible. The moment an agenda or a prompt from me entered, his amygdala would register a loss of autonomy, activate the threat response, and make going impossible.


A Morning Audit: Fifteen Activations To Start The Day | 00:06:02 I walk through a typical first hour of a day with a PDA child to illustrate how many autonomy and equality losses can accumulate before the family has even left the house. Being woken up by a parent or an alarm is an externally imposed loss of autonomy. Being expected to come downstairs, eat, eat in a particular place, be told what is and is not available for breakfast, clean up the plate, get dressed, put on shoes, pack a backpack, receive a gentle correction after pushing a sibling on the way to the car: each one registers in the amygdala as a threat event. In a loving, gentle household with no intentional pressure, there can be fifteen or more of these activations in forty-five minutes. That cumulative load is what makes PDA disabling, not any single demand.


Equality Is as Important as Autonomy | 00:04:50 The equality piece is often underemphasized. It includes any energy of another person being above the PDA child in stature, authority, or position: not getting the most ice cream, not being first down the stairs, not getting the last word, having a parent try and teach them something in the moment of a behavior. Even gentle parenting's recommendation to take the child aside after a dysregulation and debrief produces this perception, because the parent is placing themselves above as the teacher and the explainer. The child is not in the right part of their brain to receive it, and the teaching itself is perceived as another activation.

Relevant Resources

Understanding PDA — The free masterclass from which this episode is excerpted, covering the six characteristics of PDA including the survival drive for autonomy and equality described here.
Burnout — Free class with context for how cumulative autonomy losses build over time to the point of disabling access to basic needs.
Paradigm Shift Program — My signature program where the shift from a demand lens to an autonomy and equality lens is practiced as an embodied skill over twelve weeks of live coaching.
Mentioned in this episode:
July Try Before You Buy Special Offer!
For a whole month you can trial all the pre-recorded parts of our proven effective coaching program - including over 500 private podcast episodes - for just $49. This special offer ends July 31. Use the link below to learn more.
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This episode is an excerpt from a lesson inside the Paradigm Shift Program. I'm sharing it because the PDA lens is the foundation that all other skills in my work rest on, and it is not something most parents are going to hear explained anywhere else.
In this lesson I walk through exactly what the PDA lens is, why it has to be learned as a skill rather than just understood intellectually, and how to begin applying it. I also address the most common thought that comes up when I introduce the concept of deliberately signaling equality: am I training my child to be a bad adult? And why the answer, through the logic of this lens, is no.
Key Takeaways

The PDA Lens Is a Skill, Not the Only Valid Lens | 00:00:00 The PDA lens is something I think of as a pair of glasses you can put on and take off. It does not invalidate the ADHD lens, the sensory lens, the OCD lens, or the anxiety lens. It teaches a different logic, one that most parents are not going to hear explained anywhere else because every professional encounter tends to frame the root cause through a different paradigm.


Every Loss of Autonomy Is a Drop in a Bucket, Invisible Until the Tipping Point | 00:01:31 The PDA lens asks us to look at every behavior, even if it looks manipulative or intentional, and think: my child has been perceiving threat around not having autonomy or being below someone or something, over and over, and every time that happens, a drop goes into the cumulative nervous system activation bucket. Most of those drops are invisible because high masking, the internalization of the threat response rather than the behavioral expression of it, is a feature of PDA. The accumulation builds over days, months and years. By the time most families arrive at my work, the child is either very close to their threshold of tolerance or so far past it that they are existing in a near-constant state of threat.


Equalization, Basic Needs, and Why Behavioral Strategies Cannot Work | 00:06:41 When cumulative activation reaches the tipping point, the nervous system tries to exert control and move above in order to get back to felt safety. This is equalizing. And control tends to coalesce around the one or two things a parent genuinely cannot force: eating, toileting, sleep, hygiene. Because this is subconscious, cumulative, and not under their conscious awareness, behavioral strategies do not work.


Signaling Equality Without Removing All Boundaries | 00:11:39 The equality signal does not mean there are no limits in the home and the child runs everything. It means thinking creatively about how to deliberately, mindfully, and as an accommodation give a child or teen the felt experience of being above, of going first, of being more skilled in this moment, in order to offset years of subconsciously perceiving that they are below.


You Will Know More Than the Professionals You Work With | 00:10:09 This is not a criticism of professionals. It is a reality of where the PDA research and understanding currently sits. Most clinicians, teachers, and therapists have been trained through a behavioral paradigm that assumes behavior is rational, conscious, and changeable through incentives and disincentives. The PDA lens is a fundamentally different paradigm and it is not (yet!) taught in most training programs.

