copyright pending

These therapeutic stances are used to navigate demand avoidance.

You will stop. Ask clarifying questions. Make space to listen and validate for understanding.

Therefore, the relationship is the tool for treatment. When YOU are the tool for TREATMENT how you show up is instrumental to success.

Be prepared to “show up” listening, responding authentically and with a genuineness of spirit. Who ARE you? Do you have humor, creativity, heart, wisdom, cleverness? Whoever you are show up in the therapeutic space while at the same time respect therapeutic boundaries by keeping the focus on your client’s needs.

All these relational skills are actually the true leveling techniques that PDA advocates encourage. Only we therapists do this all the time to humanize the therapeutic encounter. We are trained to “put ourselves in our client’s shoes” and must when working with PDA.

The professional “tone” or “officiousness” of expert opinion including making statements about “evidenced based technique” and using language that highlights symptoms or pathology creates an authoritarian stance that the PDA person rejects.

So, select your STANCE wisely.

Each word you choose will be associated with you.

You. ARE. Your words.

You ARE the tone you convey. EVERY. Word. Is. Carefully chosen to neutralize the charge that lives within it.

When there is charge you use explicit language to explain your true intent and meaning and you even object to the tone you had inadvertently conveyed. Restore connection through changing your WORDS.

LANGUAGE in your therapy space is truly how the PDA’er navigates demand avoidance.

Can you be someone who can be adept and skilled with words? Then you can do this work.

You will show in your relational space, how demand avoidance can be navigated by the careful, slow and deliberate use of language that finds meaning and clarifies intent.

Those PDA adults who navigate demand avoidance often have an inner dialogue that sounds just like what you create in the therapy space.

They neutralize demand avoidance by taking the time to consider their reasons for engaging with expectations and develop an inner life that seeks frequent perspective and contains gentle self-descriptions.

They then listen to their need to reduce pressure by avoiding other things that mean less to them but they are doing so more consciously.

This can live in the therapy space, this delicate neutralizing of what would otherwise be challenging by using select, careful wording which finds meaning to move forward. The therapist seeks to mirror this for their client.

This however takes a very large energy requirement from the PDA person. You the therapist can assist. You are the assistant in navigating demand avoidance.

As a therapist if you have ever had the experience of holding a challenge with your client, keeping it in your shared focus and finding words together that express exactly what it could mean to them to do it you know this feeling. It is a charge. Almost electric.

As you hold the material the word choices release tension and when affect feels free it rises to the surface suddenly and surprisingly AVAILABLE from the unconscious mind. And then, all of a sudden, the charge is gone. Whoosh.

If in every session you take great care to:

1. Identify the avoidance
2. Find yourself in the space (what psychodynamic defenses or interactional patterns are unfolding in the relational space? Any?)
3. Choose a “tone” devoid of officiousness and highlights your authenticity and real character.
4. Understand word choice and its impact on the PDA person.
5. And then choose your words as a reflection of meaning.

You will be able to “hold the avoidance” for a time exploring and engaging with it in a neutral way where all the charge has dropped, and the person experiences what had previously induced fear with a sense of calm and clear thinking.