When “I hate you” becomes a reflex: understanding PDA, nervous system overwhelm, and emotional repair

Parenting a child with PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance) demands a kind of relational agility that many of us were never taught. This post explores how communication—tone, language, and emotional presence—can be reimagined as care.

There are moments in parenting—especially with children whose autonomy is sensitive and whose nervous systems are already carrying the charge of too many demands—when a phrase like “I hate you” becomes less an expression of actual hatred and more a form of discharge, a protest, or even a momentary equaliser meant to restore some internal balance, however messy or jarring it feels to witness.

In my experience, when a child with a PDA profile begins responding with “I hate you” to everything you say, that repetition is often less about actual contempt and more about protection, or sometimes a misfired attempt to signal that a line was crossed, even when the child doesn’t consciously know why it hurt. The phrase becomes a shield—sharp-edged, reflexive, and difficult to ignore—liable to end the conversation.

Holding both truth and tenderness: it hurt, even if it wasn’t meant to

For children who experience demand as a threat to self, emotional accountability conversations often feel unbearable unless they are rooted in shared humanity. That’s why, in our family, I began speaking aloud—not just about their mistakes, but about mine. I talked about moments when I spoke out of frustration or fatigue, and how even though I did not intend to hurt someone, I still noticed the impact it had. I explained how being regulated doesn’t always mean being calm—sometimes it means having enough safety in your body to be mad at someone, and sometimes we let words fly because we are no longer dissociating.

It helped to say things like: “Sometimes when I feel safer, I say things I couldn’t say earlier. That doesn’t mean they’re kind or fair—just that I wasn’t able to feel them before.” That simple reframing, offered from my own side of the relationship, allowed my child to see me as a companion in emotional work, rather than a guardrail policing their language.

Declarative support and non-verbal scaffolding: shifting upstream to reduce rupture

Over time, I changed the way I spoke. I found that the fewer questions I asked, the fewer explosions occurred. Where once I would say, “Can you take your meds now?”—a question that felt reasonable to me but registered as pressure to my child—I began handing over the meds and juice without comment. My tone became declarative, my movements slower, my communication stripped of the polite rituals that soothed adults but often overwhelmed or irritated my child.

I spoke less. I acted more. I watched for signs of distress before they escalated. I handed things instead of asking. I left notes instead of giving instructions aloud. I used routine to carry some of the relational burden, because routine doesn’t demand interaction, and interaction, for a child with PDA, can sometimes feel like extraction.

I have learned through intuition as much as through voracious reading, and I continue to gather language that affirms our way of moving through the world. In the coming weeks, I plan to compile an anthology of the resources that have shaped our approach—essays, studies, and insights that helped me build this relational practice. When that post is live, I will share it here.

Repair over apology: building insight instead of forcing remorse

Apologies are hard for PDA children. Often, what they said was an explosion of dysregulation or a reaction to an emotional boundary they didn’t yet know how to hold. And often they do not experience their own behaviour as isolated or volitional—it feels embedded in a relational system where someone else made the first move, or where their reaction was triggered by something invisible but overwhelming. They feel swept along, already halfway down the mountain by the time someone asked them to slow down.

So we stopped asking for apologies.

Instead, we named harm. “That looked like it hurt your feelings. I don’t think they meant to, but it still matters that it did.” We practised witnessing emotion without requiring explanations. We practised making space for discomfort without rushing to end it through forced accountability. We practised language like “I saw that landed hard” or “I was worried how that would land, when I said it”—because repair is not about shame, it is about reconnection.

New neural routes: repatterning expression like a tight shoulder

There is something beautifully accurate in the idea that the phrase “I hate you” functions like a muscle that fires reflexively—just as a tight shoulder lifts when you try to reach, even though you are aiming for openness, not tension. In those moments, the body returns to what is familiar, even when that familiarity causes pain—because in the absence of new patterns, the old ones feel safer, simpler, and more practiced.

