When PDAers Grow Up: Supporting PDA Beyond the Childhood Years

In this session, psychologist, psychotherapist and Think Sensory co-founder Karla Pretorius joins host Nicole Day to talk about PDA, or persistent drive for autonomy, as it looks from the inside and across a lifetime. Karla is a registered European psychologist completing a PhD on neurodivergent women, and the talk is built almost entirely from her own story.

Karla begins with the three ways PDA can present, internalizing, externalizing and combined, and the implicit and explicit demands that set it off, including the ones adults do not realize they are making. From there the session walks through Karla's life: a quiet, compliant childhood spent saying yes to everything, a rebellious adolescence spent testing whether anyone would leave, years of moving countries and careers looking for somewhere her nervous system could settle, a burnout, and three ADHD diagnoses before one finally made sense. Karla is candid about the parts she still finds hard, including shame, distrust and resistance to authority, and about the moment as a teenager that she is still ashamed of. In conversation with Nicole, the last third turns to what Karla wishes the adults around her had asked, and how parents can build a low-demand home that starts with their own load.

Therapists, educators, and parents will come away with clues for recognizing the internalizing PDAer who looks like the easy kid, a clearer sense of why trust matters more than compliance, and practical ideas for flexible structure and lower household demands. Grounded in Karla's clinical work and lived experience, this session is vulnerable, warm, and often funny.