Episode 104

Interview between Speaker 1 (Meg Ferrell) and Speaker 2 (Dr. Gillian Boudreau)
Episode 104

Meg:
Hey, podcast listeners. It’s Meg. Quick reminder that enrollment to our online courses ends on December 16th, 2025. So, check out learnplaythrive.com/trainings to get one year’s access to any of our neurodiversity-affirming online continuing education courses. We’ve shared more details about why we made this decision on our blog as well. And if you want to hang out with me in person, we’ve recently announced our newest in-person full day continuing education training that’s open to the public. It’s taking place in Chicago in April, 2026. Visit learnplaythrive.com/chicago to get the details. And stay tuned, because we’ll be announcing Seattle and Portland dates for May 2026 soon. Hope to see you there.

[Introductory music]
Welcome to the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast, a place where we explore research, amplify Autistic voices, and change the way we think about autism in life and in our professional therapy practices. I’m Meg Ferrell from learnplaythrive.com, broadcasting to you today from unceded Tsalagi territory.

Welcome to Episode 104 with Gillian Boudreau. This is a brand-new interview that is just so incredibly salient. If you didn’t listen to the last episode, go back and listen because this conversation builds on what we talked about in Episode 103. And if you like learning from Gillian, you’ll love sitting down with her in an intimate eight-session reflective practice group this coming spring. Our fall groups filled to capacity, and after just two sessions, one participant Denise said, quote, “The opportunity to connect with others in the reflective practice group has been truly beneficial to my mental health and professional growth. Participants are stretched to recognize underlying energy behind both positive and negative thoughts and experiences in work and in personal life. I leave each session feeling lighter with relief at having been fully heard, as well as receiving a healthy perspective and reset as I move into the coming weeks,” end quote. We want you to have this experience, too. Get a spot in the spring offering by visiting learnplaythrive.com/practice. Here’s the interview with Dr. Gillian Boudreau.

Hi, Gillian, welcome back to the podcast.

Dr. Gillian:
Hi, Meg! I’m so excited to be back. I love this community and I love chatting with you.

Meg:
I do too, and I’m so glad to have you here. You’ve created just this, like, tidal wave of change through so many of us. Yeah. So, in your work, you’ve been talking about something really interesting to me lately. You’ve been focusing on the times that a child feels three things: Startled, trapped, or shamed. And I wanna jump right in and talk about that because when I heard you say this for the first time, I immediately and intuitively knew that those three things, I could think of examples of, I have experience with neurodivergent kids, I have experienced in my own body, and I knew that this was important, and I knew that this is something that’s really easy to miss or misinterpret. So, I just wanted to start by asking you: Why startled, trapped, and shamed?

Dr. Gillian:
Yeah. So, it’s funny. I’ve been trying to help adults make sense of the behavior of all kids, but especially Autistic kids, and especially Autistic PDA-ers, honestly, since the year like 2002. But I was 44-years-old. It was a day at the beginning of 2025 where I got this lightning bolt of, oh, startle, trapped, shamed. And that’s because, so much of my work basically is helping adults take a look at kids who can be very confronting to them, who can seem to show up with big behaviors and big refusals, what can seem, quote unquote, ‘out of nowhere’ or ‘for no reason’, right? All the things that all of us in our community are always trying to figure out and help the adults around us figure out.

So, it’s been years and years of doing all the things we try to do, right? So, I try to help adults assume a stance of ‘A person wouldn’t be doing this for no reason. This behavior must make sense. And if it makes sense, it must have a solution. We just have to find the sense of it’. So, in my effort to keep adults in that state, right, because that’s the only state where they can actually be present to and flexible with and creative about the experience of kids, I feel like I’ve listened to hundreds of thousands of vignettes about kids doing things that seem to be, quote unquote, ‘out of nowhere’ or ‘for no reason’. And when we really think it through, the underlying reason — as you know, ’cause I’m obsessed with fear — is almost always fear-based. But the flavor of those fears, 90% of the time, will crystallize into something about being startled, something about being trapped, or something about being shamed.

And once I figured out those categories for myself literally just a few months ago, I got so excited. And now I’ve been, like, you know, I sort of backfilled that hypothesis through observation over the years. And now, I’m like testing that hypothesis, like, I’m transparently talking with educators and therapists and parents about could it be startled, trapped, or shamed? And it really seems to be working in the front way, too. And it seems to be a really helpful map. So, I’m just trying to spread it far and wide now that it’s sort of crystallized itself.

Meg:
That is so interesting. ‘Cause I know, even for me, the way we interpret a child’s behavior colors how we react and whether or not we can access our own regulation and empathy and all of those things. And when we — I’m thinking about for myself — when I interpret a child’s behavior as like angry, rigid, controlling, I have this, like, equal and opposite reaction that it’s kind of hard to regulate that back into something helpful in myself. And if I can see it and go like, “Oh, this child in front of me is feeling so scared or so anxious or so, like, things are out of their control right now,” it’s so much easier to stay regulated and respond with care and compassion.

Dr. Gillian:
Yeah, I think that’s true. And, you know, I love to talk about how we’re all just mammals, right, and we’re all just trying to manage our meat suits run by threat-responsive nervous systems. If there’s a being in front of me who I think is angry at me, who I think is working from a specific motive to thwart my motive, right, that being does become a threat to my mammalian nervous system, right? If that were true, if this were a kid who for some reason woke up in the morning and thought to themselves, “I’m gonna cause harm to Gillian Boudreau today,” right, that — well, that would be a hard, thing, right? That would be something I would maybe need to worry about. But that’s not what it is.

