Mailbag: How do I get my own needs met?

Nov 11, 2024

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In this mailbag episode, I answer listener questions about one of the things I get asked most: How to balance adult needs with low demand parenting. We dive into what to do when your family isn’t on board with low demand and how to meet your own core needs when your kid can’t leave the house for months. From finding support as a low demand parent to managing a PDA child’s need for closeness, we’ll explore how to identify our true needs and disentangle them from specific expectations. Tune in for real-life strategies, deep insights, and a reminder that we can meet our needs while respecting the capacity of our loved ones.

Time Stamps:

00:53 Understanding Adult Needs and Low Demand Parenting

02:53 Navigating Family Dynamics and Expectations

07:07 Personal Journey and Real-Life Examples

11:44 Addressing Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA)

Additional Resources:

Low Demand Parenting book: a love letter to exhausted, overwhelmed parents everywhere. Get the first chapter free!
Why is everything with my kid so hard?: Take the quiz to find your first step forward!
Low Demand Parenting Blog: a treasure trove of low demand wisdom

The Low Demand Parenting Podcast is your space to let go of the pressure and embrace a more joyful, authentic approach to parenting. We hope you enjoyed this episode and would be honored if you left us a review which helps us reach more parents just like you!

Transcript:

Welcome to the Low Demand Parenting Podcast, where we drop the pressure, find the joy, and thrive, even when it feels like life is stuck on level 12 hard. I'm Amanda Diekmann, author, autistic adult, and mom of three. I'm not here as an expert, but a fellow traveler. Together, we're learning how to live more gently, authentically, and vibrantly in this wild parenting life.

Today, we have a mailbag episode where I answer your questions about things that are concerning you, things that you're facing as a low demand family. And both of the questions for today address the way that our adult needs intersect with the demands that we make of other people. Our work to do as the low demand parent in this scenario is figuring out what we really need.

And once we know our needs, We can disentangle those needs from all of the various solutions that are coming to our minds immediately of ways to get those needs met. Typically, as parents, our first way to solve getting our needs met is to get our kids to change. Like, well, if I could just get my kid to go to bed earlier, then I could get more sleep at night.

Or if I want to go to the gym, I've got to get my kid to go to the childcare. Part of our process here is recognizing the core need, exercise. Sleep, and then separating ourselves emotionally and practically from the solutions that we've latched on to as the key way to get those needs met, especially if those solutions are proving too hard for our kids or, as we'll talk about in this episode, other adults in our network.

Once we're clear about our needs, We can let go of the demands and find ways that we can be okay and get our core needs met at the same time as we embrace other people's real live challenges, the places where they simply can't do what we're asking them to do. This is the core of Low Demand. Not that you let go of what matters to you.

Not that you sacrifice yourself while everyone else gets their needs met. It's not even an either or between you or your kid. We're stretching into the challenging, murky, and beautiful territory of the both and. What if we have a family dynamic where we can both get our core needs met as long as we can hold loosely to the way it happens?

When we bring our curiosity and our creativity to our basic needs, there is always a way forward. Our first question comes from a listener who is wondering a very simple, but actually quite profound question. How do I get my family members to get on board with low demand? I'm all about it. But they're dragging their feet.

What do I do? So this one's an interesting one because we really can't get them to agree with you about low demand, to take this seriously, to understand what it's all about. The get them language, when I hear that rising up in my own thoughts or my own wishes or my energy, like, Oh, how do I get them to fill in the blank?

It's usually a sign to me that I'm a little bit off track and it's time to go back to the low demand principles. There's can't not won't. If somebody isn't able to meet an expectation that you have, it's that they can't do it. Not that they won't do it. In this case, it's your expectation that your family.

Would listen and understand and agree with the approach that you're taking. They may not be able to do that right now. It's really important to remember too, that family is. Not a monolith. There are all of these different family members with their own journey, their own needs, their own expectations, and the particular places of intersection where this is coming up for you.

If someone lives really far away, they don't call very often, and they disagree with your parenting, it's probably not presenting a major issue for you unless you are really wrapped up in what they think about you. If that you see them every day, it's an active struggle to negotiate in the moment how you're going to respond to different parenting situations.

You're noticing that you parent really differently when this family member is around, um, or you have real needs for emotional connection with this family member. They're really important to you. They're a key part of your emotional support system. All of that is really going to impact how you go forward.

So, you know, the first thing with low demand is just having a demand lens, looking at what's too hard for them in this particular situation. What is the particular expectation that you have that they're unable to meet? Are they really unable to listen to you talking about low demand, but perhaps your partner or a podcast would be more accessible?

