PDA Men and the Women Who Love Them

At 4:00 a.m. on a weekday morning, the summertime baby birds scream loudly for their breakfast as most normal people sleep. I awake, startled, with the lyrics of a Taylor Swift song reverberating in my head:

You, with your switching sides
And your wildfire lies and your humiliation.
You have pointed out my flaws again
As if I don’t already see them
I walk with my head down
Trying to block you out
‘Cause I’ll never impress you I just wanna feel ok again…

As a neurodivergent human, I seem to catalog lyrics I’m not even aware I know. My brain sends them to me when I’m a scrambled mess of amorphous feelings. This week, I’m metabolizing the feelings of several clients who are all struggling with the same person, or the same type of person rather: a PDA man they love who’s hurting them relentlessly.

PDA is short for Pervasive Drive for Autonomy, or Pathological Demand Avoidance (choose your own acronym adventure) to describe someone whose nervous system is particularly sensitive to hierarchies, directives, unfairness, lack of autonomy, and feedback. Some believe PDA to be a subtype of Autism. Some believe it can exist independent of Autism. I don’t know what I think anymore. I just know that once you’ve seen PDA, you can’t unsee it.

On Tuesday, a thirty-something couple sits in my virtual office: Franky and Lola. They start the session giggling as we share an ongoing beginning-of-session joke. We end with her in tears, and him in a state of outrage. “How did we get here, again?” I find myself asking, though the formula isn’t lost on me. His continual dysregulation and irritation = a contempt-filled, verbal onslaught toward his partner that seems more than a little outsized and misplaced. Her hurt and need for direct communication with someone she loves (which only fuels his continual dysregulation and irritation) = her apologizing (apparently the wrong way) and being left to sleep alone with the dog.

This time, it started when Lola didn’t put the lock on the garbage can lid, and a neighborhood raccoon had a feast at their expense. Lola wants to talk about it, but Franky is still pissed.

“You just expect that I’ll clean up after all your messes. You don’t even care how irresponsible you are. You just sit upstairs and shop online, and knit, and do whatever thing you want, and I have to be the adult here. Honestly, I’m sick of you dragging me to therapy because you think I’m a problem to fix when you’re just a child who’s using me because you don’t want to work.”

Woah. This is not the same man who told me last week his partner is the safest, kindest girlfriend he’s ever had, someone who “makes me want to be a better man every day.” This is not that man. Literally, he’s gone. This is a man whose nervous system has hijacked his prefrontal cortex. He’s a walking amygdala, and both Lola and I are a threat. This reaction isn’t new for him, and what comes next isn’t new for this couple. I know this pattern all too well.

Lola takes his words like a shot to the chest. Her lower lip quivers, and she inhales deeply before speaking. “Hey Franky,” she says. “I don’t think it’s that serious. I thought I did put the lid on the can. The dog took off after a squirrel when I was taking out the garbage, and I got sidetracked. It was an honest mistake. I’m sorry you had to clean that up. I’m sure that was really frustrating to be left with the mess.”

Kory brain: A 12 out of 10 apology. She acknowledged her mistake, didn’t make excuses, offered context, and validated his frustration.

Franky: Save your feelings talk for someone else. You’re fucking selfish, and you knew exactly what you were doing. You were probably listening to a murder podcast and thinking about spending money like you always do. Maybe think about me some of the time.

Kory brain: Franky is only thinking of Franky right now.

Lola: Franky, why are you talking to me like that? If this happens again, leave the mess for me–I’ll clean it up. I don’t know why you’re acting like you’ve never forgotten to put the lock on the lid. When it happened to you last week, you laughed about it.

Franky: Can you not be defensive, Lola? You’re wrong here, and you can’t just be wrong. You’re trying to show off for Kory like you’re perfect. I’m so sick of your shit.

Lola: (lip quivering) I’m really sorry. I said I was sorry. I understand you’re annoyed, but I don’t know why you’re being so aggressive. It was an honest mistake. I really do feel terrible. But you’re looking at me like you hate me, and I’m trying to apologize.

Franky: Therapy is such a waste of time because your words don’t mean anything. If you really give a shit, stop being an airhead and clean up after yourself, princess.

Kory brain: Oooooooh shit.

Kory: Hey Franky, I’m seeing you’re having a big reaction right now. Does this all belong to Lola? I’m surprised at some of what you’re saying. It doesn’t seem on brand for you.

Franky: Would you feel better if I used an “I statement,” Kory? I feel like therapy is stupid. I feel like my girlfriend is lazy. I feel like I’d rather use this time to do literally anything else.

Kory: Franky, I can see so much irritation right now. Is that right?

Franky: You tell me. Isn’t that why we pay you the big bucks?

Kory: Ok, I’m going to give you a minute. Is it ok if I talk to Lola?

Franky: I don’t actually care what you do. (He blatantly pulls out his phone and starts to play a matching game.)

It hits me all at once that there’s truly nothing Lola or I can do here that’s going to deescalate Franky. He’s caught in a PDA behavior called “equalizing.”