So, if we believe that’s what’s going on, we send our brain into a needless threat response. It’s very hard to downregulate a threat response once it’s started, right. And now, we’re just a mammal clocking threat. They actually were already a mammal clocking threat. So, now everyone is very confused and it becomes a mess. Whereas, yeah, anything we can do in general to remember this person in front of me is vastly more afraid of me than I am of them — I have all the power. I’m so much taller. I’m the one who governs who’s good and who’s bad. Like, I have so — they are so much more afraid of me than I am of them, right. Then, we can help our mammalian brain downregulate.

And I think being specific with ourselves that even a kid who’s looking threatening or confronting very well might be scared is a great place to start. But then, having some specificity around what kind of scared they might be, I think, can keep us even more in our seat of, okay, I know what to do. I have a map that helps me stay safe as an adult, and that helps me access my prefrontal cortex where I can be creative and curious.

Meg:
Yes. Okay. Let’s talk about those types of scared. Can you give an example of each for startled, trapped, and shamed?

Dr. Gillian:
Yes. So, I think I’ll go general to specific. So, in general, things are startling when they are fast. So, there’s a general sense of a rush in schools and also in therapy spaces because we’re working under capitalism, there’s way more to get done than we’ll ever get done, right. So, just speed will be a little bit startling to a human nervous system. You know, one thing I forgot to say, I wanna back up a tiny bit, is that my greatest teachers to get me to startled, trapped, and shamed are not only Autistic, but are PDA-ers.

So, our folks who present with — sometimes it’s called ‘pathological demand avoidance’. I like to call it ‘pervasive drive for autonomy’, which is, as we all may know, is basically a nervous system disability that takes things that no human loves — like for example, being startled, chapter shamed — but creates a really enormous house-on-fire, nervous system fight-or-flight response that might make it so this kid will clock more safety in getting out of being startled, trapped, or shamed ’cause that feels so threatening than even meeting another basic need like eating, or pooping more than once a week, or something like that. So, I really wanna bring in the, you know, the how helpful it is, how clear the ‘No’ of a PDA-er can be, and how much access to that ‘No’ they often have, right, much more than other neurotypes, right, to really — you know, we’re dealing with understanding a big ‘No’ of PDA-ers a lot when we’re trying to work through behavior.

So, that’s what sort of gets us going, thinking about underlying fears. And startled, trapped, and shamed often seems to be the thing for PDA-ers. But what I think is so important to note is that while we never ever want to idealize or fetishize a disability, because it’s very hard to live with PDA, I’m also really grateful to PDA-ers as a bit of a canary in the mine for identifying ways in which the spaces that we’re in are generally unnecessarily start;ing, trapping or shaming all of us, but in particular children, in ways that aren’t good for everybody.

But often, PDA-ers will be the ones who show up with the biggest ‘No’ about it. So, when I’m programming for PDA-ers in particular, I always tell people that if there is, you know, all the things — if there’s an unexpected zigzag that is startling, right, that will throw the nervous system into a state of dysregulation. Things are gonna go poorly from there. If there is too much urgency and adults are moving around too fast, like, there’s a huge rush trying to get things done, or particularly if we are start rushing a child, that will also start this kind of the startle response. Also, something that wasn’t expected, right? So, there was a clinical example that came up recently where a PDA-er kiddo was involved with a performance in an auditorium, and before that performance, they had left their backpack in one particular spot.

Their well-meaning parent had moved their backpack over to where the family was sitting. And then, what we were processing through was actually a large confrontation and some very angry words that this child had yelled at and about their mother in this public space, trying to understand that. But when we traced it back, it actually had its roots in how startled this child felt when they went back to where they thought their backpack should be and it wasn’t there. They immediately thought that someone had stolen their backpack. Now their nervous system is totally on fire. By the time their mom comes over and explains to them, like, what happened and asks them just to come on over, they can’t. All they can access is rage at the mom, which really ended up being rage related to the startle response.

Meg:
So interesting and so easy to miss.

Dr. Gillian:
Yes. Yes.

Meg:
I appreciate that walking back. Okay, so that’s startled. And I was thinking about, when you gave that example, I was thinking about, my kid says, “I don’t like surprises. Please tell me what I’m getting for my birthday.”

Dr. Gillian:
Oh, yes. Great example.

Meg:
Yeah. And not, it’s not a bid to just know earlier. Or I’ll hear somebody say, “Oh, we’re gonna do something so fun tomorrow.” And he’ll say, “Please tell me. I don’t like surprises.” And I think it’s such good self-advocacy.

Dr. Gillian:
Me too.

Meg:
And it does require adults to break convention to meet that need to not be surprised, right. Like, okay, yes, I will tell you what you’re getting for your birthday.

Dr. Gillian:
Yes. That is a great point. It also makes me think about just general springtime in public schools, right? I mean, there was a point where my, all the kids I was working with and trying to get through the public school day were a group of PDA-ers we now know. And, you know, the end of the school year is, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had a picnic on this day? And wouldn’t it be great if there were a surprise mascot who came in and did a dance on this other day?” right.

And I really like what you’re saying about breaking convention because a lot of responsible programming for those kids during that time is actually to reveal the secret or the surprise to those kids, as well as sometimes to give them a way to opt out of what might seem like the really fun, exciting, novel thing when actually what’s gonna be better for certain kids is to forego, you know, the huge seemingly rewarding thing to have a routine and to have things be predictable.