Is there one specific part about seeing that kids do well when they can that's really tricky? That they're able to absorb some aspects of the philosophy, but others are just too hard right now? Um, And then always coming back to why does this matter to you? Is the expectation growing out of your need for more support and validation?

Are you feeling lonely or under resourced? Do you really wish that you had somebody to call to talk about this with? Who could understand and process with you? And you're used to doing that with the assembly members, but when it comes to parenting, they're really not available for you. Figuring out what your need is that's growing into this expectation that's unrealistic and that's presenting as a demand for your family members and then going back to the need.

Is there another way you can get that need met while honoring what is too hard for the people that you love? In the long run, this kind of journey of self exploration and being more honest about our expectations and releasing other people from expectations that are really not aligned for them This actually enables us to have more closeness and more connection, or at least it allows us to have more aligned relationships where we are actually getting our needs met, where we are close with the people who are truly serving us, and where we can be more in honest communication with the people that we're connected to.

Sometimes it does mean taking actions that involve boundary setting around what makes you feel safe or what you need to protect the people that you love. That can come out of realizing what expectations are not reasonable or aligned for other people. It doesn't always mean it brings us closer, but it doesn't always mean it pushes us apart either.

It can often be this really nuanced journey of discovering how we can be close with people, how we can get our needs met and how we can release expectations that are really not aligned. I want to give you an example of what this can look like. So in the early days, when we were starting to drop demands, But I hadn't done a lot of the inner work about really knowing my needs and getting clear on what matters most.

I started dropping demands left, right, and center to try to get some stability back in our family dynamic. So at that time, we released all All screen limits and naturally, my kids, as they had been highly controlled around their screen use for a long time, and they were all struggling mightily with emotional regulation, they dove headfirst into screen time as a major regulating tool.

And that season lasted a lot longer than I thought it would, or than my husband thought it would. And my movement into low demand was pretty unilateral. I I was sure this was the right thing, and it felt like the only thing for us at the time. But I noticed, of course, that my partner was not as on board as I was, and at the time I would have said, I really need you to be on board with me, I need you to support me, I need you to back me up.

Those felt like real needs for me, but they were actually solutions. Those were all demands that I was putting on to him. You must, you will, you have to. And every time he looked at our kids on screens and invited them to go do something and they said no or ignored him. He felt so sad, and I saw that sadness all over his face, and it brought up a lot of stuff for me around feeling insecure, wondering whether or not he was judging me or judging the decisions that I'd made, whether we were really true partners in this time in our life.

And if I could go back, I would do a lot of things differently, including my partner more thoroughly in the process and being more transparent about what I was thinking and feeling. Bye. But one thing that we discovered together was that my demand that he support me actively, emotionally, was just not true for him.

He could not do that. He couldn't feel good about what he was seeing. He does now, and it's been his own journey. on his own time, but I couldn't make him feel good. I couldn't make him praise me or give me the emotional validation and support that I needed at the time. But that didn't make my core need any less valid.

My need wasn't my husband will look at me with shining eyes every time he sees our kids on screens and whisper to me, you're doing great. That is a solution to my real need. My need was not to feel so lonely. My need was not to feel so isolated and vulnerable as the brave leader of my family charting a new path forward even without my trusty best friend and life partner right alongside me.

So, a lot of what I did in order to meet that need was finding other people. Who were journeying similarly to me and discovering ways to get that core need met while honoring where my husband was on his journey and giving him space to feel what he felt and to be where he was, was a powerfully transformative experience.

reality for both of us that did end up bringing us closer. Because there were so many things he could do for me, so many ways that he could be a good partner to me. But specifically, this one demand that I was making of you affirm my choice to drop screen time demands, he couldn't do that. He couldn't do it at the time.

So there's this nuance where we hold space for other people to be right where they are. Acknowledging what they can and can't do in relationship with us. We hold tight to our core need while releasing the ways that we're trying to get that need met, especially when those ways aren't doable for the people that we love.

And so we say to our need, you matter, and I'm going to find a way to get you met. And also I'm going to let go of this one strategy, this one way, because that's what it means to love this other person that I really deeply care about. The same is true with our kids. And in the next question, we're going to move into a parent child scenario where the adult need is also really intense and not getting met.

And in this question, we're specifically going to talk about pathological demand avoidance, PDA, also known as pervasive drive for autonomy. However, people want to self identify, I eagerly support, and I identify as a PDA er, and many people in the low demand community where it originated also identify as being PDA or parenting PDA ers.

So we're going to talk about that reality in this section of the podcast. There'll be many more episodes to come where we'll dive more into the neurobiology of PDA, but in this case, I don't think you need to know too much more about it. Um, to be able to process the question and how I respond. Let's get into it.