Children who have repeated the same explosive or biting phrase a hundred times are often reaching for relief through the only path their nervous system knows, and unless we help them form a new path—one that still allows protest, disagreement, or critique, but with less emotional shrapnel—they will return to that phrase, even when it hurts them too.

And so, in our home, we began to practise language like stretches. We created emotional physiotherapy exercises—not to script politeness, but to expand expressive range. We brainstormed a hundred ways to say “I didn’t like that” without attacking the person who did it. We practised separating behaviour from identity, action from affection, discomfort from rejection. We even brainstormed insults other than “I hate you” and “fuck you.” Because I was tired of the same words. And I knew that being creative and exploring choices rooted in similar parts of the brain would make for more growth in the brain. We explored phrases like:

• “That felt really unfair to me.”
• “I didn’t want that to happen.”
• “I’m frustrated and I don’t know what to do with it yet.”
• “I need a break from this conversation.”
• “That hurt, even if it wasn’t your intention.”

Even nonverbal gestures became part of our new vocabulary—hand signals and sideways glances that meant I’m still here, but this is hard.

This was not a matter of insisting on “appropriate language” as a moral imperative; it was about building pathways toward honesty that would not tax their relationships every time they used their voice.

Repairing the air between us: moving toward low-arousal communication for everyone

In families where demand sensitivity lives close to the skin—where questions feel like commands and affection can feel suffocating if it arrives with an expectation attached—there is a quiet and urgent invitation to reimagine communication itself as a form of nervous system care, one that honours not just what is said, but how it lands, how it is carried, and whether it creates spaciousness or sparks collapse.

Even the most well-intentioned question—”Are you ready?” or “Can you come help me for a second?”—can feel like an emotional ambush when spoken into a system already bracing against the next demand. And over time, these moments do not disappear into the background; they accumulate. They settle into the body as unease, become coded in the heart as disconnection, and sometimes grow into resentment—not because the child resents love, but because love began to feel indistinguishable from expectation.

We moved toward declarative language not as a strategy of control, but as a gesture of faith: “I’m going to put your snack here for when you’re ready.” “I’ll be outside folding laundry if you need me.” “Here’s the draft plan for today and you can let me know if you have questions or need changes.”

We built a way of speaking that treated autonomy as sacred and sensory overwhelm as real, that allowed refusal to be met with curiosity instead of punishment, and that resisted the urge to get compliance at the cost of connection. And perhaps most tenderly, we recognised that changing the way a family speaks to one another is a form of care that rewires not just the child, but everyone.

When recovery eclipses strategy: grief, love, and the long return

I want to end this with something honest—because it would feel disingenuous to suggest that any amount of love or low-demand care or well-honed relational practice can always prevent collapse. Sometimes it cannot. When burnout happens, nothing works. The sooner you learn that and stop doubting what you thought might work based on your research and experience, the better. Just because things are fuckered, does not mean you were wrong. Institutional harm has an enormous weight. Sometimes the weight of what a child carries—the years of contorting themselves to survive school, the daily dissonance between their needs and their environment, the heartbreak of feeling like they are always too much or too different or too hard—accumulates until something inside them shuts down.

My child has been in bed since March. The scaffolding we built—the gentle language, the nonverbal handoffs, the evening reflections, the playful banter, the deeply connected rituals we crafted to protect him from overwhelm—only went so far. And his trust in me that I would make things safe by trying to advocate for his needs only went so far, when they failed him over and over.

I see signs of him slowly returning—subtle, flickering, almost imperceptible—but I also understand that this season will be long, and that we are now living through the aftershock of what happened when I kept sending him back into harm. Sometimes the harm is institutional, the burnout cellular, and the return glacial.

We are still here. Still speaking quietly. Still declaring instead of asking. Still leaving the snack within reach. Still waiting with love that expects nothing. And when he is ready to return—to words, to movement, to spark—I will be here. I will not ask him to rush the journey just because I wish we were already back in the rhythm of before. Because the truth is: nothing we did was wasted. It still lives in the space between us. Even now.