Inside the Nervous System: Reframing PDA with IFS

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Introduction

I’ve come to understand PDA not as wilful defiance, but as a living negotiation inside the nervous system — a coalition of Parts working urgently, sometimes rigidly, to protect autonomy and safety whenever these feel under threat. Seen through the lens of Internal Family Systems (IFS), PDA shifts from a pathologised “profile” to a system of protection and care.

This piece doesn’t aim to settle the debate over what PDA is. Instead, it’s an offering: a way of seeing PDA that is both practical and deeply affirming — especially for those of us who find ourselves within it.

Ableism: The Soil Our Parts Grow In

To truly understand PDA, we have to name the soil it grows in: systemic ableism.

So many neurodivergent people spend years — even decades — being told our sensory needs are “overreactions,” our boundaries are “barriers,” our honesty is “rude.” So we bend. We mask. We perform.

For many late-identified Autistic people, the strongest, most relentless demands have never been tasks but the lifelong expectation to perform neuronormativity.

Masking is the daily suppression of stimming, sensory needs, authentic communication, and true ways of relating. It’s the unspoken rule layered over every interaction: Don’t be too much. Don’t be inconvenient. Don’t make others uncomfortable.

The Nervous System and Intolerance of Uncertainty

Much of the research on PDA points to anxiety and intolerance of uncertainty as core drivers of extreme demand avoidance (Stuart et al., 2020).

For many Autistic people, ambiguity is not neutral — it can feel deeply unsafe. Lived experience teaches us that unexpected demands often bring overwhelm, shame, or conflict. Even seemingly “small” requests can echo older moments when saying yes cost too much.

So, the nervous system reacts with an urgent need to restore control. This protective impulse shows up in ways many of us know well: distraction, procrastination, slipping into the comforting safety of fantasy, or shutting down communication altogether.

These responses aren’t signs of manipulation or defiance in the malicious sense — they are survival strategies. They emerge from the same protective instincts that drive any fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response when threat is near.

How IFS Makes Sense of PDA

Internal Family Systems (Schwartz, 2021) offers a lens that many of my clients — and I — have found profoundly clarifying.

IFS starts with a radical proposition: each of us is made up of many Parts, each working to keep us safe in ways that once made sense.

In IFS, these Parts often fall into three broad categories:

• Managers — proactive Parts that scan for danger and try to control situations to prevent pain.

• Firefighters — reactive Parts that jump in when pain breaks through, often using urgent or drastic strategies to shut it down.

• Exiles — tender, hidden Parts that carry our oldest wounds, unmet needs, and stories of vulnerability.

At the centre of this inner system is Self — the calm, compassionate core that can witness and care for all Parts without fear or judgement.

When we map PDA through this lens, what looks like rigid avoidance or open defiance becomes easier to understand: it’s a system of Parts working together to protect Exiles from overwhelm, shame, or the loss of autonomy that once felt life-threatening.

The PDA System in Action

In my own experience, the sequence often goes like this:

A Manager Part stays on constant alert, scanning every interaction for hidden expectations: What’s the cost of saying yes? Who might I disappoint if I say no? How do I keep my freedom intact?

When a demand lands too close — or too suddenly — a Firefighter Part may burst in to break the circuit: scroll the phone, hyperfocus on something else, withdraw, go quiet, or say Absolutely not before I’ve fully registered what’s happening.

Beneath all this sits the Exile — a younger, often hidden Part that remembers what it felt like to be cornered, coerced, or forced to perform compliance at the cost of my true self. This Part holds the old truth: My needs don’t matter unless I’m compliant — but compliance always costs me something precious.

IFS reminds us: these Parts are not enemies to fight or faults to fix. They are ingenious adaptations — guardians forged in moments when the world asked too much, too fast, too often.

The Core Exiles PDA Protects

At its heart, PDA protectors often stand guard over one or more Exiles carrying the wound of a coerced loss of selfhood. These wounds often grow from:

• Loss of Autonomy — A deep, somatic memory that saying No makes us unsafe. Many PDAers have lived experiences where compliance was the price of inclusion or affection.

• Violation of Consent — Stories of bodily autonomy dismissed, sensory limits steamrolled, or truth gaslit. Not always obvious — but deeply shaping.

• Rejection for Difference — The hidden rule: If you don’t mask, you don’t belong. PDA is not just about tasks — it’s about protecting the right to exist as we are.