Meg:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. One of my favorite podcast moments was when Lei Wiley-Mydske said that, “Self-advocacy starts with listening to a child’s ‘No'”. This is such a good example of it ‘cause it’s really easy to be like, “But this is the fun thing. Come on.” And this, that child is saying, “I’m literally telling you what I need right now to feel safe. This could not be any less fun for me right now.” Or it’s about to stop being fun and I am actually doing the thing you’ve been asking me to do. I’m noticing my body and I’m asking for what I need to regulate, and that’s ‘I don’t wanna do this thing’. And when we don’t listen to that, then we say, “Don’t scream at me. Don’t hit. You need to just ask for a break and regulate.” And it’s, well, that actually already happened.

Dr. Gillian:
That already happened. And we said ‘No’ to that. So, they had no choice but to go to a Plan B.

Meg:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. So, those are great examples of startled. What about trapped?

Dr. Gillian:
Oh, you know what, before we go there, could I, while we’re on startled, could I tell you the cheesy mnemonic device I’ve come up with for the antidote to that?

Meg:
I love a cheesy mnemonic device.

Dr. Gillian:
Okay. So, if we’re dealing with a startle response, right, and the ways that we can think about this with a kid — and some of this is understanding what happened, but the best way to do it is to also be proactive. So, you know, when we’re thinking about planning a session for any kid, but in particular like a PDA-er, we could think to ourselves: Now, okay, what about this situation could be startling? If I were to just be really creative about this, is there anything about this that could be startling? Am I meeting with this person in an office that’s different than I usually do? Are there any, like, you know, toys or materials that are in a different spot than they usually are?

If you can clock anything that could be surprising or different, then you — so, the mnemonic is, to work against startled: First, we wanna make things ‘Slow’ just because speed and urgency are inherently startling. Whenever possible, we wanna make things the ‘Same’, which just means predictable. And when we can’t make things the same, we wanna make them ‘Seen’. Which just means changes are prepped for in advance.

And I think we all know the big ones, but this asks us to get really granular about the small ones, almost in a spot-the-difference way, if you, like, think of those spot-the-differences in Highlights magazine or whatever, you know, it’s is there anything about this setting that is even a little bit different than it usually is?

And if so, is there a way that I could greet this kid, you know, in the waiting room or wherever it is before we come in, just to give them a heads up. They might not even need the heads up, but even just knowing that you’re an adult who has thought ahead and knows about the importance of a heads up or has thought about what might be different can often be very regulating to kids in advance.

Meg:
One thing that I learned when I worked at TEACCH that I teach in my course that I really appreciate and I think this is important and can be done badly, is how to show change to our Autistic clients. And I think a way it’s done badly is therapists forcing change for changes sake to teach a kid to be more flexible.

But I think the way it’s done well is when a routine is going to change a lot, teaching the child that the routine is to check their references, their visual supports, their schedule to see what to expect, as opposed to the routine is ‘We always do this and then that’. Because there’s some kids that if you do this and then that twice and then you change it, it’s incredibly stressful. But sort of showing early and often like, “Hey, it’s not always gonna be these same things in the same order, but you can always see what to expect here,” is a saner way, and a more predictable way. Like, my calendar doesn’t always say ‘5:00 PM interview with Gillian’, but I can always look at it and see.

So, that was something I took from TEACCH and I’ve had to add a lot of nuance to, because we can be like pulling the rug out from under kids when they’re already distressed to teach them to be flexible, and that’s the wrong approach. But really being able to show what can you count on and how will you know when something changes.

Dr. Gillian:
Okay. I love that so much. That makes my mind go in two directions. Yeah. One is that we never have to on purpose bring in sort of something like unpredictability or let’s say something like disappointment, because the world is naturally gonna offer that, right? We just need to give kids tools to navigate it.

And it’s interesting in even the therapy world, right. So, I do therapy through an attachment lens and, you know, one of the things that’s important for both adults and kids to develop is the ability to tolerate healthy disappointment in a close relationship, right. So, one thing we learned in therapy school is that if I, as a therapist, do end up disappointing a client, we can make use of that because processing through disappointment and coming to where we can recognize that disappointment and also ongoing care and connection can coexist is an important developmental skill.

But by the same token, we would never go out of our way to, on purpose, disappoint a client to help them learn that skill. That would be deranged, right? And I often feel the same way when folks are like, “Let’s introduce this thing that this kid hates,” right? “Let’s take away their comfort item. Let’s introduce a surprise so they can get used to it.” No, the world is already full of, like, unpredictability and nothing lasting forever. Like, we don’t need to introduce that. We just need to be ready to help kids when it happens. And I love that idea, you know, if we think about startling too, a startle response is also at the center of most anxiety processes.

So, even many adults with anxiety who I’m working on, working with, are also dealing with the fact that the world is very startling. And a good intervention for that is to be like, okay, there’s so much that will probably change. What are the things that can be more constant? And so, in a world where the schedule of the day cannot sustainably be made constant, as much as we might try, the existence of a map on a schedule or on a calendar can be made constant. So, let’s train dependence on the constancy of that. That’s really, really cool.

Meg:
Yeah, I love that. And the other little practical piece of that was when there are changes, not to do it behind the kids’ back and kind of hope they don’t notice, but to change it in front of them, mark it off, take off the picture, whatever it is, and be like, “You were expecting this, that’s changed here.” And let them see you make the change rather than trying to sneak it in.

Dr. Gillian:
Yes. It’s like, it’s so ridiculous. If we know that kids are vigilant to change, those are so often the kids that people try to pull a fast one on ’cause they don’t wanna deal with the meltdown. And it’s like, what do you mean? There’s no way that’s gonna work.

Meg:
Anything else you want to say on startled before we move on to trapped?

Dr. Gillian:
Nope, I think we’ve got startled. Thank you.

Meg:
All right, let’s talk about trapped. What does that look like?

