I live with a persistent drive for autonomy, or PDA. Basically, I have a very high baseline anxiety, I'm always thinking about what may happen or go wrong in the future, and because of this I only feel safe when I'm fully doing things voluntarily, of my own volition.
For example:
PDA people often have good attention to detail, are problem solvers, and are extremely good at self-educating. We are less easily influenced by general fashion trends, and often make good researchers and entrepreneurs.
But external observations of these kinds of behaviors of children within schools (a very controlling environment), lead to this neurotype being called 'pathological demand avoidance' within medical circles.
I and many others strongly dislike this name, and 'persistent drive for autonomy' more accurately describes the lived experience. But why does it exist? I can actually see obvious reasons for these kinds of behavior traits from an evolutionary standpoint.
If we consider neurodiversity as a concept, we can imagine that nature and evolution has created a number of different types of 'brains' which are adapted to performing different roles within the human social system, similar to how there are different kinds of ant in an ant colony.
Neurotypical people appear to be highly inclined to copy each other in a way that creates a harmogionous group, but they also never appear to stop and question why they are doing anything, or what practical function it serves.
That's clear to see within clothing fashion, which often does things that are objectively not practical. For example the early 20th century trend of women wearing 'hobble skirts', so tight they could barely walk.
The tendency for some individuals to feel deeply uncomfortable whenever they are not directly in control of their situation would make sense as an evolutionary defense mechanism against external manipulation.
Regarding how it manifests in myself, PDA allows me to observe the world as an 'outsider' and gives me the freedom to ask 'why' to everything I'm seeing. I have no drive to copy what anyone else is doing unless I chose to.
By and large, my natural inclination is to ignore everything and work things out from first principles. That then then serves as a form of proof and fact checking.
Thus, I think that the PDA neurotype exists to fact check the mass blind copying behavior of neurotypicals. Without something like this, a bad idea manifest in society that is quickly copied by people, could be extremely destructive to the system as a whole.
Obviously this is a very surface level explanation, but I feel that it in principle makes sense.
The main advantage is that by being very focused on my own interests, I'm less easily influenced by what other people are doing. Steve Gibson on his podcast Security Now, has often mentioned not downloading software one did not choose to look for as a means of avoiding downloading malware, and one can use this as an analogy for not downloading 'information' into myself that may be malicious.
For me, the main thing that PDA influences is how I approach learning. It always starts out with a personal interest - I see something new that catches my attention, or another task I'm doing manifests a need to develop a given skill.
Then my process goes like this:
An important thing to stress about this method is that I can't be taught in the way that schools typically do. If someone starts pushing information on me against my will, and I don't have a clear answer to 'why is this useful to me', my subconscious mind will immediately reject it.
Actually when talking to other people about how to do something, I'm generally looking for information not direction, and since coming to understand things more I can see that this often confuses people.
At the current point in time most people are accustomed to teaching in a directive rather than informational way, and I'm not good at being directed by anyone. Now that I'm aware of it I'm sure that this can be handled better.
If you're talking to someone who is asking for advice, but then immediately rejecting or pushing back against your suggestions, it may be because they have a PDA neurotype. It is best to offer advice in a way that leaves the other person in control of themselves:
And when offering advice, it is best phrased in a way that guides them to find solutions for themselves:
If you are a PDA person and someone is communicating in a way that bothers you, try to communicate your point of view, and explain how you learn best.
Finally, I feel it worthwhile to offer some insight into the situations where PDA traits can lead to autistic meltdowns. People with the PDA neurotype need to feel that they are in control of their life situation, and able to predict what will happen in the immediate future in order to feel safe.
Humans have something called the 'fight flight freeze fawn' response, which is a set of self-protective behaviors evolved in prehistoric times to handle situations like a predator attack and other threats. When triggered it manifests in the way the name describes, causing someone to want to flee, fight, freeze, or fawn.
Suddenly of forcefully removing control from a PDA person can trigger this response. For example, within the following video Meg discusses an occurrence where she was staying away from home as a child, and felt very uncomfortable being in that situation.
In this instance she was maintaining contact with her mum by talking on the phone, and this was providing a 'life line'. During one such conversation someone took the phone off her, hung up and turned it off.
She discusses how this triggered a meltdown where she was screaming 'give the phone back' over and over again, and the phone was not returned.
PDA related meltdowns are almost always related to this kind of thing, and in the stated example had the phone been returned, the meltdown would have ended.
If a PDA person has a meltdown, it is almost certainly because control was taken from them, or something was forced on them against their will. Here are a few more examples:
Exactly how these kinds of meltdowns manifest will vary between people, and is probably related to how parental modeling taught someone to handle stressful situations and how to regulate them.
Because meltdowns are a result of a stress response, any attempt to shame or punish them absolutely will not help, and will most probably make things worse. People will often clearly communicate that they are in distress well before a meltdown occurs, and they are easy to prevent if one will simply listen to and act on what the person is saying.
For instance in the example Meg gave, It should not be surprising that a child in an unfamiliar situation would panic when they have their support network forcibly removed, and is concerning to me why the person in this situation would not take the hint from the clear distress, and return the phone.
PDA is a neurotype and like others, it has its positives and negatives.
The main problems experienced by PDA people relate to people communicating in ways that come across as controlling, which then trigger self-protective behaviors. I think we really need to develop an awareness and ways of communicating individual learning styles.
Someone communicating in a bothersome way probably is doing so because that's how they know how to communicate, and not because they were intentionally being malicious.
The need to be in control of our own worlds doesn't mean that I have any less desire to form friendships or relationships. Good social relationships are always a mutual agreement from both sides - the PDA person remains in control as it is something they are choosing to do.
I want to stress that PDA is not a desire to control other people, although it can manifest in that way in some situations, like controlling others to control anxiety triggers, but one can learn better ways of handling that.