My child can't tolerate me leaving the house right now. So I have left five times in two and a half months. However, when I'm home, I feel like I'm always on, even when I'm alone in a room. However, the lack of complete autonomy is wearing on my PDA brain and impacting my ability to regulate myself. This question asker is deep in it and not an unfamiliar place for many of us.

But also a place where we tend to just go into survival mode and clean up the mess later. And I get the sense with your question that you're saying, is there another way? I know what survival mode feels like, like I can just shut the whole thing down or use all my negative coping mechanisms or stew and anxiety, but I don't want that.

And is there something else out there? Or is there something I haven't tried? And as always, the first thing that I want to do is just honor your inner knowing and your resiliency. Children are often praised for being resilient. You're probably tired of hearing your resiliency is one of your great strengths.

What I would like the type of resilience that I want to particularly focus on here is your desire to be true to yourself, your inner knowing. That says, I don't want to be out of alignment with myself. I know myself now. I've done the whole thing where I just pretend I'm another kind of person, and I just do what everybody else tells me to do, and you've done that.

You tried that. You don't want to go back there. I'm trapped by my love for my child and their particular neurology. I'm trapped by my own neurology and myself knowing that I can't even use all the crappy mechanisms that I used in the past. And that is actually your resilience. That is your genuine, true self saying, I refuse to go into the night.

Like I will not do that stuff again. I will not deny my child full humanity. I won't suppress my love for them. I won't demonize them, but I also won't shut myself down. I won't pretend I'm somebody I'm not. And those two won'ts are hemming you in. And they're making it harder for you to sit in this season.

They're such a great strength and I want to honor so much of what that voice is bringing forward. The only piece that I have to offer because I can give you ideas and all those things, how to distract yourself, how to use coping mechanisms, how to use tools you already know. It's the only thing that I want to offer.

That might help is to recognize that your PDA brain is asking for freedom and core to this freedom is the ability to choose. And that part of what might be missing for you is I choose this given the shitty options on the table for me, given me, given kid, I won't deny what I know about myself. I won't demonize my child all given your nose.

What is your yes? What are you saying yes to by staying home? Are you enacting in your own life that is deeply aligned, that you are committed to, that is very much in your control? Because you could hurt your kid. You could just leave and hurt your kid. You could do that. You could drink yourself into a stupor.

And wake up tomorrow and do it all over again. Those are in your control, but you are choosing not to. So we're gonna, maybe, if this feels good, name what you are choosing and why you're choosing it. Make this an exercise of autonomy and control. I choose this. And it might crystallize into one or two words that you need to say to yourself when you feel particularly trapped.

And maybe it comes along with some other of your tools. Like, if you can create pictures in your head, maybe you have some kind of expansive vista, like an ocean that goes on forever that you create in your mind where your intention, you are choosing this. This lives right there in that expansive world where you have a thousand options.

You could deal with this so many other ways. And this is the way, this is what is you, this is your essence in a decision form is to stay in this home, to keep going, to love this child and yourself in these ways. And it may be depending on your brain and body and. How you exercise that freedom, it may be that you need to do some witchy woo casting around this intention, like if you had 30 sisters with you on the solstice gathering around you with this intention at the center and they were going to cast a spell in a certain place where the expansiveness of your options and the sacredness of your choosing was going to cast like a spell onto every wall on every surface so that every time you step in there it shimmers like a sanctuary of choosing.

What would that look like? And maybe it's one rocking chair or it's the time you use your acupressure mat. It's this one space that just shimmers with all of the possibility and the sacredness of your autonomous decision to be here. And when you do it, you're surrounded by all the ancestors who are cheering you on and every woman around the world who believes that what you are doing is the mightiest, most powerful expression of love that has ever existed.

And it ripples forward into your future generations, grandchildren and great grandchildren whose lives will be expanded because of the way that you are choosing to love your child. And all of it That is holding you up in those moments. That's what I wish for you, is that when you sit in this choice, that you don't feel trapped, that you feel like aligned.

This is me. I choose this. I am here for a reason, literally in this house, at this moment. It's deeply powerful, world changing work, me in this house, maybe. You'll feel just a bit more free. If you have a question for our Mailbag episodes, I'd love to hear from you. You can go to www.amandadiekman.com/podcast for a place to send me your questions.

If this podcast is speaking to your soul, you can subscribe through wherever you get your own podcasts. Even better, if you feel the nudge, head on over to Apple Podcasts in particular and leave us a review. We'd It's such a helpful way for new people to also get to experience what this podcast wants to bring into their lives.

I'm Amanda. Remember it takes great strength to let things go. I'll see you next week.