Dr. Gillian:
All right. So, in broad strokes, trapped is any kind of ‘Because I said so’ or ‘Or else’. Trapped also shows up in random hierarchy. So, if we go back to, you know, PDAers being really the ones who taught me about these constructs, no human nervous system likes feeling trapped, of course. My PDA clients are often the ones who will react the most strongly to, but also will call out arbitrary hierarchy, right. Which there’s injustice to that, sure. Yeah. We also know that there’s a strong sense of justice for PDAers, but I think the fear under that strong sense of justice is of getting trapped or of being overpowered. So, any kind of ‘Because I said so’, any kind of ‘Or else’, any kind of activity that just doesn’t have an out.

So, you know, even when I think about, you know, I’m not a fan of PBIS and in the dark ages of 2010, that was the model that I was taught as the most radical and helpful way we had to, you know, help people who we didn’t have a word for yet but were probably PDA-ers. And if I think about it, okay, if there was any good initial intention to that idea, how I understood the basics of the shift that occurred with PBIS is that, okay, we’re no longer focusing on punishment and consequences as a way to force kids to do stuff, which is the most trapping. Now we’re at least moving to a stance of enticing, right, or rewarding kids to do something, or creating a condition where they might choose to do something. So, that was, I think, an initial step toward not being trapping. Although as we now know, ultimately PBIS becomes coercive as well.

But anytime we are offering voice and choice, right, anytime there’s a menu, anytime there’s any kind of out — also, anytime we just are truthful that we literally can’t usually force another human to do anything, anytime we just sit in that reality and don’t participate in the coercive delusion that it is possible or should be possible to force others to do something, that’s, you know, that’s all in the soup of what I mean by trapped.

Meg:
Yes. Thank you for that. And if people haven’t really done a deep dive into PBIS, we did talk about that as well in an episode with Greg Santucci. It’s Episode 37 where he calls it a ‘pig in lipstick’, and talks a little bit more about the problems with it.

Dr. Gillian:
And I really wanna say it does turn out to be a pig in lipstick, and I think that was one of the first examples of an attempt to move away from trapped, even though it didn’t work. Yeah. Go on.

Meg:
Yeah. Well, I just wanted to ask you, is there anything else that we should know about how to identify or avoid trapped?

Dr. Gillian:
Yes. Yes. So, I also have a cute little mnemonic to avoid trapped, and these are all words that start with the letter ‘O’. So, we could think to ourselves, okay, what about this situation could feel cornering? And then, we think ahead to make things ‘Open’, which from a leveling out the hierarchy perspective, and this is actually similar to what you said about not trying to trick kids about changes in the schedule. The first one is ‘Open’, which means have a transparent adult agenda.

So, again, I learned these nuggets from PDA-ers, and one thing that’s often true about PDAs is that they react against coercion. And so, they react to some degree against adult agenda at all. But they, especially, every person is different. And often there’s a large reaction to a hidden adult agenda, right? So, I find that PDA-ers really respond to congruence or lack of congruence. And sometimes, as adults — so, the outside’s matching the inside.

So, if we’re pretending there’s no agenda, but actually we’re like really trying to manipulate a kid into doing what we want, that’s typically going to really freak out a PDA-er and cause a big reaction. On the other hand, right, if we can be open about our adult agenda — so, when I used to be in the position of needing to do psychological assessments with PDA-ers, I would often say, if we needed to try to get through, you know, a set of cognitive subtests, I would say to them, “This is a me thing. My job today is to see if we can get these done. I think this will be of benefit to you because it will help us know more about your brain. But mostly this is my agenda to try to get this done because this is something I’ve been asked to do today. It may or may not be in line with what feels like your agenda today.”

And as overwrought as that might sound, oftentimes having that conversation at the beginning, you know, for one, would just make a cognitive testing experience feel more ethical ‘cause now a kid, you know, they know a little bit more about the whys of this and they’re a little bit more involved in the process. But also, I do find that would sometimes preempt a threat response that I would imagine otherwise would feel trapping, right?

The second is ‘Optional’. So, first is ‘Open’, transparent adult agenda. Second is ‘Optional’, menu of choices. So, whenever possible, we have kids be able to choose the order in which we do things or we kind of say, “Now is math time, but here’s a lot of different types of math you could potentially do.”

And then, from a mammalian perspective, in particular if I might need to have a hard conversation with a PDA-er or something like that, I find it’s helpful to do that ‘Outdoors’ when we can and when it’s safe to do that just because all creatures tend to feel less trapped when they are outside. Or, you know, at least when I’m working with a PDA-er, I make sure not to block their egress. I just make sure that they have a clear view of and access to the exit if they might need to leave quickly and that seems to help also.

Meg:
I love these mnemonics. So, for startled it was ‘Slow, same, sane’, and for trapped, it’s ‘Open, optional, and outdoors’. Is that right? The first time I heard you describe these — startled, trapped, and shamed — I started noticing them more in my own kids. And my youngest, who I wouldn’t say has PDA traits at all, right, she has a flight response when she gets hurt. And she just needs to run. And she gets, she’s clumsy and gets hurt a lot. And I found myself trying to, like, get in front of her and stop her to co-regulate like a good mom. And she actually screamed, “Stop trapping me. It makes me feel worse.”

Dr. Gillian:
What? Great words. Wow.

Meg:
Yeah. And I thought of you because while we’re talking about PDA-ers, no one feels good when they feel startled, trapped, and shamed.

Dr. Gillian:
No, no. Yeah. This, it’s a universal human truth. And it hits a PDA nervous system hard enough to cause a reaction that’s big enough for us to really clock it and then learn from it.

Meg:
Yeah. And I also think it’s so important to notice in ourselves too, like, when we’re in a session and this kid’s having a meltdown, I think it does all three of those things at once to us, right? Like, I wasn’t expecting that. And I have to get to the other side of this. I am trapped here. And am I bad at my job? Did I do something wrong?