• Chronic Overwhelm — The body remembers the cost of pushing through. The Exile inside whispers: One more thing will break us.

Seen through this frame, demands don’t just mean tasks — they carry the threat of being dragged back into the places where selfhood was not allowed to breathe.

Lessons From Research: The Heart of Adult PDA

Recent research (Doyle & Kenny, 2023) echoes what so many of us feel in our bodies:

• Demands carry a felt sense of threat. Even a small request can echo old moments where a yes cost too much. The nervous system remembers — and the protectors rise.

• Social misunderstanding feeds the cycle. Misunderstanding PDA responses as laziness or manipulation only deepens the protectors’ resolve. When refusal is punished, the Parts double down. The wound underneath remains unseen.

• The paradox of connection. Many adults with PDA want closeness — but not at the cost of themselves. The No is not rejection for its own sake; it’s a boundary protecting a fragile freedom.

• Masking as invisible demand. Masking is not a skill but a survival strategy. It’s a demand so constant we forget it’s there — yet it costs us daily.

• Attachment wounds shape the protectors. Many protectors formed in moments where saying No meant care was withdrawn or punishment followed. Better to brace and push back than risk abandonment.

• Rigidity rarely helps. Rigid systems and inflexible demands only make the system brace harder. Trust and relational safety soften what force cannot reach.

• Quiet hope remains. Despite the friction, many adults carry a quiet hope: that with understanding, belief, and gentleness, there might be ways to hold both autonomy and connection — to choose freely and belong without losing oneself.

Why PDA Can Feel Like a Paradox

Many PDAers describe a deep irony: the drive for autonomy can sometimes become its own cage.

When every request feels threatening, we can find ourselves resisting even the things we genuinely want. A hobby that once soothed us can feel like pressure when it shifts from choice to obligation. A goal we set for ourselves can suddenly feel like an external demand if we sense others expect us to achieve it.

For me, this push-pull shows up as an inner tug-of-war. I want to choose freely — but sometimes the Parts protecting my freedom guard it so fiercely that I lose access to Self-led choice altogether.

Here is where IFS can be so transformative. Instead of fighting the Parts that resist, we learn to be in gentle relationship with them. The goal is not to erase the drive for autonomy, but to expand the conditions under which it can soften — because the system trusts that Self is here to protect what matters most.

A Path Forward

What if, instead of pathologising our avoidance, we listened to it?

What if we trusted that the Parts that say No are not trying to ruin our lives but to protect what is precious inside us?

Through an IFS lens, the task is not to get rid of the protectors but to build trust with them — to show them that Self is here. We can widen the window of safety, bit by bit, until the Parts that once guarded our freedom with rigid walls can soften into new possibilities for choice, rest, and connection.

In the end, PDA is not just about saying No. It’s about saying Yes — on our own terms, in our own time, from our own centre. It’s the lifelong work of returning to our wholeness — one gentle boundary at a time.

May this perspective be an offering to any Part of you that has always known: freedom and belonging can coexist.

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References

Doyle, A., & Kenny, N. (2023). Mapping experiences of pathological demand avoidance in Ireland. Journal of Research in Special Educational Needs, 23(1), 52–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-3802.12579

Fidler, R., Christie, P., & Kirk, C. (2021). Pathological demand avoidance: Current understanding and support. Autism, 25(2), 318–329.

Gillberg, C., Pickles, A., & Madden, S. (2018). PDA and the Autism Spectrum: An Update. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 59(5), 541–555.

Gore, N., Hastings, R. P., & Brady, S. (2020). Experiences of Receiving a PDA Diagnosis. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 50(8), 2951–2962.

Newson, E., Le Maréchal, K., & David, C. (2019). Demand Avoidance in Autism: Historical Perspectives and Modern Understanding. Developmental Disorders Journal, 11(1), 45–60.

O’Nions, E., Happé, F., & Viding, E. (2020). Distinct profiles of PDA within autism spectrum disorders. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 25(1), 87–99.

PDA Society (2024). https://www.pdasociety.org.uk/

Stuart, L., Grahame, V., Honey, E., & Freeston, M. (2020). Intolerance of uncertainty and anxiety as explanatory frameworks for extreme demand avoidance in children and adolescents. Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 25(2), 59–67.

Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No bad parts: Healing trauma and restoring wholeness with the Internal Family Systems model. Sounds True.