Has your nervous system experienced enough agency today? Autonomy may be something you lose when someone tells you what to do, but that's really only half the story. An individual's felt sense of autonomy slowly drains away over the course of an ordinary day. This happens even in the absence of demands poking holes in the bottom of our cups; when we face more demands, we're drained more quickly. But we're never without demands: almost everything we do is in response to necess

Birthdays have been a therapy topic for as long as I've been working with fellow autistic folks. Usually someone mentions having seen a social media post about how hard it is to be the center of attention or to react in the "right" way to a gift, and don't get me wrong-I have no idea what I'm supposed to do while everyone is singing happy birthday to me. Do I look at the cake? Do I sing along? What do I do with my hands? But in my experience, most "why birthdays can be hard f

Pathological demand avoidance, also called pervasive drive for autonomy (though if you ask me-a PDAer-both names are lacking), is a hot topic in the neurodiversity-affirming mental health realm. I often see colleagues chastise each other in therapist spaces: "It's not oppositional defiant disorder, it's PDA. ODD isn't affirming." I get the same "ick" I used to get in treatment team meetings when my boss would interrupt staff who used the term "attention-seeking" by saying "Th