Dr. Gillian:
Ooh, that’s exactly right. I just got chills. That’s so beautiful. Yeah. One of my favorite parenting interventions when we find ourselves going urgent with kids, and this is especially to address trapped, maybe, is to be like, is there any way I could just get a break from this situation?

Or I could meet whatever need I think will happen if I get my kid to do what I want them to do, right? Like, how can I get myself out of the space of being trapped? How can I remember that I am a freestanding adult so that trapped alarm stops going off in my mind and I can stop exporting kind of that frantic quality onto my kid?

Meg:
Yes. I remember this. I think it was in our previous podcast episode of maybe you gave the example of you feeling urgent because you really wanted to go to the pool and your kids saying, “No,” and this is so relatable. And you asked the question, like, what need is it that I have and how can I meet it without making my kid change?

It’s a powerful question. It’s a powerful question. And it gets us untrapped. It does get us untrapped. Yeah. And I think sometimes as a provider, what need can I meet inside of myself without this kid changing, right? Like, our need isn’t actually, I don’t think, for the kid to meet the goal. No, I think our need is to feel like we’re doing a good job.

Dr. Gillian:
Yeah. Our need is to feel competent. Our need is to not be afraid that our day is gonna fall into chaos if a kid won’t leave our office. Like, those are the types of needs that we’re typically really dealing with in a provider moment.

Meg:
Yeah. And I wanna get to shamed, but I have to say here that this is where I think your course is so profoundly impactful, the ‘Calm in Contagious’ course, because so many of us haven’t learned how to have something go wrong in our session, or something be tricky, or a client that we have a hard time staying regulated with and still maintain our own feeling of things aren’t spiraling into chaos and I still feel safe. Like, I would say a lot, maybe most of us, don’t have that skill and that’s where we can get trapped from, “Oh, my gosh, this is gonna take all of my energy for the rest of the day.” That’s what used to happen to me. I would use all of my energy in one session and then be exhausted for the rest of the day.

Dr. Gillian:
Right. That’s so true. We’re also trying to protect against that. Yes.

Meg:
Okay, so let’s talk about shame. What does shame look like?

Dr. Gillian:
So, oftentimes when shame is on board, we will see refusal. So, in the way I sometimes talk about the sneaky fears of just being like, “I’ll never do this. This is stupid. You suck,” oftentimes, there’s shame under that, which is just, you know, a classic fear of failure. But we’ll also see shame on board if there’s like bragging behavior or like in the PDA world, we sometimes talk about equalizing behavior, which is that behavior that might seem sort of mean or jerky for no reason, but actually is a child has been made themselves to feel in the one-down position.

So, just their nervous system is compelling them to then kind of make the next person feel bad or, you know, feel less than. A very, very, very human thing to do. We’ve just given it a name in PDA, which is called ‘equalizing’. There’s a psychological defense that’s called ‘turning passive into active’, which is very similar, which is, you know, if someone has felt powerless or oppressed in one place in their life, then they might try to balance the emotional check sheet by overpowering the next person.

Sometimes we’ll also see that in global affairs, especially lately. So, you know, that’s where we know that kind of shame is on board. Now when — one of the reasons that PDA-ers are such a good teacher about this, but also one of the things we really need to help our PDA-ers with the most is that they, I think, are in a really tough position with shame. So, for one, along with PDA, as we know, many kids often have RSD, which is ‘rejection sensitive dysphoria’, right? So, PDA plus RSD can mean that there is such a vigilance against shame there. There’s such a reading of even neutral stimuli as maybe indicating that I’m ‘less than’ or ‘not good enough’. And then, when I do find that stimuli, I have a huge reaction, which, guess what? People concretely don’t like. And then, they might actually start being mean to me or judging me or ostracizing me. And then, I’m gonna feel more shame, and now it’s actually more justified. And then, I might get more dysregulated, and have even more times where I have a big behavior, and then people like me even less.

So, this can become a really, really intense downward spiral that we need to really address with so much care and empathy. So, I see this a lot also in sibling stuff, right? Just the fact of having a sibling, right. You know, on a psychoanalytic level, it’s so great to have siblings. I’m so glad that we do that. And also, especially if we think about the experience of an older sibling, you know, when your parents have a younger kid, they’ve basically said to you, “I love you so much that I have decided to get another one of you and to split my attention from you.” It triggers like betrayal and abandonment and shame in addition to being a wonderful thing, right? And bringing in the possibility for, you know, more love and more connection.

And so, also, you know, anything related to sharing, anything related to parent attention, I think more than we realize that’s actually a very big deal due to shame and due to a feeling of ‘Am I good enough for my parent to prioritize?’ I think that’s on board for all kids more than we realize. But that’s very at the surface for PDA-ers when we’re noticing sibling challenges in that realm.

Meg:
So interesting. And again, just like the others, so often misinterpreted.

Dr. Gillian:
Yes. Yes. Because oftentimes when a child is moving from shame, they look the opposite of it. ‘Cause that’s the point of the defensive structure. They might look like they have a lot of bravado. They might look like they think they can do no wrong. They might look like they don’t have any remorse. When in fact, all of that is just an exact opposite mask or defense against an enormous experience of shame.

Meg:
One of the ways I hear people sometimes dismissing a child’s experience of shame is to say, “But I didn’t shame them.”

Dr. Gillian:
Yeah. Which is just that adult shame coming up. To be like, “I would feel a lot of shame if I were a person who would shame a child. I didn’t do that.” And it’s like, nobody did anything on purpose or wrong. We’re just all experiencing shame. We — you know, let’s like slow down and reconnect. It’s so interesting.

