Unmasking PDA Series: Understanding Pathological Demand Avoidance in Adult Life

Part 1: Could This Be Me? Recognising PDA in Adulthood

If you’ve ever found yourself avoiding even simple tasks—ones you genuinely want to do—you might have wondered why. Maybe you feel intense resistance when someone asks you to do something, even if it’s something you’d normally enjoy. Perhaps deadlines send you into a spiral of avoidance, or you find yourself using elaborate strategies to reclaim a sense of control over daily demands. If this sounds familiar, you might relate to Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), a lesser-known profile of Autism that affects how people respond to expectations—both external and self-imposed.

While PDA is often discussed in the context of children, many adults, including myself, are only now recognising how it shapes their lives. Perhaps we were once overly compliant on the outside or misunderstood as “lazy”; “stubborn”; or “defiant” Adult PDAers can struggle in workplaces, relationships, and daily life due to an intense need for autonomy. On the flipside, when passion overtakes demand inertia, deep dives into areas of interest and creativity can result.

Signs of PDA in Adults

PDA can look different from person to person, but common experiences include:

Intense Avoidance of Demands: From simple requests (“Can you send that email?”) to major responsibilities, any expectation can trigger resistance—even self-imposed ones.
Feeling Trapped or Overwhelmed by Expectations: Even minor obligations can feel suffocating, leading to procrastination, anxiety, or withdrawal/ shutdowns.
Masking and Social Camouflage: Many PDAers have spent years blending in, learning to appear compliant while secretly resisting demands in subtle ways.
Emotional Intensity: PDA can come with sudden mood shifts, high anxiety, and difficulty regulating emotions, especially when autonomy feels threatened.
Creative Avoidance Strategies: Using humour, distraction, prioritising less important but more interest-based tasks, or making excuses to escape demands is common—sometimes even without realising it.
Struggles with Authority and Traditional Work Environments: Jobs with rigid structures or micromanagement can feel unbearable, leading to frequent job changes, interpersonal conflicts, or Autistic burnout.

Why PDA Is Often Missed in Adults

Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) is not currently an official diagnostic category but is recognised as a profile associated with Autism. While demand avoidance alone can also be observed in conditions such as eating disorders or Major Depression, PDA involves a distinct set of traits that go beyond these experiences.

Despite its impact, PDA is often missed in adults, particularly amongst those who have developed strong masking skills or have additional presentations related to trauma and attentional difficulties. Many professionals are not yet trained to recognise PDA in adults, leading to frequent misdiagnoses, including anxiety disorders, ADHD, or personality disorders. While anxiety and ADHD are commonly present for a PDAer they do not account for all PDA traits. For many adults, it is often when the PDA profile is recognised in their child that a parent may begin to identify these characteristics in themselves.

If you notice a visceral response to requests and demands, have found that traditional coping strategies do not seem to work for you—if productivity techniques backfire or if therapy focused on compliance has felt harmful rather than helpful—it may be worth exploring whether PDA is part of your experience. Understanding your unique needs can open the door to more effective, affirming support.

In Parts 2–5 of this series, we delve into what it’s like to live as an adult PDAer. We explore practical approaches to navigating everyday demands (Part 2), managing the demands of university life as a PDAer (Part 3), the unique challenges PDA can bring to relationships and parenting when you’re demand avoidant yourself (Part 4), and how clinicians can work more effectively and respectfully with PDA adults in therapeutic settings (Part 5). Each post draws on both lived experience and clinical insight.