Demand avoidance isn’t defiance.
Therapy and parent coaching for PDA kids and teens, and for late-diagnosed autistic and ADHD adults. Los Angeles and online across California.
Therapy for:
01
PDA kids, teens and adults
Kids and teens with pathological demand avoidance (PDA) who love to learn and still struggle in school, and the adults they eventually become. People who feel lost, or who have clear goals and can’t figure out how to get to them. Parents following parenting advice that is not working. (Why do all the books assume you have one child??)
02
Late-diagnosed autistic and ADHD adults
People who, when they learned more about autism and/or ADHD, realized it was the missing piece that made their life come into focus. People who masked well enough that nobody noticed, and people who couldn’t mask and were labelled all sorts of ill-fitting things.
03
Neurodivergent couples
Couples who can’t stop having the same fight over and over, arguing about arguing, and so much is getting lost in translation that they can’t figure out why this is so hard. Maybe one or both of you processes the world differently, and that’s why the problem has been so hard to name.
04
People who know their trauma well
But it still doesn’t feel better. Knowing why doesn’t seem to lead to change.
How I work:
Why are the hard things easy and the easy things hard?
— a lot of possibly neurodivergent people
You may already have a good sense of how you operate, or you might struggle to put words to your experience. My journey to become a therapist has been driven by being on both sides of that coin. At times, diagnoses can be disruptive to a person’s life or sense of identity. For neurodivergent people, research has shown that labeling and organizing experiences can be a meaningful step towards identity actualization. If I have something to offer by way of that — something that comes from my lived experience, I will offer it. Most research tends to focus on experiences and perspectives too narrow in scope to be relevant in the room and sometimes the shared experience of being neurodivergent is all we have to go on. So I bring my whole self — experience, training and perspective — into the room, too.
Internal Family Systems
(Level 2 IFSI). That internal conflict everyone feels at one point or another: one part of me wants this, but another part wants that. By getting to know these parts, we start to notice when they are taking over our body. We learn self-leadership, finding love and compassion for these parts while we guide them towards relinquishing their burdens.
EMDR
Often, we’re ruled by memories that carry a kind of electric charge. Sometimes it helps to give part of our attention to a clicking sound or a bouncing ball while we revisit those memories, so we can move through them with more love and patience for ourselves.
Attachment-based
Most communication problems are really protection problems. Somewhere along the way we learned that we had to work really hard not to be seen as bad or as a burden, so we figured out ways to avoid the feeling. Sometimes we learned so young we aren’t even aware we are doing it, and it always seems to show up the most in the relationships we care about the most. Attachment therapy is about looking back to when we learned these things about ourselves. How did we learn to trust and to love? What models did we have for relationships? How did believing we were bad or a burden keep us safe? What can we understand about the child we were when we look back as an adult?
PDA-informed parent coaching
Lower the demand to make room for the skill. Demand avoidance isn’t a discipline problem; it’s a nervous system response. Many PDA kids hold vast internal worlds, full of nuance and complexity a parent can’t always see at the moment of making a demand, so the no is rarely about the task. Attachment is the foundation of autonomy: we work on the connection first. If cooperation is the goal, we explore that through a decolonizing lens, challenging our expectations to find opportunities for autonomy.
The framework
I am PDA-informed, neuro-affirming, anti-racist, using a decolonial lens. Which in practice means always paying attention to power: who accommodates whom, whose needs count as needs, and who has been doing the work of being easy to live with.
Fees
I’m an out-of-network associate therapist working under supervision, and I can offer a superbill. A few sliding-scale spots for people who need them. Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover.
What a first session is like
It depends on you, and I’d rather follow your lead than run a script. Mostly I’m curious: why now, how you found your way here, what you already know, what you’re carrying. Sometimes it helps to start naming what you’ve been living with right away, and sometimes that’s too much for a first hour, and we don’t. If you’re a teen, the hour is yours to use how you want.
I am here to follow your lead, and I can provide more structure if that’s something you want.
Finding a therapist is its own executive-function task. So the first step is small.
Call, text or email. Let’s see if we’re a good fit.
Online on weekdays, anywhere in California
Or write to me.
I usually reply within one business day. If you’d rather not be emailed back, say so and leave a number.
Please don’t include anything you’d want kept out of email. This isn’t a crisis line; if you’re in crisis, call or text 988.