Looking for “Just Right”

Rabbi Shoshana Meira Friedman, creator of the PDA Safe Circle, explains equalizing like this: “A PDA-er exerts power, control, or status to regain a sense of nervous system safety after a perceived loss of control or social equality/status. Equalizing with another person can be overt, like insulting, yelling, hitting, or hiding or breaking an item. Or it can be more subtle, like criticizing, one-upping, exerting expertise, or correcting.” A PDA-er can even equalize with a task they sense as threatening. This looks like exerting control over exactly how they do the task to regain a sense of nervous system safety in the face of a demand.

What’s often most frustrating about equalizing is that it’s completely out of character. A few minutes ago, this person was a loving, caring partner that would’ve fallen all over himself to prevent Lola from experiencing hurt. Now, he talks down to her like a petulant child and can’t be coaxed out of this approach.

I watch Lola try to be gentler, calmer, more apologetic, smaller, less of a burden. She falls into her familiar pattern of fawning. Her blue eyes beg me for support, but I don’t have an intervention here. A dysregulated nervous system can’t be reasoned with. Franky can’t make his way to empathy or even curiosity, because all he sees is his pain. Our only choice here is to end this discussion. There’s no logic to be found in a person leading a discussion with their amygdala.

Watching Lola try and fail to bring him around, I think about Goldilocks. Not the version of the fairy tale where Goldilocks is the villain of the story: the other version, where she’s a girl who walks into a house and tries, with genuine effort and good intentions, to find something that works. Too hot. She adjusts. Too cold. She adjusts again. Too hard, too soft, wrong chair, wrong bed, wrong bowl. She doesn’t give up. She’s not trying to cause harm. She’s doing what humans do when they want things to be okay: calibrating. But it’s not working. The bears are attacking her anyway.

The problem isn’t how she’s talking to them, or even the fact that she’s in their house. The bears in this story were dysregulated before they even came across Goldilocks. Goldilocks didn’t create the dysregulation. She just had the misfortune of being around while it was already happening.

This has been Lola’s life for over a year.

The triggers that send a PDA nervous system into freefall aren’t always dramatic, which makes this cycle even more disorienting for partners. It’s not always a catastrophic fight or a major life stressor. Sometimes it’s the transition home from work—that seam between two worlds where the body hasn’t adjusted to the new world yet—and the first person the PDA man sees becomes the place where all his discomfort lands.

Sometimes it’s travel, or the week after travel, when the nervous system has been performing regulation for days and finally gets somewhere safe enough to fall apart. Sometimes it’s a tough day with the kids, or a bad night of sleep, or a scratchy throat. Sometimes it’s having a week where he didn’t get any time with his special interest, where life demanded too much and gave too little back, and his tank is empty in a way he may not have words for. Sometimes it’s simply being asked to do something he himself isn’t choosing to do on a timeline he hasn’t set in a way that’s left him no door marked “exit.”

The nervous system of PDA-ers keeps a running tally of autonomy lost. And eventually, the tally tips. And the lid wasn’t on the garbage can, or the wrong thing was said, or the right thing was said with the wrong tone or the wrong body language.

Franky’s nervous system was trying to transition home from a job that, in his words, “does nothing but piss me off.” Lola was safe, so he equalized all of his dysregulation onto her when he couldn’t balance his nervous system himself.

The Call Is Coming from Inside the House

I work with a lot of PDA adults. Most of them are genuinely trying to treat their partners well, and very few know they’re PDA. In fact, many of them won’t even entertain the idea of being neurodivergent or PDA.

But as a couples therapist, I also sit across from their partners, who are exhausted in a very specific and recognizable way. It’s not the exhaustion of loving someone whose mood is frequently sensitive to many ordinary, unpredictable life circumstances. It’s the exhaustion of a person who’s been running an experiment for years, tweaking the variables, logging the results, and still can’t figure out why the outcome never changes. It’s the exhaustion of a scientist who doesn’t yet know the lab is on fire.

Here’s what I want to say to every partner who’s ever adjusted the apology, the timing of when they apologize, the tone of their voice, the length of their texts, whether or not they’re on their phone, the number of questions they ask on any given Tuesday, the way they laugh: you were never the problem. You were just safe for a dysregulated nervous system to decide you were the problem.

This is PDA doing what PDA does when it remains unnamed and misunderstood.

When a PDA nervous system loses its sense of autonomy and starts to feel controlled, cornered, suffocated by the ordinary expectations of living alongside another human being, it doesn’t announce how it’s receiving what’s happening. It doesn’t say, “I’m dysregulated and I need support.” Instead, it looks for a cause. And almost always, the closest available cause is you. But the call is actually coming from inside the house—not your tone, your spending, or the lock your forgot to throw on the garbage can. Partners should be able to make a mistake without a reaction that feels like a punishment.

Objectively, this reactivity to you isn’t entirely the PDA man’s fault. But know that It’s not entirely your fault isn’t the same thing as You’re off the hook. The nervous system dysregulation that drives this pattern is real, and as mean as they can get, Franky is not a villain. He’s a man whose nervous system is doing what threatened nervous systems do: identify a threat, lock onto it, and hold it tightly as the cause of their distress in an attempt to neutralize it.

