Canada Preparations

Canada preping on #Dartmoor ride. Ride – walk 2 hrs – then ride a distance.
Lesson learnt- not a good plan walking 2 hrs with biker trousers and boots! Not helped by me trying a kit variation involving keeping lining in making the trousers heavy to walk in. It was a good ride though, Dartmoor is stunning.

A big part of our #Canada trip is to slow down and ‘do’ more. Sofia really struggles with the concept of ‘doing’ and it triggers her pathological demand avoidance (#PDA) which is part of her #autism profile – this effectively means she refuses to ‘do’ that which she percieves is expected of her which is felt intensely and must be fought against and/or reinterpreted to her own liking. It is an anxiety state. From the outside this is often percieved by others as laziness, but actually it is anxiety driven.

Yet for her living in the future (aka in a state of anxiety) is more ‘relaxing’ than living in the present moment she tells me. A miss conception I hope to help her resolve in #Canada & hope in turn it will help her manage her PDA and enable her to do more. Because the frustrating thing for her is that it is not that she doesn’t want to go for a walk for example or draw the picture somone has asked her to, but she doesn’t understand why she can’t let herself ‘do’ these things.

How do I get her to do as much as she does with PDA? Constant negotiation and a huge amount of planning to ensure negotiations are successful. I don’t sweat the small stuff either, thats where the really big resistance is – in big stuff like travelling there is a fate à complis and serves as a distraction so small stuff can enter through the back door of her mind.

 

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