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Irritability and inter relational sniping are vulnerability without any other means of expression. The PDA person is a sheep who puts on wolves clothing to protect their soft vulnerability.

So many of my clients recently have been talking with me about their avoidance. How, it can be much easier to not communicate their feelings which are ambiguous, hard to fully articulate with authenticity and accuracy, and, then feel ashamed that it feels so hard to clarify them.

They are 20 and 30 something young adults. They are allowed to be confused. But this isn’t confusion. Not really. This happens for my clients in their 50’s too and is about PDA emotional processing. Most KNOW their thinking, only there is just so much of it. The feelings and sensations may not have accurate words to convey meaning. But at just the right moment when feelings and sensations have the right word connected it feels accessible and available both to them and also to share.

They can know themselves and also see themselves reflected back. The missing piece? The mirror! The person in front of them provides the missing piece bringing what they see, how they see it and what kind of feedback they offer.

Then, is it they themselves who “know” or is it the mirror who shows them who they are. Does it matter? In PDA it will always matter who you surround yourself with. Choose those people well.

Those that can reflect who you are help you feel secure, strong and clear. But even they, those wonderful mirrors, are imperfectly reflecting shades of light and nuance that your eye won’t catch, or feels is not as important.

But is the mirror willing to shift its angle to capture the image of you as you grow and change?

What happens when the mirror refuses to shift its angle.

Words play a huge part in how the mirror can function. Your words and the words of response back to you.

This vulnerability, the challenge to finding words to express strong powerful experiences of thought, sensations and emotions, is often what leads my clients to therapy. They may have emotion close to the surface and struggle to hold it at bay but tolerating emotions and strong affect isn’t the point.

The individual with internalized PDA finds it intolerable to EXPOSE their strong affect and be vulnerable to an imperfect mirror and suffer the failure of their language and constructs to make sense of their experience for the mirror. This is a huge demand that they are avoiding.

This is where confusion ensues. Is it the mirror who can’t capture them? Is it the language they are choosing to use? Both? This can often cause real debilitating distress and upset wherever this falls in a person’s life be it with a partner, friend or parent.

My internalized clients often feel highly self-conscious and attenuated regarding how they are perceived. But also place a huge premium on relationship and connection to others. Anxious demand avoidance, for them, is often expressed not through their work or education, although it can, it is largely expressed through experiencing communication of feelings and their own thoughts as a demand. As a result, they have strong feelings and intensity they live with every day that causes a churn of internal dysregulation. Their demand avoidance is protecting their relationships from the friction that’s created by the imperfect mirror that they still strongly and intensely suffer with. To share it they fear will hurt the feelings of others or rupture the relationship beyond repair.

Their suffering over and over is caused by the existential question:

What’s the point of revealing yourself to not feel seen?

This makes my clients angry. Righteously angry. That no one notices that they have feelings that are asking for attention and space.

Of course, they feel hurt too. But anger is very clarifying. It shows what it is you are missing. Which is to be seen and understood. So, the cycle continues. And those who internalize will look irritable, sometimes nasty, when they have strong intense feelings under the surface and are angry that there are imperfect mirrors around them unable to understand.

Internalized PDA, rather than appearing reactive with externalized dysregulation, can instead look prickly, precise, withdrawn, sensitive and misunderstood.

What is a bridge for my clients to safety? Safety with “imperfection” which causes attenuation and inner dysregulation because the coregulator can’t hold the experience?

The answer I find is often that the BIG life questions important to that person CREATE safe zones, the parameters you can create with language where big feelings and intense inner experiences can be held long enough to look at how to sooth hurt and confusion.

A big question of life for my clients? “What matters most and why”? “If what matters is the relationship, then, why is it important to do the “work”?

Answer: “To get to a place of understanding with people knowing you will also have lots of feelings that will be hard to share and may not be received well.”

Frankly, neurodivergent relationships are full of imperfect mirroring. But the perfect relationship doesn’t need perfect mirrors but valuable reasons to tolerate imperfection to gain connection and understanding.

There is great wisdom in not looking for something that has not yet come and having the ability to tolerate that, to then actually see what is there instead. What is there is often, “stuck” and stuck for a reason.

What is stuck?

Vulnerability, not just your own, but the “other” who is struggling to see you. Can you accept you feel a lot that they may not agree with or understand about you and that you both can be imperfect mirrors for the other choosing every day nevertheless to care and show up?

Many of my clients especially those in their 20’s and early 30’s don’t think that they can do this. They hide parts of themselves with family, friends and partners. They perceive the experience of “imperfect mirroring” as conflict because of the blame and shame that they carry about how they express themselves imperfectly.

This is where general, open, expansive language helps HOLD the space inside the PDA young adult for their feelings to just be. They process emotions slowly in smaller pieces to prevent being overcome by them.

They can, if they choose, give that space to themselves but also notice that the “other” person needs it too. Language such as “we both have strong feelings and views and rather than be right or convince the other can we both agree that it is hard to see or understand each other and that it needs time, maybe a lot more time”? Any other description that contains judgment is based on an imperfect mirror and fosters misunderstanding.

Internalizing PDA young adults are often the children of PDA parents and many times have siblings with PDA as well. Emotional reactivity for all its challenges is a release and the opportunity to be seen but it also fills up the space while someone who has internalized has withdrawn inside. Emotional avoidance and internalizing of complexity and strong intensity needs release too, into, powerful expansive language to hold the reality of it in the space between people, to look at it and know it.

When you do, you have the chance to coregulate an experience of knowing emotion in relationship to another, over time. Mirrors are not born they are “made”. Expansive language takes you away from “picky” and precise, and, into expansive general meaning making. As a result, it moves away from what can be conflict and into finding places for understanding.

Do you want to know the strong feelings of the people in your life. Do you want them to know yours? How can this be done without being overpowered, overwhelmed or overcome with vulnerability?

Pick organic places in day-to-day life when you’d ordinarily feel picky, sniping, or testy. This is a sign post directing you to the need for inter relational space. Find expansive language, right here. Don’t pick at the situation to find imperfection. Certainly, you will find it!

Instead, go to the BIG expansive question. “There is something about this that feels big. Bigger than this moment. I think we are not fully understanding each other”.

Then, let it be there. Likely you BOTH are feeling vulnerable and uncomfortable. This is an invitation for a “reset” to look at one another as vulnerable human beings who don’t always know what to do or what to say to bring understanding and connection.

“Let’s drop it”…..

Or

“I can wish for things to be perfect, but life isn’t like that. I know.”

There is possibility in this, for a chance to reflect, consider and have this mirrored back. Can this happen? Often, yes…. if the relationship is fundamentally a good one.

Elise Jacobson, LICSW