Relevant Resources

Understanding PDA — Free class where I teach the nervous system disability framework and the root cause logic that the PDA lens described in this episode is built on.
Tracking Progress — Free class on how to observe the three outcome dimensions, nervous system activation, basic needs, and engagement, referenced in this episode as the data to watch rather than the behaviors to fix.
Paradigm Shift Program — My signature three-month program where the PDA lens introduced in this excerpt is practiced as an embodied skill across twelve weeks of live coaching, spot coaching, and community support.
Mentioned in this episode:
July Try Before You Buy Special Offer!
For a whole month you can trial all the pre-recorded parts of our proven effective coaching program - including over 500 private podcast episodes - for just $49. This special offer ends July 31. Use the link below to learn more.
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When I first heard Jan Winhall speak about the intersection of the nervous system and addiction, I immediately thought of the PDA teens and adults in our community who are reaching for substances or engaging in self-harm.
In this episode she explains how addiction and self-harm function as nervous system state regulation strategies, what conventional models get wrong, and what it actually looks like to support someone through this from a place of safety rather than shame.
Winhall brings a wealth of knowledge to the conversation as a trauma and addiction psychotherapist, developer of the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, and author of two books on treating trauma and addiction through embodied awareness. I hope her insights support you.
Key Takeaways

Addiction as a Nervous System State Regulation Strategy | 00:06:52 The conventional model frames addiction as either a moral failure or a brain disease. Jan offers a third understanding grounded in polyvagal theory and neuroplasticity: addictive behaviors are strategies the body uses to shift nervous system states when there is not enough perceived safety. When someone is in a chronic sympathetic state, the wine bottle or the substance moves them into dorsal, into numbing and relief. When someone is in a chronic dorsal state, high-risk or stimulating behaviors move them back up into sympathetic mobilization. The body cycles between these states because it cannot stay in either extreme indefinitely. The behaviors become addictive because they work, at least in the moment, and because there is no other available path to felt safety.

What Cutting and Self-Harm Do in the Nervous System | 00:10:05 Self-harm functions within the same trauma feedback loop. Cutting can release a sympathetic surge when the blood appears, which shifts a person out of dorsal numbness. It can also trigger the release of endogenous opioids that bring the body back down into dorsal relief. The person is not being manipulative or seeking attention. They are doing what their nervous system has learned will shift an unbearable state into something survivable. Jan describes working with women in her first job who were all self-harming, all addicted, and all diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She did not accept that framing then and still does not. What she saw was a population of trauma survivors whose bodies were doing exactly what bodies are designed to do.

Not Being Seen Is Traumatic | 00:37:30 Jan describes the privileged neurodivergent teenagers she saw in her clinical work who came to her saying I have everything, why am I like this? What they were experiencing, she explains, is the trauma of not being seen and fully delighted in for exactly who they are.

What Healing Actually Looks Like With a Teen | 00:43:21 Jan describes her clinical work with teens as beginning with co-regulation and the building of a relationship where the teenager feels genuinely safe. That means meeting them where they are, including the sessions where they spend the entire hour talking about how much they did not want to come. It means creating an environment where they can say anything as long as they are respectful of the basic boundaries. It means finding something to fall in love with in the person sitting across from you, because that delight is the container in which a teen can begin to explore shame, identity, and the behaviors they have been hiding from everyone else.

Neuroception, Interoception, and the Paradigm Shift | 00:22:55 Interoception is the body's capacity to sense what is happening from the inside: the tightness in the chest, the quickening of breath, the feeling of something that has not yet found words. Jan's Felt Sense Polyvagal Model combines polyvagal theory with a body-based practice to help people slow down enough to listen to what is already happening in the body rather than suppressing or bypassing it.

Relevant Resources

Felt Sense Polyvagal Model Institute — Jan Winhall's institute where she teaches the Felt Sense Polyvagal Model internationally, including graphic models of the nervous system that can be downloaded and used with children and families.
Somatic Mondays With Jan Winhall — Monthly community gathering focused on nervous system regulation for people navigating addiction and recovery, hosted by Jan Winhall and Recovery Reimagined.
Dr. Sean Inderbitzen on LinkedIn — Autistic therapist, parent, and author of two books on polyvagal theory and autism, referenced by Jan Winhall in this episode as a recommended resource for neurodivergent families.
Understanding PDA — Free class where I teach the nervous system disability framework and the polyvagal concepts that underlie the addiction and self-harm patterns Jan describes in this episode.
Burnout — Free class with context for the dorsal shutdown and burnout states that Jan's work helps illuminate, particularly for families whose teens are reaching for substances or engaging in self-harm.
Paradigm Shift Program — My signature program where the nervous system framework, felt safety, and the accommodation toolkit are taught live, creating the kind of co-regulated container Jan describes as foundational to all healing.
Mentioned in this episode:
July Try Before You Buy Special Offer!
For a whole month you can trial all the pre-recorded parts of our proven effective coaching program - including over 500 private podcast episodes - for just $49. This special offer ends July 31. Use the link below to learn more.
Try Before You Buy