Demand Avoidant? This Might Change Your Life
As it turns out—avoiding demands is demanding.
I finally found it—the goddamn Higgs Boson of the clusterfuck that is my life.
Living with demand avoidance is hard, and we all have to find our own ways to cope and thrive. There’s no shame in that.
But I recently realized that my go-to strategies have stolen years of my life away.
Luckily, that realization came with the answer to all my questions—why I’ve never had a healthy romantic relationship, why I’ve never had a stable career, and most importantly—why I am such a magnet for exploitation and abuse.
You ready? Here it is.
Avoiding overt demands invites covert demands.
Sure—it’s extremely uncomfortable when people ask things of us.
But we’re better off surrounded by people with the integrity to ask than with people who feel entitled to take. If we don’t develop tolerance for honest requests, we make ourselves helpless to dishonest extractions.
Let me break it down for you.
Roommates & Demands — A Hypothetical
Believe it or not, demand avoidance can make us vulnerable to exactly what we’re avoiding—demands. Not sure how? Let’s kick this off with a hypothetical scenario.
Let’s say you have a roommate who hates cleaning the bathroom. They come to you honestly and confess—they really hate it, and would like to work out an arrangement where you do it instead, and they’ll pick up the slack in other ways.
Your demand avoidance flares up. They don’t like cleaning bathrooms? No one likes cleaning bathrooms! You protect your rights. You protest. If you’re going to be roommates, you’re going to share unpleasant burdens, and that’s that. You decline their request.
After enough incidents like this, your roommate gets sick of you, and you’re sick of them too. They move out, and a new roommate moves in.
You tell them all about how frustrated you were by your previous roommate, and how they refused to share burdens. The new roommate totally agrees with you, and assures you they will help you clean the bathroom without complaint.
The bathroom starts to get dirty. It gets dirtier and dirtier. You do a half-assed job cleaning it, and ask your roommate to finish the job. They assure you they will.
They don’t.
It gets dirtier again. Toothpaste is caking onto the faucet and the mirror is covered with spots. You ask the roommate again. They apologize and assure you that they’ll get around to it as soon as they can. Days go by.
They don’t.
Just more delays and more excuses.
Before you know it, you have been the only one cleaning the bathroom for months.
Why? Because your demand avoidance worked against you.
When the first roommate came to you honestly with their desire not to clean the bathroom, and was willing to work out an arrangement with you, you rejected them.
But when the second roommate told you what you wanted to hear, only to continually deflect the bathroom task from that point forward, you ended up with a lot more demand put on you in the long run than you would have had you compromised with an honest person—instead of letting your reactive nervous system run the show.
This has been my problem—My stubborn, self-sabotaging tendency to choose roommate number 2, over and over again.
I fight uncomfortable truths, and favor beautiful lies.
And I’m writing this to help you see the pattern and avoid the same mistakes.
What Is Demand Avoidance?
A lot of neurodivergent people struggle with demand avoidance. The term specifically refers to the persistent resistance to requests, instructions, or expectations that would be deemed everyday or ordinary to the general population.
This resistance isn’t just emotional—it compels survival responses. These can be quite active or even strategic, like delaying, refusing, distracting, negotiating, or outmaneuvering the situation. Anything to neutralize the threat of compliance.
If you’re like me, your demand avoidance may be a hallmark of your neurotype. I represent a profile of autism is called PDA: “pathological demand avoidance,” or as we generally prefer to define it, “pervasive drive for autonomy.”
PDA involves a strong need for control driven by debilitating anxiety if we perceive our autonomy is in any way under threat. In response, we exhibit behaviors that may look oppositional, disrespectful, or defiant—but we’re responding naturally to authentic distress.
(PDA is, in part, why I once mistakenly thought I was a narcissist—but unlike narcissists, PDAers don’t feel entitled to harm or overpower people.)
For understandable reasons, society is not generally sensitive to the needs of demand avoidant neurodivergent people. We receive virtually zero compassion. People judge us as difficult, unreasonable, and spoiled. They’re so preoccupied with how it looks on the outside, there’s no inquisition regarding what’s going on for us on the inside. Ergo, they avoid, punish, and ostracize us.
