When Prayer Feels Like Too Much
I’ve always found prayer to be a source of connection - sometimes the only one that really makes sense to me. Prayer helps me return to myself. It gives me structure and rhythm when the world feels chaotic. It helps me reconnect with my breath, with the sensations in my body, with the feeling of being rooted here, in this moment. It gives me peace. According to my Whoop it helps my HRV and general nervous system regulation in big ways. Prayer opens a doorway - to myself, to other people, to the earth, to the Divine. It is one of the most reliable ways I’ve found to reveal and access the best parts of those connections - presence, compassion, awe. Prayer helps me be a better version of me, a more true version of me.
But for many of us autistic folx, especially those of us who live with PDA - even the things we love can become sites of struggle. PDA, called by those who reduce us to symptoms Pathological Demand Avoidance, though most autistic folx prefer Pervasive Demand for Autonomy, isn’t about being oppositional or defiant. It’s not a personality quirk. It’s a nervous system response to perceived demands, including demands we place on ourselves. When someone with PDA feels that a demand is being placed on them - whether external (“You must do this now”) or internal (“I should really get up and daven”) - their system may react with avoidance, shutdown, distress, panic, or all of them.
We often want to do the thing. We often really want to do the thing. But the demand itself triggers something deep and involuntary - a loss of felt safety and autonomy. That’s what makes PDA so hard to understand from the outside. It’s not about not wanting to pray, not valuing connection, not caring. It’s about what happens in the nervous system when a meaningful act gets coded as an obligation.
Judaism speaks of prayer as a mitzvah - an invitation to connection with the Divine. In theory, that’s beautiful. It means our connection to the Divine is so important, it’s a core responsibility. Something to return to again and again, three times a day, anchored by community and tradition. But for many autistic Jews with PDA, that structure doesn’t feel grounding - it feels imprisoning. It’s not that I reject obligation. It’s that when my system registers prayer as a demand, I often can’t access it at all. I go blank. I go numb. I freeze up. Even when I’m craving the comfort of prayer. Even when my soul is thirsty for it. Even when I know that prayer would help me most in that very situation. I cannot begin to tell you how many times I take out my tallit, my tefillin, my siddur, and I just sit there watching them on my table.
This creates a painful paradox: the very tool that helps me regulate and reconnect becomes unavailable because it’s framed as something I’m supposed to do. It’s hard to describe what that does to a person’s relationship with prayer. Shame creeps in. Am I lazy? Uncommitted? Spiritually weak? Am I a bad Jew? But this is not a failure of commitment. This is not about motivation. This is a nervous system pattern that gets activated by the experience of obligation.
