Autonomy sensitivity and the PDA profile
What is being proposed
Autonomy Sensitivity Theory proposes that demand avoidance is a universal motivational response to autonomy threat, distributed across a spectrum that varies between nervous systems, with the PDA profile sitting at the acute end.
It is an account of detection rather than of response. Most existing descriptions begin after a demand has been refused and can say a great deal about what happened next. They cannot say why the demand registered as something worth escaping in the first place, and that is the question the theory is built to answer.
Autonomy is not the same as having choices
Autonomy here means self-determination. Being the author of your own actions, on your own account. Offering somebody a choice between two things you already picked is one narrow tactic, and often a hollow one. Deciding which of two shirts to wear is not the same as having any say in how the morning is going to go.
Material that treats the two as interchangeable tends to fail at exactly the moment it is needed most, which is when the person is already carrying load.
Two parameters, kept apart
Sensitivity is the threshold at which conditions register as impediments to volition. It is calibrated developmentally and it is not an intervention target. Trying to change it is trying to change what somebody is.
Baseline is the level of autonomy supply the system has come to expect. It moves over weeks and months, within limits sensitivity sets.
Holding the two apart is what makes the model usable in a room. When a presentation softens under an autonomy-rich arrangement, the person has not become less autonomy-sensitive. Load has cleared and the baseline has come down. Reading that as recovery, and putting the demands back, is the most common way a good stretch ends.
Equity-seeking
"Demand avoidance" names a behaviour by what it fails to do, from the standpoint of whoever wanted the thing done. Equity-seeking names what the behaviour is actually for.
The construct was coined by Kristy Forbes in 2025, from inside the PDA community: the observation that a PDA person needs to be in equity, rather than in equality, with people, places and things. AST adopts it. The six-form elaboration that follows in the papers is AST's own rather than hers.
Where this stands.
AST is a proposed model. It has not been empirically tested, and the material says so in the places where it would be more persuasive not to.
The diagnostic status of PDA is separately unsettled. There are published arguments that it describes a set of symptoms rather than a syndrome, and they have not been answered. AST is written so that it does not depend on that dispute being settled either way.
The physiological claims in the papers are predictions the architecture generates. They are not findings it reports.
The foundational paper is available as a preprint: doi 10.2139/ssrn.6907498
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If you are a professional
The practical version of this is the course, which maps the evidence base module by module.
For professionals →
If this is your household
The family side of the work is here, along with the framework the parent programmes run on.
For families →
The Elara InstituteBreaking Cycles / Building Connection
meghan@elarainstitute.ca