A conversation between James Christensen and Catherine Roebuck

Catherine: We were talking the other day about pathological demand avoidance — with neurodivergent clients and their partners — and you offered a different term that I just loved.

James: Yeah. The other term is persistent drive for autonomy, which I think is just a normal human trait.

Catherine: Yes, I agree. And that term is so much nicer because having "pathological" in a term is a little pathologizing, right?

James: Just a bit.

Catherine: Persistent drive for autonomy — you're right, this is something that we all have, and people can have it to more extreme degrees. Sometimes that can be more difficult to work with, but I love framing it that way. Everyone wants to belong to themselves, and of course they do.

James: I think some of us who have it to more extreme degrees had more difficulty finding autonomy in childhood.

Catherine: That makes a lot of sense. And there could be other things that make someone's brain more focused on this. Even in the same family, some people may be more focused on it than others. But I really find it helpful to think about it as a healthy drive to be your own person — maybe taken too far at times, but healthy at its core.

James: I think it is a healthy drive. What we do with it matters. What I was thinking about this morning is relating to myself with warm acceptance versus cold rejection. I had this dream last night where people were relating to me with cold rejection, and it was so off-putting to be treated that way. I actually woke up in a bit of a panic and was lying in bed thinking, "Can I relate to myself with warm acceptance? Can it be okay for me to be up in the middle of the night with a bit of a panic?" I would obviously rather be relaxed and sleeping, but I just lay there and practiced relating to myself with warm acceptance — that was the phrase that came to mind.

And it seems that if I don't want to set my partner's drive for autonomy against me, what I should do is relate to my partner with warm acceptance instead of cold rejection.

Catherine: That makes sense. So you're talking about what you do if you have a partner who tends to lean toward autonomy even when it costs the relationship.

James: Yeah.

Catherine: This comes up in every partnership where you want your partner to do something different. And a lot of times, depending on how you approach them, you might actually get in your own way and work against having the best chance at them being receptive to that request.

James: It happens all the time. And I think it happens internally too. The way I think about my brain is that the parts that developed when I was really young are still there, and there isn't anything I can do to make them go away. They're always going to be there.

Those parts of my brain also respond with this drive for autonomy. Like, "No, I'm going to be in control." And that has harmful effects for me. When I woke up in the middle of the night in a panic, there was a part of my brain convinced that it needed to defend me from something, even though there was nothing to defend me from.

The way I relate to that part of my brain has a similar effect to how I relate to my wife. I can relate to it in a way that induces it to push against me harder — to push harder for autonomy — or I can relate to it in a way that induces it to relax and accept that I don't have to push so hard for my autonomy. In a way, I'm already autonomous. I'm already free. Another way of thinking about it is: am I enhancing my partner's sense of freedom, or am I diminishing it?

Catherine: And you're saying you could do this with yourself or with another person — that you could enhance your own sense of freedom based on how you relate to yourself.

James: Yeah. What I was doing in bed this morning was enhancing my sense of being okay, which is kind of like being free. It's okay for me to feel what I'm feeling right now, even though that feeling is unpleasant. It didn't go away for a while. But my default setting is to get upset about being upset, and it just makes it worse. It's like I'm feeding harsh energy into the feeling, and it just gets bigger and bigger.

Catherine: So if you're trying to get either yourself or your partner to engage differently — which plenty of us struggle with — and what your brain produces automatically isn't getting you there, what's the ineffective approach you might need to start noticing? And how do you shift to create conditions for change?

James: The most common ineffective approach I see is using judgment or condescension or superiority to try to get someone to change. Another way of saying it is: I'm going to paint a picture that what you're doing is so bad that it's making my life not okay, and that's going to induce you to change.

But I usually see that have the opposite effect. If I emphasize the degree to which I'm not okay because of what you're doing, it actually induces the other person to not change — because they feel controlled. If I'm doing that, I'm emphasizing my victim status to induce you to change. I'm claiming victim status to make you feel uncomfortable, and then you're going to do something to stop feeling uncomfortable. But people don't like being controlled that way. My partner is likely to say, at least on a subconscious level, "I can see what you're doing. I can see how you're using your unpleasant emotions to try to control me. I'm not going to be controlled. I'm going to do even more of what you don't like, just to make it clear that you can't control me."