Despite the fact that from our perspective, we are enduring a world of constant, ongoing, normalized psychological assault.
Demand avoidance with a demanding parent
In my case, my distress was compounded by having a demanding mother. She had two modes—totally ignoring me, or invading me.
In hindsight, it seems entirely plausible that my mother was also PDA autistic, and was unable to grapple with the demands of being a mother. I won’t sugarcoat it—PDA parenting is a hell of a challenge.
The result was *enmeshment trauma—*a term describing the **psychological harm that occurs when personal boundaries are blurred or absent. My needs, feelings, and life choices were subsumed by my mother’s. My survival depended on carrying emotional burdens for her that she was unable to carry herself. I was groomed for codependency.
Despite my brain being predisposed to protect my autonomy at all costs, it was taken from me from the jump. If I adhered to my demand avoidance, I was punished and I suffered. But if I adhered to my abuse, I suffered all the same.
There was no way out, and I had no support. I didn’t even get a chance to determine who “I” was.
My internal compass was calibrated entirely for guilt, obligation, and emotional parentification—when a child is expected to meet a parent’s emotional needs at the expense of the their own development. I had to make Mom happy—making myself happy wasn’t on the menu, because “myself” never got a chance to come into being.
Identity disturbance refers to a pervasive pattern of inconsistent or unstable self-concept that disrupts decision-making, relationships, and life direction. I didn’t develop my identity when I was supposed to, so the only true north I had to base my decisions on was external approval—even after leaving my mother behind. I continued to have chronic difficulty separating my sense of self from dominant relationships throughout my adult life.
Authenticity vs. Reactivity
Exhaustive pressure from both my mother and the grind of school tapped out my capacity for self-suppression. If my survival required one more second of burying my emotions for the comfort of others, I didn’t want to survive. No joke. I attempted to unalive once, and considered it many times before and since.
For me, a life without my autonomy and my authenticity wasn’t a life worth living.
Whatever was inside of me was going to come out—hell or high water.
If anyone treated me in a way that triggered a strong, negative response, they were going to find out—immediately.
But I wasn’t defending my autonomy, nor my authenticity. I was defending my reactivity.
The idea that there were benefits to tempering my reactivity, beyond appeasing others at my own expense, was alien to me. I navigated the world with no sense of a difference between reactivity and honesty, and I was convinced honesty was virtuous. If people weren’t receptive to my reactivity, I thought my honesty wasn’t being appreciated, my needs were being disregarded, and my authenticity was being rejected.
I had some perception of the burden I put on other people, but I thought that the right people for me would accept that burden. I thought that’s what love was.
But that belief was forged in the flames of enmeshment trauma. I grew up conditioned to carry everything that was tossed at me, and expected others to do the same. I didn’t understand boundaries. I didn't understand that to socialize in a healthy way, I had to recognize what was mine alone to carry. I failed to see that forcing my burdens on others, with no filter, made me as destructive as my mother.
I also failed to recognize a gaping vulnerability.
I thought my closest, most trustworthy friends were those who took it in stride. I thought that meant they accepted me. I thought they loved me.
This was a fatal error in judgment—so listen very, very carefully.
Shady people will happily tolerate your reactivity if they see it as data they can use to manipulate you.
My reactivity was so stubborn it was reliable. I made it obvious how I would behave under certain conditions, so all anyone had to do to get me to do what they wanted was provide those conditions. I would comply like Pavlov’s dogs, and believe I was being honest and virtuous while I did it.
Meanwhile, I would rebel if anything was asked of me honestly and directly. As a result, the only people who could stand me were dishonest and indirect.
I was still being exhausted by demands, I just didn’t perceive them. Drop this frog in boiling water, she knows to hop out. But drop me in it lukewarm, and you can crank the heat until my skin bubbles off.
It’s easy to get confused and interpret our reactions to manipulation as authenticity. Reactions are immediate, so they feel natural. But their immediacy doesn’t mean they come from nature, it means they don't come from your conscious choice, which makes them the total opposite of authentic.
When you’re reactive, you’re like a passive musical instrument that allows manipulators to pluck your strings to play whatever song they want.