Meg:
Yeah. And I know kids who that ‘Am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Am I strong enough?’ question comes up with not already knowing something.

Dr. Gillian:
Oh, for sure.

Meg:
That they’re supposed to be learning, right? Like, they weren’t even supposed to already know it, but no, no one shamed them and it feels scary for them to be seen not already knowing something or not already being good at something.

Dr. Gillian:
Yes. It’s so nuanced. Okay, so one time I was doing a school consultation and there was a child who I was, I mean, hopefully reasonably, you know, observing in a way that wasn’t bothering them. It’s so weird to be, like, observing children. But so, I was focusing on this one kid who had an adult who was often with them, like for support. And I watched that adult, you know, there was maybe a movie going on at the front of the room and the kid was sitting at the back of the room. And the adult said, “Oh, hey, go to the go to the front of the room. You’ll be able to see better.” And there was a massive response.

And so, when we unpacked that, you know, and I was working on that team for a while, so we had a chance to try some other things, it turned out that there was a totally different response if, same exact situation, same adult said, “You know what, I’m gonna go up closer ’cause I think I might be able to see better.” Then the kid might go. But I think it’s so easy to miss how easy it is to bring up shame in a PDA nervous system because I think that kid thought, “You think I am an idiot? You think I don’t know where the television is? You think that I can’t, on my own, figure out how to see something?” When that adult just thought they were like offering helpful information. Everything related to school in particular because it is so evaluative by nature is inherently shaming to a PDA nervous system. We just wanna know that up top.

So, you know, that kind of brings me anything evaluative has the risk to be inherently shaming just by existing as a construct, and a context. And it’s important as adults not to — for us to personalize that. So, if we’re looking at the quality of shame, to get around it, we wanna think to ourselves, all right, what about the situation could mean rejection or failure, right?

And then, we wanna think ahead — these are ‘R’ words. We wanna think ahead to make things ‘Respectful’. So, for one, we do not talk down. We wanna be really aware that the register that many practitioners find themselves in just to try to be kind or child friendly, “I’m gonna do it, though I don’t mean to make fun of anyone.” So, anytime we’re going like this, or anytime we’re being like, “Okay, children,” right, that the register of that lands as patronizing to someone who is really worried about whether they’re being rejected or whether people think they’re stupid.

So, first we don’t wanna talk down. Sometimes, when I’m helping folks work well with PDA-ers, I will say, I want you to imagine that a middle-aged professor who is at the top of their field has had the sci-fi misfortune to land in the body of a 7-year-old. And I want you to speak to this individual as if that is the situation. And that will often help a lot, right?

We also want things to be ‘Reciprocal’, which means accepting the child’s influence. So, that means letting ourselves be wrong and letting the kid be right when that just naturally occurs, which it will. That means letting the kid know more than us sometimes. That means genuinely letting the kids show us things that we didn’t know. That means doing our darnedest not get defensive when kids call us out, because that’s absolutely gonna trip up their shame trigger.

So, really the main thing is try to get your own shame button under control as an adult, ’cause if you go defensive against shame, they’re gonna go defensive against shame. And then, so we’ve got ‘Respectful’, ‘Reciprocal’. And then, the third one is ‘Rehearsed’, which is that we really wanna limit the thinking on their feet or the being asked to perform in front of people of folks who are vulnerable to feeling shame. So, if we take, you know, a public school example again, in a world where we might be going around the class and asking folks, you know, what the answer to a math problem is, or we might be asking folks to raise their hand and give an answer.

You know, if one of our goals is ‘Kid will volunteer an answer in class’, then the way to meet that goal is actually to talk to that kid beforehand and you know, and have them work through the problem on their own or help them with the problem and be like, “This is really cool. We’re gonna, we’re gonna make it so once we get to class, like, I’m gonna ask you what this is and you’re gonna know.” And that’s how we start the process of a kid with a strong shame response to being able to volunteer in class.

Meg:
Thank you. So, ‘Respectful, reciprocal, and rehearsed’. That’s so practical, so helpful. So, I feel like we’ve hit on this, but quickly just to hammer the point home, can you talk about the difference between when we notice these states — startled, trapped and shamed — versus when we miss it?

Dr. Gillian:
Yeah. Okay. So, let’s start with what happens when we miss it. So, if we miss it, then we are gonna think that a child has hit the roof for no reason. And if we have one experience of, oh, this is a really unpredictable child who’s hit the roof for no reason, we’re gonna start to get a little scared of this child as a practitioner. And then, the next time we see them, we’re gonna be a little bit on our guard. And so, our fear is already gonna be up when we see them.

And then, as folks already know from me, then that means that we’re gonna go one of two directions. We’re either gonna become more vigilant and punitive, or we’re gonna be become more dissociated and abandoning and avoidant. Either way, now that kid’s gonna — we’re gonna stress out that kid. They’re gonna sense that we are not in an attuned, grounded place. They’re gonna catch what now is our fear. And guess what? They’re gonna have an escalated behavior again.

And if we don’t think about the causality here, we’re gonna decide, as I said on the last podcast, ‘Great. I was right to worry. Now let me worry harder’. And it’s gonna get worse and worse. So, if we miss these, we’re gonna set a kid up, frankly, to look crazy. And that’s a real justice issue that we need to avoid.

If we catch it and we notice the impact that it has — okay, so as I mentioned at the beginning, first, if we just have a sense of what’s going on, if we have a way to make sense of it for ourselves, that it doesn’t seem like it’s out of nowhere, now we have a map that helps us regulate so that we don’t panic and make it worse.