Catherine: So you're sending a message that you want your partner to change, but the actual message is: when I'm deciding what you should do and who you should be, I'm pretty hard on you. I can be shaming or judgmental or cold. And so if your partner complies with that request, they're setting themselves up for more of the same treatment. They're reinforcing a pattern where you're going to keep treating them that way, and they don't like how you're treating them. It's like, "I don't want you to run my life because you're not very nice to me." To try to belong to themselves and not be controlled by a mean, critical person, they can't actually do what you're asking. They would be losing if they did that.

James: Yeah, that's the way I often frame it. If your partner does what you want, do they feel like they just won, or do they feel like they just lost? And what they're actually losing or gaining is autonomy.

The kind of changes that most of us need to make in our relationships have to be driven by autonomy, because the brain doesn't change when it feels controlled and manipulated. It locks itself down. It's like, "This is not a safe environment for me to loosen things up and start rewiring." If I have some behavioral pattern that's really annoying to my wife, for me to rewire and change that pattern, I have to get myself into a state of emotional safety where I feel like I'm going to be okay and I'm in charge. That's when my brain is going to unlock and say, "Okay, I'm in a sufficiently safe place to do some rewiring work."

When I work with clients, I would never try to get them to rewire in a state of excessive emotional arousal. I would never get them feeling all defensive and then say, "Okay, now let's rewire your brain." It just doesn't work. The more defensive they're feeling, the less open they are to changing. I think that's just the way we are.

Catherine: That makes so much sense. If you're in an interaction where you feel threatened by the people around you, you don't want to accept outside influence. When you're under attack, you're focused on maintaining your own autonomy, your sense of being your own person, while somebody is threatening that. It's just going to reinforce resistance and rigidity and "don't tell me what to do."

James: I have some ex-military clients, and in the military we had a concept called threat con — threat condition. How threatened are we right now in this location? It goes through levels. I used that with clients and said, "When your brain's at a high threat con level, it's not going to rewire. So what can you do to help yourself come down into lower threat con so that you can do some rewiring? And what can you do to help your partner come down into lower threat con level so they can do some rewiring too?"

Catherine: So what if somebody has a request that really matters to them, and they're trying to figure out how to make it in a good way — where they stand a chance at their partner taking it in, considering their perspective, and making a change?

James: I think the best place to start is with warm acceptance. Can I offer you warm acceptance exactly the way you are? My favorite definition of the word "respect" is to accept a person just as they are. Can I offer you warm acceptance just the way you are, and also ask you to change? I'm not going to qualify you as a bad person. I'm not going to make it seem like your behavior is so extreme that it's ruining my life. I'm just going to start from the idea that I'm okay and I'm going to be okay, and I want you to change.

Catherine: So if you want to make a request of your partner and set it up so it could be a win-win — where they wouldn't have to give up their autonomy or sense of self to make a change that benefits you — how would you go about that?

James: The focus is on what is my emotional state when I make the request. Am I making it from a place of cold rejection, or from warm acceptance? Warm acceptance means I have to go through the work of figuring out whether or not I'm going to be okay if you say no.

If I approach you and I've already decided in my mind that you have to say yes, I'm going to be putting a lot of pressure on you. I'm going to be making it seem like my okayness depends on your response, which feels like control — because it basically is a kind of emotional control lever. You're going to be tempted to say no even if you're open to yes, because you don't want your autonomy threatened that way.

So if I want to not do that, I need to do the work of figuring out whether I'm going to be okay if you say no. I really need to figure that out for myself. Then I can present it with warm acceptance. I can make this request and I'm prepared to accept a yes, and I'm also prepared to accept a no. There's not this emotional load on it because I'm not putting you in charge of my okayness.

Catherine: And I think part of what's tricky is that some people, when they look at that, are going to find that they really don't believe they're going to be okay. That's highlighting some kind of dependence — it could be emotional dependence, it could be financial dependence — but some type of dependence issue.

