03/12/2025
Every day in this work, I’m trying to help caregivers understand this exact thing... that it’s never just about the words we use. Declarative language can be beautiful and supportive, but for PDAers, pressure isn’t carried in grammar… it’s carried in the whole relational field.
This is one of the biggest pieces I teach in our space:
that nervous systems respond to felt safety, autonomy, predictability, and authenticity, not scripts.
You can soften the sentence, but if the urgency, the timeline, the expectation, or the emotional load is still there… a PDAer will feel it instantly. They’re wired to.
This is why we focus so much on:
🍃 genuine autonomy
🍃 permission to opt out
🍃 predictable pathways without rigidity
🍃 emotional honesty (no pretending to be calm when you’re holding urgency)
🍃 separating information from expectation
🍃 reducing pressure in meaningful ways, not just linguistic ones
I teach this because it changes everything.
Not just the language, but the whole dynamic.
For PDAers, safety is felt in relationship, not in phrasing. And that’s the piece I wish every caregiver, educator and support person could truly understand.
This is a brilliantly written post 👇
There is a common practice to move away from commands and toward declarative language, meaning swapping direct instructions for gentle statements, narrated actions and open invitations. The idea behind this is simple - if demands trigger stress, then softening those demands should help the other person regulate and participate without feeling pushed or controlled.
For many neurodivergent people, it does work. Declarative language reduces the emotional weight of expectations. It invites collaboration instead of insisting on compliance. It creates breathing room. It removes the edge. Sounds good, yes?
But... anyone who loves or works with PDAers, children, teens or adults whose nervous systems detect and resist demands in ways that go far beyond preference, will recognise that it doesn't always work as intended. Declarative language, despite being softer and more respectful, does not always have the predictable, calming effect it’s believed to have. Sometimes it helps. Sometimes it does nothing. And sometimes it triggers the very same demand avoidant response it was supposed to dissolve.
This doesn't mean that declarative language is ineffective, it just highlights the fact that for PDAers, the experience of pressure sits in the entire relational field, not just in the words they hear.
Declarative language is based on the assumption that named commentary is inherently less pressurising than instruction. It shares a structure where the speaker narrates their own thinking or actions, rather than directing the listener. The pressure, in theory, is removed because the sentence is no longer an immediate demand.
The problem for PDAers is that the implied direction of travel is still there. They hear the next step in the process before they hear the grammar. They hear the expectation before they hear the softening. They hear the movement toward action before they hear the gentle tone.
So, even though the wording may be different, the intention may not be and intention is what PDAers track most closely.
Taking all of this into account, we must acknowledge the fact that PDA is not learned behaviour, and it’s not oppositional behaviour. It’s a nervous-system response. It is instinctive and protective, not chosen, whereby a PDAer can feel pressured by something that wouldn’t register as pressure to anyone else in the room.
This is why even the lightest declarative phrasing can land as a demand, because the nervous system doesn’t wait for the second sentence or the intention.
If the PDAer is already navigating sensory, emotional, cognitive loads or unpredictability, their threshold for demands is already lowered. And declarative language, for all its gentleness, still requires processing, still signals direction and still exists in a relational context where expectations have meaning and where the phrasing does not override a heightened threat response. For PDAers, the system reacts first and the logic comes later (if it comes at all).
Declarative language becomes a pressure point when the PDAer notices an expected timeline, the task involves transition, the adult’s internal urgency is detectable or the PDAer has limited capacity at that moment in time. PDAers are experts at reading implications... they read tone, pacing, body micro-movements, emotional residue, the shift in someone’s breathing when they’re bracing for resistance, the energy in a room before the first word is spoken. So, when declarative language is used as a technique, the shift is felt instantly and that is the moment it loses its safety.
There’s also a layer of cognitive and social work required to interpret declarative language that goes unacknowledged. Declarative language relies on shared attention, inferred meaning and context tracking. To understand a declarative phrase, the PDAer is already scanning for hidden demands, reading the relational tone, inferring the next step, checking their internal resources, predicting how quickly the situation might escalate, assessing whether they’re allowed to say no and monitoring the speaker’s emotional state.
This is a huge amount of processing for what was intended as a light nudge.
Another aspect to take into account is how quickly declarative language stops being declarative once the speaker is using it to get a result. If a person narrates their actions simply to share information, that’s genuinely declarative, but if the person narrates their actions with the underlying intention of creating movement in the PDAer, the language is no longer neutral, since PDAers pick up intention faster than most people pick up tone. The point is that declarative language only works when the relationship is valid, not the script.
Declarative language may reduce the surface-level demand, but it does nothing to change urgency, timeline or relational intensity. If the adult still needs the task completed, the pressure remains and the language just disguises it, and a disguised demand can trigger more avoidance than a direct one, because it feels less predictable.
Just like anything else, declarative language may work beautifully one day and then has no effect, or even provokes distress, the next, which reflects the fluctuating demand threshold of a PDAer’s nervous system. A PDAer’s capacity shifts based on sensory input, emotional load, the predictability of the environment, transition demands, social fatigue, previous interactions that day and the level of autonomy they’ve had. (this is by no means an exhaustive list!)
This is why declarative language can't be treated as a consistent tool. It's relationally and physiologically dependent. It doesn't carry its own effect as such, but it borrows effect from the PDAer’s current regulation.
So, if declarative language itself is not the magic tool, what is?
PDAers thrive in environments where pressure is meaningfully reduced.
They need genuine autonomy, with real control over timelines, pace, sequence, and participation. They need permission to opt out - explicit emotionally safe permission that is. They need emotional honesty, because pretending to be relaxed while holding internal pressure just teaches them that language is not trustworthy. They need separation of information and expectation. They need predictability without rigidity, clear timelines that they helped shape, clear options and boundaries that aren’t arbitrary. Predictability reduces the threat response, but rigidity increases it, so there has to be a balance there.
We must understand that language follows relationship, not the other way around. Needless to say, declarative language still has value, but only in context and when used in an environment of genuine autonomy and relational safety. It can support the dynamic but it does not create it.
The bottom line is, that declarative language doesn’t always land for PDAers because PDA-related demand avoidance is not about language. It’s about perceived control, relational safety, internal capacity and autonomy. A gentle sentence can still carry the weight of expectation when spoken in a context of pressure.
