[MegMarch]

PDA pinged for me too. https://www.facebook.com/SallyCatPDA/ and https://www.facebook.com/intunepathways/ are both pages I follow to get digestible portions of info at a time. I have a friend who can go full research mode but I need small bits.

As for responding to both criticism and praise the same way, it reminds me of when I left a new toy in my daughter's room for her to find as a morning surprise. She circled it like she was a wild animal with an enemy and then stopped and glared at me. She ended up liking it but at first, it was just unexpected and that was enough to really mess her up. She is 9 now and gets excited about surprises and can roll with change a bit better, but we still have fallout if things go out of her norm. Like we went to the lake with family for a week. It was great. But we budgeted a few days of emotional reserves to deal with her big feelings afterwards.

With PDA - invitations rather than expectations work better. "Hey, are you up for problem solving with me in a few hours?" or "Wanna help me with dinner?" with no expectation that it will come to anything but leaving room for the possibility of her being into it. Statements about what needs to be done that leave room for her to interpret and decide what to do will also help. "The trash bag is full" or "We haven't gotten to schoolwork yet, huh?" A big thing is that expectations and external pressure feels like danger to PDAers so they are frequently living in state of arousal and fight/flight/freeze mode. Working to reduce demands and pressures can allow them to relax enough to work through the demands that remain, problem self, use skills taught in therapy, etc.