Written by Elise Jacobson, LICSW, Founder of the PDA Therapy Collaborative

How many PDA professionals wrestle with how to effectively support a coregulated PDA parent/child relationship? If you’re thinking about this, you’re in good company.

I want to support and engage with family dynamics in ways that promote easier engagement with demands. That means entering rupture and repair cycles in the family dynamic.

Low demand parenting is a way to slow down, identify and repair these ruptures.

Can repair occur in the course of engaging demands? Sometimes. I’ve seen and experienced it. My clients come to me and ask:

How?

We as therapists have an important role to play.

We can introduce the therapeutic scaffolding required to hold the emotions of rupture and repair in the family system so that misunderstandings clear without build up, needs are met with less irritation, and we support trauma and attachment work.

Many of us have figured out how to do rupture and repair in our own families and have personal as well as professional insight.

My suggestion to families built on practice and personal experience:

Cultivate patience. PDA ruptures need safety, emotional space and distance, all of which needs your patience. Cultivate confusion not solution. The opposite of CPS!

The solution in the present is to stop looking for answers or to superimpose an adult insight, technique or understanding.

My most challenging but worthwhile stance in PDA affirming work is holding a space for patience to allow understanding and connection to develop self-directed solutions that are unique to each family relationship.

Practicing compassionate patience with myself has made it easier to move through the trauma response anywhere I feel it in my life. I can pause and FEEL the hurt that needs repair, and the emotions guide me to solutions that take hurt into consideration.

Examples to clarify what this looks like:

Rupture and repair are most often about safety and health when our children are small. Our child wants to experience what it feels like to create safety and health themselves and will play fireman, doctor or teacher. We invite this while we guide them to safety and health in life. Ruptures are repaired if the parent can offer attention and patience.

As ruptures become larger and more complicated the exploration must occur more broadly to hold the intensity of pain in these repairs. Ruptures then are often about values and what we care about. Asking questions about meaning allows insight to take root building flexibility for moving forward.

Repair makes space for two people to make meaning, have insight and be right, from their own vantage point.

Now superimpose this onto your client’s life as a scaffolding strong enough to hold their feelings and self-directed choices.

Healing, care and taking the space to understand perspective in a playful nuanced way is no longer a given. But it is desperately still needed. And the time to begin is now.

PDA children usually can’t say, I am confused and sad and need you to pay attention to me.

Instead:

A teen begins hiding in their room and refuses to go to activities but had asked you to sign them up. Their room is full of dirty laundry and food wrappers. It’s hard to find the floor. You don’t know what they’re doing in their room late at night. They get sick and when they feel better, they are not ready to go back to school. What do you do?

Parents can drop the demand to go to the activity, clean their child’s room and do their laundry, let their teen stay home for longer and cultivate NO REACTION by changing their expectations and even search for their compassion.

How do you add in more options and choices for families to encourage growth and change? Accommodate the rupture and repair cycle.

Step one: don’t proceed unless you can accept the possibility of a strong reaction in your child. Stop if there’s reactivity.

Step two: Don’t explain yourself. Share something small with as few words as possible and don’t justify your feelings.

Step three: Share in regulation if possible. Then invite a conversation to happen when you both are ready. Ready means, in regulation, calm and curious about one another.

This would look like:

I know you want to go to back to school to see your friends. I wonder if it’s hard to get moving and go after you’ve been home sick? Can I make this easier at all?

Child’s first reaction?

Irritation.

Scrunched face and a mean abrupt statement, like, leave my room. And you watch them put the covers over their head.

What do you do. Let it go? Push and insist on attending? Anything else?

This is the kind of interaction parents struggle with. They are not sure if they can manage their child’s frustration level and the initial feeling they have of rejection and hurt when an offer of help is dismissed. They also fear that the demand will overwhelm their child or if they let go it will make things harder to go back to their regular life.

It takes time and practice to do this.

Navigate by remembering your humility.

In my life:

I share my own vulnerabilities at moments when the covers are over the head and there is tension in the air:

” I get it if you really “can’t”, I used to pretend I was still sick to get more sleep, catch up on tv and it’s hard to give it up. I’m glad you can be honest. I know it’s hard. Would a Frappuccino on the way make it easier. Out comes my goofy face and I might joke about how I can’t do anything without coffee.

It may not work. I might back away.

But:

No rupture occurs. No pain unfolds.

More often than not, they get up and go. Why? Was it the Frappuccino?

Maybe, or, the car ride to school reveals the pressure of an upcoming deadline and I strategize with them about how to reduce the time pressure by suggesting an extension.

A deeper understanding ensues, that pressure is building up and I offer to look at assignments. They say they will handle it and ask their support teacher. They thank me and apologize for getting upset earlier. We are both relieved.

What I offer. What all parents can offer, isn’t perfection through perfect attunement, but a relationship that can engage in complexity with you, that you can lean on as you grow.

I still got an angry upset face, tears over the pressure and irritation that was directed at me. But in the end, they apologize for their reaction and also for holding back important information.

Sometimes my kids will say. “I thought you’d be mad at me” and maybe I would have a few years ago. I’m not angry. I’m practiced at this with teens and young adults now. Ruptures are small but bumpy. I accept the emotion to get to clarity and connection.

I learned how to approach the rupture and repair to accommodate and make it easier.

PDA parents need help to begin this as soon as they can as their child and family begins to stabilize. Find professional support to navigate it. Look for community and friendships that understand it. It’s hard work.

Mirroring the “good enough” is how attachment secures itself. Find your own “good enough”.

PDA Therapy Collaborative subscribers:

Are you looking forward to clinical discussions with the PDA Therapy Collaborative this winter? The winter schedule will come out next week!

Expect deep discussions about our work and the chance to meet colleagues. I look forward to learning and growing with all of you in 2026.

Elise