Because we tend to balance each other out in relationships automatically without thinking about it, if one partner is overly dependent, the other partner is going to be overly independent. You might be in the dynamic wanting your partner to come closer and connect with you more, but actually, if you want that, you'd have to address some of the dependency issues on your side. Adults in general can secure their own okayness. It might take some work, but if you're really not okay when your partner says no to a request, your focus probably has to be on getting to where you're okay — not on appealing to someone you can't rely on for support.

James: Yes. And most of the couples I work with, it's not really an issue of physical okayness or financial okayness. The issue is more a sense of emotional dependency.

Catherine: Yes.

James: "I need you to be a certain way for me to be emotionally okay." And my instinct is to ramp up my emotionality more to get you to respond. I think that's a very deep human instinct, because that's how we got ourselves taken care of as infants.

When I was an infant, I had no power other than making a fuss. My only lever was to ramp up my emotionality until I got a response. And so deep in my mind is this idea that if my wife isn't doing what I want her to do, the instinctive response is to ramp up my emotionality — to ramp up my performance of distress. "Look how distressed I am because of what you're doing." That worked as a baby. I would put on performative distress and I would get taken care of. But it has the opposite effect as an adult.

Catherine: I agree. The intuitive thing is to think the problem is that my partner doesn't understand how upset or hurt I am, so I need to make it more clear, more inarguable. But often your partner does know that you're upset and hurt. They've got a different reason for not wanting to go along with what you're asking. And sometimes that reason is that they have a problem with how much you depend on them or try to control them.

James: Sometimes I think we're just both focused on our own distress. If I'm so focused on my distress, my wife might be just as focused on hers. Her strategies might be somewhat different for managing it, but she's probably not as interested in dealing with my distress as in dealing with her own — which is true on my side too. When I'm doing all these things, I'm not really thinking about what my impact is on her. I'm only thinking about what her impact is on me.

Catherine: A classic way I see this play out is with a preoccupied-avoidant dynamic. The preoccupied partner is saying, "I'm under so much distress in this relationship. We have to talk about it. Can't you see how upset I am? Have some compassion and talk to me." And the other partner is saying, "I'm under so much distress in this relationship. Can't you give me some breathing room? See how much stress I'm under? Back off for a minute and let me recover." They're at similar levels of distress, but they have opposite strategies for handling it. That's typical — that we partner that way or push each other that way. They're just caught up in their own heads and not really seeing very far beyond their own difficulty.

James: And the avoidant person is going to face similar levels of distress when they come into the relationship as the preoccupied person faces when the avoidant person avoids. If I ask my wife to come toward me — especially if I haven't calmed myself down yet — I'm asking her to take on the same level of distress that I already have. The distress that I'm trying to get rid of. I'm basically saying, "Can you take this on for me?" Which isn't really fair if I'm not willing to carry it.

Catherine: Yes. I agree with that.

James: I tell clients a lot that your partner is never going to give up their drive for autonomy, and your chances of getting what you want are much higher if you can do it within the context of allowing your partner to be autonomous — and making it obvious that you're allowing them to be autonomous. That means you respect them and their choices. You respect that it's their choice and not your choice. Which, once again, is just not instinctive. It's not the way we're built. But we can get to that place.

Another way of framing this is: if I want to be more kind to my wife, that lies on a foundation of feeling more strong. This is the idea of differentiation — I have to feel solid in myself before I'm going to be able to reach out with kindness and acceptance to my wife. For me to offer warm acceptance, I have to be okay with who I am first. That's the foundation level.

When I'm feeling super insecure, that's going to limit how much kindness and goodness I can offer to someone else. You can't put that cart before the horse. There's no shortcut to becoming more kind if you don't know how to feel like you're going to be okay.

Catherine: One way I talk to people about this is that you're in your own company all the time. If the way you talk to yourself is unkind and impatient and harsh, you're wiring that in many, many more hours than you're wiring in something different. Even if you talk to your partner better — some people think they're nicer to other people than they are to themselves — your brain just works on repetition. The more you do something, the more automatic it becomes and the stronger those pathways are. You're creating much stronger pathways around how you treat yourself than around how you treat anyone else, because you're doing it all the time.

