Sensory Evaluations Through a PDA Lens

“Mama, before our trip, my body didn’t want to get on the plane, but my head really wanted to.”

My PDA son broke our comfortable silence as we sped through the foothills of the Rocky Mountains on our way to farm-based therapy in Colorado.

We were traveling for a nervous system healing – the Safe and Sound Protocol* – with a trusted therapist, healer, and in my opinion shaman, to spend a week finding safety in our relationship and connection on a deeper level.

“That must have felt hard for you.” I stated, not wanting to shut down the conversation before it began.

“I told my body it was OK, and now my body is fine.”

“That’s great. I’m happy to be here with you on our adventure.”

“Me too.”

We settled in again and Cooper stared out the window at the totally new landscape – open skies, mountains, and dry land – while I focused on driving near the median to give space to the dozens of bicyclists along the two-lane highway.

PDA vs. Anxiety

I share this anecdote, because after four years of accommodating my son, he is finally able to articulate what I have known since learning about PDA and studying the nervous system and the body of research on trauma:

His body often can’t do the things his thinking brain and heart want.

This is different than anxiety.

PDA is based on the *subconscious* perception of threat in the survival brain, often without rational awareness of why on the part of the child or teen.

Every perceived loss of autonomy.

Every subtle loss of equality.

It registers in the body over and over and accumulates. It can then feel sudden when your child or teen tips past their threshold of tolerance and their body is disabled from doing something – leaving the house, attending school, speaking, using the toilet independently, eating, sleeping, etc.

Unlike Anxiety – which is more cognitive in nature and based on a fear or worry about the future – PDA neuroception is about in-the-moment, immediate, and automatic responses to a subconscious perception of threat. There may not be any cognitive awareness about why the body is responding as it is.

“My Body Won’t Let Me”

When Cooper was younger and in burnout, this paradox was ever present and utterly confusing to me as a parent.

What I saw were often non-verbal signals of stuckness.  For example, his body would almost lurch to do something – leave the house, get in the car, eat, or get up the stairs for bedtime, but then he would melt down, collapse, lash out, or jerk away as if an invisible force was driving his sudden reaction.

I remember trying to take him on a walk one hot evening with a popsicle – a desperate attempt to get him out of the house and some fresh air – then him getting stuck (freeze) just a few blocks from our home when the popsicle was done (no more dopamine) and needing to be carried home.  

At that time Cooper needed proprioceptive and vestibular input in order to be able to sense where his body was in space and feel grounded, yet he was not able to move his own body on a swing, bounce on a trampoline, climb, swim or engage in movement.

We spent *YEARS* bouncing his body on a trampoline for him, swinging his body on a swing set or in hammock swings, or moving his body through water because he physically couldn’t. (At first this looked like “laziness” or “stubbornness,” but it eventually became clear it wasn’t temperament).

As his nervous system activation came down slowly – with an accommodation approach – we would hear the common refrains that so many of you are familiar with:

My body won’t let me.

My legs don’t work.

I can’t.

Why Many Approaches Don’t work with your Child or Teen

Like trauma, the experience of repeated nervous system activation registers in the body, often below and beyond conscious thought.

And this is the foundational reason that the following strategies often don’t work to support our kids and teens (and in many cases, make things worse):

• A behavioral approach of any kind
• Reward-sanction frameworks
• Exposure based therapies to alleviate OCD compulsions, anxiety, and cognitive-based worries when that isn’t the true root cause of behaviors.
• Traditional talk therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, naming emotions
• Teaching or correcting in the moment of a survival response (because it often looks like “defiance” or bad behavior).

This does not mean these are “bad” or “incorrect” modalities or ways to parent, or that particular aspects of some of these approaches might benefit your child once they are consistently back in their thinking brain and able to access rational thought and out of burnout.

I point it out because the tendency is to START with – and DOUBLE DOWN on – the above modalities when our kids are struggling, which will simply drive them further into the survival brain, towards burnout, and away from connection and trust.

Nuance

The truth is, many PDA children and teens have more than one support challenge:

PDA and OCD

PDA and severe generalized anxiety

PDA and ADHD

PDA and PANDAS/PANS

PDA and Trauma

The opportunity we have here as parents is to make space – whether it is a week or a month or a year – to experiment with a different way of parenting, caregiving, therapizing, and educating our children that is based on a totally different paradigm and targets a different part of the brain.  To “isolate” the PDA variable in order to gain clarity on what is causing what.

If you do this consistently, over time, you can observe your child or teen without judgment, collect your own data, and find your own path.

Not by looking to an expert or a guru on parenting, but rather by tuning into your own intuition and the data right in front of you. Then trusting it and yourself.

Making this shift often requires a monumental and sometimes heroic effort on your part.

It requires you go against societal norms around parenting (and school and discipline, etc.), move against the strong behavioral current of most medical, educational, and therapeutic practices, and choose approaches that are not *YET* evidence-based in terms of large-N samples.

It requires you to drop the people pleasing and set boundaries, maybe for the first time in your life.

You will do this in what feels like isolation, while being judged and shamed along the way. Whether it is by your parents, your neighbors, your in-laws, a pediatrician or even your co-parent.

The truth is, a committed focus on felt safety, accommodation, trauma-informed strategies, and autonomy is not the easy path.

It is long-term. It will bring you to your knees at times. And it is likely the most challenging thing you will ever do. But I know you have the strength to change the trajectory of your child’s life and stabilize your family.

So, I will leave you with this:

You are not alone.

You are part of a global community of 1000’s of parents eking out a path against the grain and against the odds.

I believe in you and that the best is yet to come for you, your family and your PDA child or teen.