To be truly authentic—to truly have autonomy—you have to defend your strings.
The problem with employment
Work is demanding. By its very nature. We get paid to adhere to the demands of whoever is paying us.
For years, I’ve relentlessly pursued work without demands—where I could release my own content at my own pace and wait, God willing, for money to appear. YouTube was my drug of choice for over a decade, but I’m doing the same thing here on Substack—like a prospector chipping away at a rock, day after day, waiting for that fateful moment I finally stumble on a single glittering vein.
Traditional work has always been a struggle. My enmeshment trauma set me up to have my value dictated to me rather than to assert it myself. Instead of defining what I had to offer and what it’s worth, I let others decide that for me. I didn’t negotiate, I didn’t set terms. My brain insisted I didn’t have the right to. I was groomed for undervaluation and exploitation. I had to take what I was offered—or get nothing.
Between that and constantly letting avoidant manipulators steal my autonomy outright, I’ve spent my life working at an ever-deepening loss. Always desperate to escape demands—only to be demanded upon tenfold as a result.
There has also been a physical toll on my brain. It never developed the capacity to identify reasonable demands. Job listings never appear to have a comfortable middle ground—they either want what I don’t have or far more than I can sustain.
Approaching clients with my boundaries defined ahead of time doesn’t help. The thought of chasing people into needing me—and me depending on their need—makes me freeze. My brain has crunched the numbers, and determined that anyone who asks anything of me never gives enough back. I only trust myself to put expectations on me.
My steadfast avoidance of demands has only netted stress, desperation, and exhaustion that doesn’t let up. In other words—demand avoidance has been, well, demanding.
It’s time to approach the issue proactively, not reactively.
Honor your nervous system, but honor yourself more
Your nervous system isn’t you—it works for you. You and your nervous system can, and often should, disagree—particularly if your nervous system was trained by someone who abused you. You’re the boss now. Retrain it—with love and compassion.
Demand avoidance isn’t what we are. It’s what we’re dealing with. We’re better off accepting our challenge without identifying with it, because once we do that, we surrender our agency to it—and we’re demand avoidant, god dammit. Giving up our agency is not the way of our people.
I now realize that my nervous system and I are on the same side. We both want to live authentically. We both prioritize our autonomy. We don‘t need to be in conflict.
But mindlessly obeying its shrieking hurts us both in the long run. To truly reduce our burden of demands, screaming and running away every time we encounter one isn’t the answer. We need to practice discernment—to choose healthy demands.
Treat your nervous system like your child. Nurture it. Care for it. Respect its needs. But do so from a position of leadership. You’re the adult. When you know better, you owe it to your nervous system to act on that knowledge. You aren’t oppressing it—it’s counting on you for guidance and support.
Bottom line—life is give and take, and as much as we hate being nudged, we’ll never be able to anticipate every little thing that other people need from us in advance. Expecting a life of zero demands is unrealistic.
It falls on us to shape boundaries that define and protect acceptable demands. People who are capable of having healthy, strong relationships with us will expect to ask things of us from time to time, because they’d rather be honest than manipulative. We aren’t serving ourselves by alienating those people.
Let’s all work on our tolerance for demands together.
I’m right there with you.
If you’re interested in learning more about PDA I recommend PDA: Resistance and Resilience.
Zamdanga Healing centers around trauma healing, neurodivergence, and the tumultuous slog of practicing self-advocacy and self-trust in a world that discourages both. Enjoy essays, personal stories, media analysis, and creative experiments.
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Thank you so much for this post, Lindsay, and for recommending PDA: Resistance and Resilience. I recognize myself in many of your words here. The way you describe the vulnerability that comes from avoiding overt demands only to become entangled in covert is familiar.
I also had to work through enmeshment trauma, and learning how to have boundaries as an adult. It took me years to realize how much of my own demand avoidance was tangled up in blurred boundaries, guilt, and obligation. Like you, I had to learn to tell the difference between reactivity and authenticity, and to stop confusing survival strategies with my true self.
I’m grateful you’re writing so clearly about this. It helps to know I’m not alone in trying to understand these dynamics and find healthier ways forward.