The problem is that his nervous system keeps identifying the person who loves him most as the threat. When he’s dysregulated, his brain will find evidence that his partner is the problem every single time, because it needs a problem to “equalize on” in order to regain a sense of agency and control. He won’t be able to hear his partner’s perspective, won’t be able to feel her pain or recognize that she’s also a person who’s hurting. He can’t begin to reconnect with the reality that this is someone he loves deeply.

It also can’t be pointed out to him: the PDA man has to be the one to name what’s going on for him. So accountability for a PDA man in a relationship looks different than it does for non-PDA-ers. It rarely looks like apologizing in the moment, or using “I statements” in fights. When his amygdala is still fully in charge, feeling words and the language of repair probably won’t be available to him.

But he can protect himself and his partner by temporarily removing himself from the equation when he’s dysregulated. You can’t hurt or blame people when you’re not engaging with them. He has the option of hitting the “pause button” on the fight or argument and allowing his nervous system time and space to settle. Then, the real accountability can happen in quiet, regulated moments, when he can access his prefrontal cortex and ask himself an honest question: What did I do, and what did it cost her? He can familiarize himself with his own triggers well enough to name them out loud before they name themselves through her physiological responses to his criticism and accusations. He can build a life with enough protective autonomy baked in that the tank isn’t perpetually running on empty. He can get support—not in order to perform wellness for her, but because he believes he deserves to feel better.

Here’s what I know to be true about Franky, and all the Frankys of the world. He doesn’t want to be mean. He’s not sitting somewhere plotting ways to make Lola feel like she’s useless or small. He hates himself when he does that—and the shame of knowing she’s right about the harm he’s caused is part of what fuels his meanness. When he’s regulated, he’s the man who calls her the safest person he’s ever loved. He’s the man who’s constantly doing for her and loving her out loud, giving her a type of safety and connection she’s never had before. That Franky is real. Both Frankys are real. The work for Franky is figuring out why one of them keeps disappearing and what it would take to bring him back more reliably.

A Hypothesis Problem

In three years of working specifically with a PDA population in couples therapy, I haven’t once met a Lola who was actually “the problem.” Not once. What I’ve met is an extraordinary collection of patient, perceptive, funny, self-aware women who read books about attachment, listen to podcasts about nervous system regulation, and show up to therapy every week trying to understand the man they love. This isn’t a coincidence. PDA nervous systems are drawn to safety, and for PDA men, safety tends to look like someone warm, steady, and committed. They find the most capable, emotionally generous person in the room and love them completely.

But even the most patient partner runs out of patience when the pattern never changes and repair never comes—when the experiment keeps producing the same result and nobody will admit the lab is on fire. When someone spends years making themselves smaller and quieter and more careful, and then one day realizes they can’t actually remember the last time they felt okay, resentment builds. That’s not a Lola problem. That’s a Lola emergency.

For Lola, for every person who’s ever found a way to push down their feelings to avoid a blow-up they know will happen with their partner, this is what I want to say to you: Stop trying to get it just right. I mean that with every clinical bone in my body. Not because your effort isn’t loving—it is—but because the experiment has a design flaw. You’re the variable. You keep changing yourself, and yet the outcome stays the same. The hypothesis that there’s a version of you that won’t trigger your PDA man’s dysregulation is false. You could be perfect—genuinely, impossibly perfect—and on the wrong day, with the wrong amount or type of sleep, after the wrong commute, you’d still be seen as the threat when the tally tips.

But here’s what you can do: stop shrinking. Stop apologizing for things that don’t require an apology. Stop fawning your way through a dysregulation episode in the hopes that if you get small enough fast enough, it will be over sooner. Because it won’t. And every time you get small and fawn, you teach both of you that your smallness is the price of his regulation. It’s not. It was never supposed to be.

And stop waiting for him to understand what’s happening in the moment. He can’t. His nervous system has filed you under threat, and you can’t talk your way out of that folder while he’s still in it. The conversation you need to have doesn’t happen during the episode itself. It happens two days later, when he’s regulated and you’re both drinking coffee and the garbage-can situation feels very far away. And if he won’t have the conversation then either, if the rupture never gets repaired, if the accountability never comes in the aftermath, that’s information. That may be the most important data point in the whole experiment.

You deserve to be with someone who can eventually, imperfectly, honestly say sorry.

By the time I finish writing this, the baby birds have quieted down. I think about Lola and every woman who woke up this morning next to a man she loves and spent the first 10 minutes of her day quietly calculating how not to set him off. I think about the Frankys too, the ones drowning in shame they can’t name, loving people they can’t stop hurting, wondering why the version of themselves they like keeps disappearing.

The meanness is real. The hurt is real. And underneath all of it is a nervous system that’s never been given the language to understand itself. Of course, this doesn’t make the behavior okay. It makes it something that can, with a bit of willingness and the right help, change.

But Goldilocks doesn’t have to stay in the house either.