Low Demand is Triage

Often times, families reach out in desperation, in the height of their crisis.

I often tell parents I work with that low demand is triage, first aid, which is organic given the crisis setting. It's absolutely necessary to create an environment of more immediate safety which provides space to breathe and have choices. 

The immediate reaction for a lot of parents is bewilderment. "You can't have no demands!"

Correct. That's not how planet Earth and human bodies work.

So, how long do you stay here? Great question, can’t really answer it. Because what really needs to flow along with a parent/caregiver paradigm shift (the offering of low demand) is an honest look at relational dynamics. Unmet needs. Old wounds. Vulnerable feelings. Grief. Fear. Vulnerability.

Oof. It’s a whole thing.

But if we’re all focused on low demand and not allowing ourselves to take stock of the whole picture at play, we’re never going to get the outcomes we wish to see. 

In my previous life, I did body image work (which will always be my first love, even if it’s not my current jam). I realized that not much else can come before awareness for any real shifting to occur. “Awareness is key,” was my mantra.

It is - when you’re working on the relationship with your body, you’re first coming online to all the programming that you swallowed before you could have ever understood it. Synthesized it without your buy-in; no one asked. You’re building mindfulness for the input sources and the internal stories. You’re building mindfulness for how you show up and treat yourself. It changes stuff. But it can't happen without you knowing what all is happening.

Low demand lets the fires calm a little and allows us breathing space/thinking space. In this space, we can engage parts of our higher thinking brain which help us understand where the kinks really started.

(Spoiler alert: those kinks can be subtle due to their long-held patterns and wide normalization.)

The gift of the chaos is being allowed an opportunity to see what the PDA is reflecting back to us. The message is urgent and isn’t going to go away if it’s ignored. If we allow for awareness and mindfulness, we can come online to our programming and find its misalignment with our authentic thoughts, beliefs, desires, values. We can make adjustments through healing and allow for the expression of our authenticity. 

After all, few things are more important to a PDA’er than authenticity.

The work I do with parents happens in phases. We slow down and we notice. I ask a lot of questions. Things start connecting on levels we likely didn't realize at first. Interactions start to shift in the way they look and sound. We're able to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. It starts to make a lot more sense. There are challenges, which all growth requires.

And on the other side of these slow, intentional changes is a life that looks and feels much more manageable.