If you want to be kind and patient and accepting, you're going to have to take on being that way toward yourself, which many people find very difficult. The way we relate to ourselves is usually just however our caretakers related to us when we were young, and many of us did not have caretakers relating to us with patience and warmth and acceptance.

James: Yeah.

Catherine: So what if you're the person who has more of that persistent drive for autonomy, and you know this about yourself — that you tend to instinctively say "nope" whenever someone wants something from you, and just because somebody wants it means you don't want to give it? How do you work with that?

James: I've seen this happen a few times over the past couple weeks with my wife. She's asked me for something and I feel this deep, energetic flood inside me of "I don't want to do that, it's not fair, it's not okay" — not really for any good reason. She's not being unreasonable. But I have this instinct to rebel.

There was one moment where she asked for something and I just kind of dismissed her and walked away. Then I came back like ten seconds later and said, "Yeah, I'll do that for you." But I had to take a few seconds to ask myself, "Is this coming from the best in me?" The way my mind had framed it was, "I don't want to over-function. She needs to face this challenge herself." Which, sometimes that's true. But I decided in that moment it wasn't. There are some things that are so much easier for me to do than for her to do — like computer-related things. Some things I can do in ten seconds that would take her ten minutes. And in those instances it really does make sense for me to help.

Sometimes it's better for me to allow her to struggle and do it herself, but there's a balance. One indication for me is: if I'm feeling antagonistic toward her in the moment, it's not coming from the best in me. And that's how I knew. This wasn't my inner wise self speaking up. It was some sort of rebellious child saying, "I'm not going to do what you want me to do."

Catherine: Yeah. I think it's based on not really trusting anybody who's tried to run your life — parents, maybe teachers or religious leaders — having a sense that these people who tried to control me didn't really act in my best interest.

James: Mm-hmm.

Catherine: I think the remedy for that is getting in the driver's seat of your life and building more trust with yourself. "I do a pretty good job running this life." You're the captain of the ship. Because then you can approach these situations and make a real decision for yourself. That's how you bring autonomy into it — you choose based on your values.

James: Mm-hmm.

Catherine: Instead of making a knee-jerk response of "since you want that — no." Because that's not you choosing. That's still submitting to external control, because someone else is deciding what you do. As soon as they put an idea forward, you rule it out.

James: You're still just responding to external stimulus all the time. You're not really making your own decisions.

Catherine: Exactly. That's the thing that helps — building enough trust in myself that I start to think, "Okay, I have a decision to make. What do I think is the right thing to do here?"

James: It helps to slow everything down and actually think about it. My initial response is often not the best response.

Catherine: Yes. Another thing I'll do sometimes is push myself to come up with three possible responses and then compare them. Your brain will automatically produce something that's just a coping strategy from childhood — that's very often the first response. But if you make yourself consider more options, you can make a real choice, and it connects you with your own agency again.

James: When I challenge clients to come up with a better response to their partner, they often say, "Well, do you want me to just be a doormat?" They'll say that even though they know I'd hate being a doormat. But it's this idea that all I can do is get angry or do nothing.

I really like that you said three responses. Because the third response is: I'm not going to be a doormat, and I'm not going to be mean, and I am going to do something else. Which would be, for example, "I'm going to tell you what I think in the kindest way possible." That's way, way harder than getting angry or being a doormat. But it is the way forward.

Catherine: Yeah. For me, I usually have to come up with three to come up with one that's mine. Because the first one is, "I could do what this other person wants." And the second one is, "I could not do what this other person wants." In my mind from childhood, it's, "I can do what my mom wants, or I can not do what my mom wants." Those are the first two options.

James: Yes.

Catherine: And then the third option is, "I could figure out what I actually want."

James: Yes. That's so true.

Catherine: You have to take on those initial ones first before you get there.

James: That's a really good model. The third choice. "I'm going to comply" or "I'm going to rebel" — those are usually not the best options. But to live according to my own desires and values is a third way.

Catherine: Right. And it's not the fastest option. Like you said, slowing yourself down is a key part of this.

James: I like that. I've never thought of it that way. That's great.

Catherine: Yeah.

James: All right. Should we leave it there?

Catherine: Yeah. Great.

James: Thank you, Catherine. That was fantastic. All right. See you soon.

Catherine: See you.