Caroline Foran

So is your son non-verbal then?

No, he is verbal.

Can't shut him up half the time.

But there's so much about him that challenged what we thought we knew about autism, like in our very limited knowledge, I guess, how we have all absorbed messages and representations of autism.

So for the longest time, we were told it's just anxiety.

You were told about your son?

Yeah.

Anxiety is such a huge part of neurodivergence as I'm learning.

Like it's

It can be the driver of people almost finding out and getting diagnosed sometimes, especially if they're like lower support needs and anxiety is very prominent.

But for him, it was really severe separation anxiety and nothing I did seemed to move the needle.

And like, obviously, I'm very aware of anxiety and myself and like what helps and what doesn't help and the language to use.

But we were banging our heads against the wall for the longest time and the anxiety wasn't improving.

And eventually...

through a lot of emotional ups and down, we discovered that he's autistic with a PDA profile.

So what does PDA mean?

PDA, I remember Googling it when people sort of said, have you come across this?

And I was terrified.

I was like, please, this is the worst thing you could tell me right now is if this is what my son is going to have to live with.

But it stands for traditionally pathological demand avoidance, which sounds like a person will just never be able to respond to a demand.