PDA and BPD: Two Sides of the Same Coin—What Really Separates Them?

(ai re-organized my journal into an article)

By a PDAer Who’s Seen the Mirror in BPD

I have Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), a profile of autism characterized by an extreme need for autonomy and an anxiety-driven resistance to everyday demands. I also have something else: a Favorite Person (FP).

If you’re familiar with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), you know that term well. For people with BPD, an FP is an all-consuming emotional anchor—someone whose presence stabilizes them and whose absence can feel like dying.

Here’s the thing: I experience that exact same desperation.

When my FP is distant, I have:

• Repeated, uncontrollable urges to call or text them (even when I know I shouldn’t).
• Sleepless nights where my body feels like it’s being flayed open by the sheer force of emotion.
• Moments where the pain is so physical I’ve ended up in the ER, incapable of regaining control of my frozen diaphragm, and so having my first brush with malignant catatonia.

Sound at all familiar? This is remarkably similar to the storm BPD folks describe experiencing in reaction to the same situation.

The Only Difference I can see? My Childhood Favorite Caregiver Never Made Me Hate Them

The key distinction between my PDA FP attachment and BPD’s FP attachment isn’t the overall shape and reason and intensity of the pain—it’s that my obsessively Favorite Caregiver as a child was stable enough that I could trust them, and never made me feel unlovable.

• For me, my FP is still "good." Even in my worst moments, I don’t split. I don’t flip between seeing them as a savior and a monster. I can be in agony, sobbing and screaming into the void, and still think: "They’re just doing what they need to do. They have a right to their autonomy."
• I hypothesize that for someone with BPD, their childhood Favorite Caregiver often became unsafe.
• I can never change how I feel about a FP unless I have decided that I was wrong all along and they are really and actually not a good person at all. We may part ways, but I always actively love them. I think that if my original FC had made me both love them, and then hate them, I would be forced by my need for autonomy, to be capable of both fully loving the them that I love… and fully hating the them who hurts me, tries to make me feel powerless, helpless, unwanted. In order to retain my autonomy in that situation, I would be forced by this bone-deep drive for autonomy to be able to fully express and experience both perspectives. I don’t think it would be possible to do otherwise.

What If My Favorite Caregiver Had Been Different?

I was lucky. My original FC—the person I attached to as a child—was stable. They didn’t alternate between warmth and cruelty. They didn’t make me feel like my need for them was also my greatest vulnerability.

But what if they had?

• Would I have learned to associate love with danger?