Then we can get through, you know, the hard moment when it happens with some curiosity. Maybe even during the hard moment if there’s space, we can make some helpful ‘I wonder’ statements, right? So, instead of being like, “That’s not okay,” we can be like, “Oh, I wonder if you weren’t expecting that.” And who knows if they are, like, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, right? Or we can be like, “Oh, I wonder if you felt cornered by that,” or, “I wonder if I didn’t give you enough of an out,” or, you know, “I wonder if there was something about that made you feel like I didn’t think you knew what you were doing. ‘Cause actually, I totally do think you know what you’re doing,” right?

Like, these are not questions that we’re looking for an answer about if a kid is already upset, but sometimes these can be helpful wonderings just into the air that can start to be soothing for the kid if they start to feel seen and we start to get it right. But most importantly, having this map is really massive for repair, for circling back after the hard moment and helping the kid feel understood, right.

So, that’s where I’ve just seen relationships grow by leaps and bounds between adult-kids is when a kid is surprised that an adult comes back to them not to be like, “Hey, you know, we never fully addressed that you ripped all the art off the wall.” But instead being like, “I thought about what happened and I remembered that right before it, you were probably looking for your backpack and I had moved it for you and you, I wonder if you felt freaked out or tricked or just shocked.” And sometimes kids are like, “Oh, my God, yes, I totally did.” And then, wow, now we are really changing things for both the adult and the kid in that situation. We’ve now built trust by 6000% which is gonna go a long way to maintain safety and buffer difficulty the next time.

And then, also just on an adult level, if we make our own meaning of what happened whether or not it’s even appropriate to share it with that kid, depending on what state that kid is in, now I can better scaffold next time, right? Then I can go to my amelioration ideas and be like, all right, next time I need to be more respectful. Or we should have tried to do this outside, or I wonder if it felt like I was hiding the ball of my agenda. That kind of thing.

Meg:
Yeah. That brought us back to the rehearse — not the rehearse, the reciprocal piece that you mentioned earlier as well. And I was thinking about what that would feel like in myself, when you have the open end of ‘Wow, this went really badly’ and that trapped state of ‘Am I bad at this? Did I mess this up?’ that we were talking about before. And I think that naming it in that way to the child closes that loop as well as an adult, right. Then we can feel like we’ve stayed within our values and can complete that stress cycle too, I think.

Dr. Gillian:
Yes. We can feel, like we’ve made use of it, right, and like we’ve made use of that therapy adage that helps me a lot, is that there’s a real value in a good repair after a rupture. Maybe, you know, in certain situations like that, you know, maybe there was a bit of a practitioner mistake that led to something like this. We’re gonna make mistakes all the time, but it has less of a chance to live in our body as a deep shame, right, if we are able to figure it out, offer it up as an insightful repair. And especially if that repair seems to go well, well, now we’re almost in a better place than if we’d never made the mistake at all. Go team.

Meg:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think about, I imagine being a child and having some sort of perfect adult in my life, like, what an impossible bar to have this parent or this therapist or this teacher who is emotionally perfect and never makes a mistake, I don’t think that’s particularly helpful to kids compared to one who cares, and shows up, and messes up, and makes a repair, and tries to stay within their values.

Dr. Gillian:
And you know what? In fact, it’s such good news that we couldn’t be perfect anyway because if we were, that would actually be the most activating thing of all to a nervous system that’s sensitive to shame. Like, we actually need to mess up in front of kids and to own it so that their shame response can stay calm.

Meg:
Absolutely. I wanna circle back to something interesting you said at the beginning and zoom out a little bit. You were starting to make some connections between the way people respond to these states — startled, trapped and shamed — and the world we live in. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Dr. Gillian:
Yeah. So, again, I really wanna walk a fine line because it’s very hard to be a PDA-er, you know, it is a disability and I wanna take that seriously. And on the other hand, I do believe that there is, you know, a real benefit to humanity of, you know, every neurotype and every way that things show up. And that is very clear to me in PDA-ers. So, a lot of my day is spent with PDA-ers. And I, just as a person, really value that because I think that capitalism, colonialism, the creep of fascism, all of these things rely on a populace that is overwhelmed and that is having trouble thinking.

And so, this whole time we’ve been saying nobody likes feeling startled, trapped, or shamed. That’s actually dysregulating for every human nervous system. It’s just not all of us might show up in a very kind of authentic, clear way with a big ‘No’ that looks like a reaction, right? Many of us might just white knuckle it and get through, but get more and more dissociated, more and numb, less and less in line with our values. So, I think it’s interesting, right?

Because if we were to really zoom out, these kids are reacting against so much of what is in the soup of our culture, right? If we don’t have a populace that’s stressed out, a populace that doesn’t trust themselves, a populace that can’t think, then they’re easy to manipulate. So, the shock and awe of the news cycle, the way that we need to fight so hard to work just to live, the speed and the urgency of all of that’s extremely startling, right? There is so much about the current paradigm that’s extremely trapping, right? Sometimes, literally, if you are being taken away somewhere you can’t get out of. But even if you aren’t needing a job for healthcare, to survive, things being so high stakes that any of us could end up unhoused if two or three things go wrong, that’s extremely trapping, right? Isolation is trapping too.

And then, you know, keeping us ashamed, making us feel less than, a culture of scarcity makes us insecure enough to buy things, insecure enough to perceive one another as threats so that we fight each other, rather than fighting what the real problem is. These actually are the tools of a lot of the problems with our society right now. And in some ways, the PDA-ers in my life, they help me to really question, does a person really have to do this? And why? Who or what is this rule serving? Could we lower any of these demands so that we could have some breathing room? These kids are really teachers in some ways because they tend to be allergic to unspoken agenda and hypocrisy. They tend to really seek congruence and they tend to be a little bit ungovernable, and I think that is a very powerful element to have in our society right now.

