Shame, Power, and Pathological Demand Avoidance in Children and Teens with Dr. Gillian Boudreau | Ep. 172

What does shame have to do with PDA? And why do behavioral approaches fail so consistently for this neurotype even when implemented well? I speak with Dr. Gillian Boudreau, a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in autism, ADHD, and anxiety across children, families, and adults, to explore the roles of shame and power in PDA children and teens.

Dr. Boudreau draws on her early career supporting high-need autistic students in a school system, her psychodynamic training, and her work with families to explain why these children frustrate adults, why that frustration is data, and what it looks like to help parents construct a resilient narrative from a place of compassion rather than blame.

Key Takeaways

• What the Adults Around PDA Children Are Feeling and Why It Matters | 00:12:00 In her second year supporting high-need students in a school system, Dr. Boudreau shifted from behavioral interventions to asking the adults on the team a different question: what is this child bringing up in you? The answers were consistent: I feel like I don't know what I'm doing, I feel powerless, I feel like I'm going to lose control. Through a psychodynamic lens, clients often make helpers feel the very way they feel inside and cannot express. When the adults named their own feelings of shame and powerlessness, and the team began offering children more autonomy and genuine collaboration before demanding compliance, the big behaviors began to shift in ways that star charts had not produced.

• Shame Is at the Root on Both Sides | 00:52:00 PDA children often carry years of cumulative shame - due to numerous factors - and w hen a child in that much pain escalates, adults respond from their own activated shame response. This produces a shame-blame cycle that makes everything worse.

• Hurt People Hurt People | 01:00:00 One of the most common fears parents bring to Dr. Boudreau is whether their child has empathy, whether they are raising someone who will become abusive. Her response is direct: true sociopathy is extraordinarily rare, and PDA nervous systems are characterized by overactive fear and often hyperempathy. She uses an example from my own family to illustrate radical empathy as a clinical stance: if a child locked someone in a basement, the question to ask is not what is wrong with this child, but what level of threat must they have been perceiving in their body to do that?

• Why PDA Children Cannot Help But Call Out Arbitrary Power Structures | 01:05:39 Dr. Boudreau describes PDA as a nervous system that is exquisitely sensitive to the emotional electricity of agenda and control. From an evolutionary perspective, she suggests that the presence of PDA across the population may serve a function: some nervous systems are wired to detect and resist arbitrary or exploitative power dynamics that others have learned to tolerate. The problem is not the sensitivity. The problem is that schools and many family systems are not built to respond to it without escalating into shame cycles.

• What Parents Need Most: A Resilient Narrative and Permission to Grieve | 01:15:15 When Dr. Boudreau works with parents of PDA children, she starts by helping them catch their own shame response at the root before it cycles back toward the child. She holds space for grief, including grief for the life and the parenting experience that was expected. She also shares what she knows from seeing many PDA journeys longitudinally: this will likely turn out to be pretty cool at some point. The goal is not to minimize the hardship but to help parents construct a narrative that has room for the full palette of human emotion.

Relevant Resources

Clear Connection Psychology on Instagram — Dr. Gillian Boudreau's Instagram where she shares content and resources on emotional safety, connection, and supporting all brains and hearts across children, families, and school systems.

PDA North America: PDA-Affirming Providers Directory — A directory of PDA-affirming providers maintained by PDA North America, referenced in this episode as a resource for families looking for clinicians who understand the PDA profile.

Turning Passive Into Active: A Building Block of Ego and Fundamental Mechanism of Defense — Reference document on the concept Dr. Boudreau introduces in this episode as the psychological term underlying what I call equalizing behavior in PDA children and teens.

Understanding PDA — Free class where I teach the nervous system disability framework and the neuroception logic that underlies the shame and power dynamics Dr. Boudreau describes in this episode.

Burnout — Free class with context for the burnout period I describe in this episode, including the six months with my younger son and why the shame-blame cycle is most dangerous when a child is deepest in burnout.