Hello PDA professionals,

I will be a featured panelist at the Institute along with many of my fellow collaborative members.

I love the way that this is evolving. Collaborative members as well as our guest panelists are contributing. Won’t you join us?

I have met many PDA professionals merging their professional and personal knowledge in support of their work.

Many have attended collaborative groups and have studied with us. I often interact over email and schedule zoom meetings for a more personal consult.

I have made many deep and sustaining relationships with colleagues over the past 3 years for which I’m so grateful. Truly I can’t work any other way.

For those of you who need community I hope the Institute can be an incubator of professional inspiration and ideas for you.

So, all that, to say, I’d like to introduce myself!

I practice social work in a relational, psychodynamic and client centered way. I run a private practice, provide professional consultation to peers, teach practice and train teams and agencies on PDA affirming adaptations to their practice approaches. I run the PDA Therapy Collaborative which began as a national consultation group examining and supporting our PDA practice, and now offers professional study, training and collaboration.

What do I know that can support PDA professionals with their practice?

I’ve been asking myself that same question for 4 years.

My answer?

I begin a therapy relationship where the client begins emotionally and won’t move faster than they do. I don’t address their thinking I focus on the feeling elicited. This is called building a safe emotional container.

I have often said that relational therapy will be commonly understood to be PDA best practice. It’s why my parenting worked. It’s why my work works. I look to build safe containers for feelings to be held between us.

We will talk about relational skill and conceptualization on panel. Would you like to join us?

I’d like to share a bit more beyond this because I have an experience many PDA professionals may share. Curious? Then read on.

I read patterns in reactions, yours and mine, and this is how I am able to read your feelings. How? I thought PDA people have poor interoception! It seems as if my eyes catch everything. Does this sound like you, your PDA child or PDA client?

Well, it happens for me too.

But I use the language of relational and psychodynamic therapy as a method to read defenses and understand how to interact with them. Take out the sofa and the elderly man smoking a pipe and you can find real nuggets you can adapt to your practice.

I have practiced how to read your defenses and my own. This allows me to create a safe emotional container.

It needs practice. But it’s like riding a bike. Once you learn you don’t forget. It fosters regulation, feels relieving, calming and clarifying. Is this what you want to support in PDA children and families?

Me too!

What allows me to read your reactions and defenses in my body?

I have a synesthesia that is a mixture of touch and sight.

I see you so I feel you literally “touch me”.

I really get you from the inside. That’s why my clients come and stay.

I will sit in regulation with your confusion a long time so you can see and read your own reactions and grow to trust them. This was my PDA parenting. This is coregulation. This is relational therapy. This is peer consultation space.

When you know how to read your feelings it offers freedom to stop thinking so much.

This isn’t woo or the psychic network.

Many of us have unique sensory systems that can be read if we learn the language.

This form of synesthesia is rare, but, but not in autistic people. I come to expect it, and at some point, it will become part of our work.

Are you wanting to trust your relational skill in practice to accommodate PDA professionally?

Let’s meet, share our ideas, learn together and collaborate in a professional space.

We want to know you and exchange our ideas and experience. Join us!

Reach out to EliseJacobsonLICSW@gmail.com with any questions.

Register here on our website: https://pdatherapycollaborative.com/institute-for-pda-best-practices-may-30-2026-12pm-to-5pm-est/