Meg:
Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I love the part of what you’re saying where we’re listening to the kids when they say ‘Why?’ My first real memory of doing that is when I was like 18 and working as a camp counselor, and somebody was screaming at the kids to sit down. And this kid looked at me and went, “Why?” And I was like, I have absolutely no idea. I actually don’t know. Like, I think it’s ridiculous. I don’t see any reason, but let’s do it anyway so she stops screaming at us. But, like, really processing that ‘Why?’ question every single time is wildly paradigm changing.

Dr. Gillian:
It is, yeah. It’s not going to sleep on assumptions. There’s a wakefulness to this kind of nervous system that I find really cool and helpful to be around.

Meg:
Yeah, I do too. And like you mentioned, it’s really important right now. We’re working in, living in, trying to exist in a tricky time with late-stage capitalism and climate collapse. And like you mentioned, rising fascism. And I know in my bones that real community is one of our most powerful defenses. You have been offering to the Learn Play Thrive community an opportunity to participate in a reflective practice group. And we have a group running now and a free sample session is up on the website at learnplaythrive.com/reflect, and an opportunity for folks to enroll in our really intimate spring session, and that’s at learnplaythrive.com/practice. But I just wanted to ask you, why is reflective practice in particular something you choose to put your time and energy towards?

Dr. Gillian:
It’s one of my favorite things to do in the world. So, you know, I’ll talk about how it was developed and then I’ll talk about how I use it, which is a little bit different. So, I didn’t develop it. It’s a, you know, it’s an evidence-based practice and it basically states that, you know, helpers are less vulnerable to burnout and compassion fatigue if they have a space that’s not evaluative, so their boss is not there, where they have a chance to speak aloud the pain points and the difficulties of their work, both to have a space to witness themselves in it, but even more powerfully to feel witnessed by peers experiencing the same thing.

And, you know, so the idea is that just by speaking this stuff aloud in community, the burden of it on our nervous system tends to reduce. I use it that way. But I also have a little bit more of a radical spin on it because one of my major missions is also to help those of us who are adults supporting kids like this. Like, we have to get free ourselves. So, we have to figure out how to make ourselves less vulnerable to being startled, trapped, and shamed so we don’t export that onto the kids. And oftentimes, schools and agencies, especially those of us who, you know, work for other people or who’ve worked in institutions, those institutions are part of the same soup, right?

So, in community. I really try to help providers and helpers feel empowered to fall less prey to the trapped, startled, and shamed emotional manipulation of these jobs, right, which oftentimes basically run on the guilt and over-functioning of open-hearted people. So, we talk about, you know, the delusion of the stampede pace and the idea that you could ever go fast enough to get anything done. And instead, the revolutionary stance of insisting on going at the pace you can go and do what you need to do for kids. We talk about how easy it can be to forget that you’re a freestanding adult and to go into a childlike state of feeling like you’re gonna get in trouble, right, feeling like whoever’s above you is like your scary parent and you’re powerless and, you know, need to just do what they say, right?

Re-empowering people away from that gets us out of a trapped space. And then, remembering that if a well-meaning helper is struggling in their work, clocking that as a personal shame honestly will leave you in a bit of a form of oppression. Whereas, you know, taking a look at the system, taking a look at some of the kind of broader reasons why these jobs may be set up in a little bit of an impossible way, and finding ways to take stands against that for the kids but also for ourselves is really where the meat of the reflective practice groups tend to be.

Meg:
Thank you. It’s such a gift to our community. So, so important and just profoundly impactful. What do you hope people gain from participating in the group?

Dr. Gillian:
I hope that people gain back their self-trust because I think, especially when you’re working in a really neurodiversity-affirming way in a setting that hasn’t come quite as far, you can feel like you’re the only one, you can feel like everyone maybe thinks you’re permissive, or everyone thinks you have all these wild ideas, right. So, I try to really affirm people’s sense of self-trust. I try to make note of what people are already doing and put that in a clinical context, in a theory-based context, to help people really know why that’s so great, and why what they’re already doing is working. I try to help people, you know, I hope that people also can really remember their power in these positions, and really fight the delusion of disempowerment, and remember that they are free. They are free humans because that’s really the only way we can help the kids we work with level up their own internal freedom rather than just their ability to comply.

Meg:
Amazing and so needed. So, people can find that at learnplaythrive.com/practice. And your course is at learnplaythrive.com/calm. What else are you working on right now, Gillian? And we can find you?

Dr. Gillian:
Yeah, so I put up all kinds of little snippets and you can find startled, trapped, and shamed there too on my Instagram, which is just @ClearConnectionPsychology. I have two audio podcasts these days. One is called Stance of Curiosity with my co-host Joelle van Lent, which covers topics related to kind of school psychology. Another is Emotional Physics with my co-host Rebekah Tinker. That is a bit of a pivot for me. It covers more couples therapy and, you know, relationships and things like that.

And this is a new one, but I’m excited to talk about it. I have a video offering over on YouTube with my colleague Robert Galligan, which is about parenting, but also looks at that as far as, you know, the fallible mess that we are in all ways, not just parenting. And currently that’s called Psych Jam with Gillian and Rob. But I just today we thought we might change the name to Fallible Mess, so it’ll be in the show notes by the time y’all listen to this and whatever we decide, you can see what the title is at that point.

Meg:
So cool. Yes, it’ll all be in the show notes at learnplaythrive.com/podcast. Thank you so much, Gillian.

Dr. Gillian:
Thanks Meg.

[Ending note]
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