Cherishing Each Other: Neurodiversity-minded Relational Living

Relational Life Therapy (RLT) has given the author tools to guide neurodiverse couples towards focusing on the “we.” Relational living offers a path towards connection, empathy, and intimacy in relationships.

When I reflect on my earliest lessons in family systems and relational living, I realize they began, naturally, with my family.  I grew up on the South Side of Des Moines, Iowa, and learned all of the basics from my Italian-American grandparents, my immigrant great grandparents, and also my great aunts and uncles.  Conversations around my kitchen table were lively, and often full of energetically intense dialogue and exchanges in which emotional boundaries were often either too thin or too thick.  Conversations weren’t simply exchanges of information.  They were passionate expressions that led with feelings first, impassioned personalities infused with short-fused reactions buzzing in every direction. 

My family of origin and my extended family didn’t exactly follow the guidelines of good relational living.  There was a lot of drama.  Often the behavior I experienced growing up played right into systems of patriarchy and ableism that are culturally pervasive.  Nonetheless, the stories I deeply absorbed from my grandparents and great grandparents when I was a child focused on the generative power of the family collective:  how “we” are going to get through our circumstance, whatever it may be, rather than how “I” am going to endure.  My immigrant relatives spoke of their cooperative efforts to build a life in America.  They spoke of their collective struggles to fit in because their ways of living weren’t accepted or understood.   They had to figure out how to navigate, how to fit in, how to assimilate, and how to stick together as a family and in their communities in order to survive. (We can leave a parallel discussion about whether people should need to assimilate for another day.)

In spite of being steeped in traditional hierarchies of patriarchy and ableism, the stories from my extended family articulated a clear recognition of the value of the collective in contrast to the value of the individual.  This emboldened our shared hope for survival. 

The Link Between Immigrant and Neurodivergent Experiences

In some ways the immigrant experiences of being othered parallel experiences of neurodivergent people, including autistic people, who are often misunderstood and may communicate differently than the mainstream culture. (Autism is only one type of neurodivergence. There are many others as well).   I’ll emphasize what may be an obvious point here: neurodivergent people have neurologically-based communication differences and/or disabilities, while immigrants, as a group, have culturally-based communication differences.  That said, however, the lived experiences of those differences are quite similar: experiences of rejection, isolation, lack of belonging in the larger community, and marginalization.   Leaning into each other – to their own differently wired and differently cultured crowd – helps create a protective buffer. A shared sense of identity contributes to healthier feelings of self, identity, and community.  

In my work with neurodiverse couples, where at least one partner is neurodivergent, the work of helping couples find a healthy sense of belonging with one another as well as in community with other couples presents unique challenges.   By naming the isolation that is happening for both partners, we open the door to find a different way.

For the sake of clarity, neurodiversity is the concept that each of us are differently wired and there is endless variation of neurocognitive functioning in human minds.  The neurodiversity paradigm says that no mind is better or worse than any other mind.  Understanding these fundamentals are essential when helping bridge connection with neurodiverse couples.

Relational Life Therapy: A Bridge to Connection

Relational Life Therapy (RLT) is a therapeutic approach founded and developed by Terry Real.  RLT works from the premise that we are wired to be relational. I would amplify that by asserting that this is true no matter our neurotypes.    RLT offers an approach that guides couples to focus on “us” in order to lean into relational living. 

Living relationally is a path away from isolation and a lack of belonging.  It’s a path towards connection, empathy, and intimacy in relationships.  It means a shift from thinking and acting from mindset of what is good for you or what is good for me to what is good for us.  It means considering an alternative to being solely self reliant, and it means confronting marginalization and isolation within relationships.  Distinguishing between power over another person in a relationship to power with another is at the core of living relationally.  The Relational Life perspective guides couples to learn about the parts of themselves that get in the way of leaning in towards respectful self advocacy, speaking up to make things better, listening for understanding, responding with generosity, cherishing the relationship, and expressing or conveying empathy.

Understanding Marginalization and Neurotypical Privilege

Relational Life Therapy (RLT), a family systems-based, ecological approach, at its core confronts patriarchy, and by extension, marginalization in relationships.  Like good detective work, RLT finds the underlying maladaptive pattern in the relationship and considers the pattern “the client.”   In my work with neurodiverse couples I collaborate with them to help me in my detective work.  I compassionately confront injustices in the relationship that are standing in the way of partnership, empathy, and intimacy. These injustices include deep loneliness as well as neurotypical privilege among other issues at play.  Neurotypical privilege is the idea that neurotypicals have a cognitive advantage over neurodivergent people, and when this goes unchecked harm can occur in relationships.  The work encourages, empowers and supports partners who may be affected by various marginalizations to specifically name how they get expressed in the relationship. It continues when the counselor joins through the truth about this marginalization process in order to help short circuit unhealthy mechanisms of power one person might have over the other.   This process is nuanced and complex.  It requires a lot of observation and data gathering, tuning in, listening deeply to each partner’s experiences in the relationship, and bringing attention to the potentially traumatic origins of deep relational wounds. It also requires the ability to name what hurts in the relationship with compassion and resolve in order to stop the silence around behavior that perpetuates unhealthy and imbalanced power dynamics. 

Neurodiverse couples often struggle with two particular forces. The first is that there is often a core collusion of silence as a by-product of living in a patriarchal culture. The second is that there is often a core collusion of silence about something called the Double Empathy Problem. According to Dr. Damian Milton, The Double Empathy Problem is the idea that partners who come from very different cultural, socio-economic, and neurocognitive-based experiences will have trouble empathizing with each other.  This happens not simply because one partner is autistic and the other non-autistic.  It happens because there can be breakdowns of empathy between two people who experience the world very differently.  Often one partner blames the other for this empathy problem, without either partner specifically naming or recognizing the mutual misunderstandings that may be, at least in part, based on differences in neurotypes.  It’s common for neurotypical privilege to stand in the way of noticing the double empathy problem.

Tools for Neurodiverse Couples: Practical Approaches to Relational Growth

Neurodivergent people often gravitate towards concrete concepts, patterns, explicit language, and “rules” for relating.   RLT provides tools and frameworks for building  the kind of relational skills that often make a lot of sense for neurodivergent people and those who love them. 

Here are some examples:

• The Feedback Wheel is a concrete, visual tool for relational repair

• The Relationship Grid helps break down abstract concepts of self esteem and boundaries into more manageable chunks

• Relational Timeouts offer structure & rules about when to maintain responsible distancing and how to predictably and gradually check back in.

• Losing and Winning Strategies are specific strategies explicitly named and described offering rules for what is losing and what is winning and why

• Dead Stop Contract is a tool to build empathy that offers clear rules for when to use this, what to do when a partner calls a dead stop,

• Relational Reckoning includes the neurodiverse couple examining  ableism and the double empathy problem and seeing these pieces more clearly in order to navigate those elements of their relationship.

Cherishing Each Other: A Path to Love and Connection

 With the guidance of a neurodiversity-affirming therapist and the tools of Relational Life Therapy, neurodiverse couples can move beyond mere survival in their relationships to thrive in a space of mutual respect and understanding. By naming and addressing the barriers to connection—whether they be rooted in neurotype, culture, or societal privilege—couples can discover the love they desire and, more importantly, learn how to cherish each other in ways that go beyond simply enduring the challenges of life together.

In the end, relational living is about more than just existing in the same space. It’s about building a life together, a "we" that transcends differences and embraces the unique ways each person contributes to the shared whole. It’s about recognizing the power of connection, empathy, and, above all, love.

 References:

Cook, Gareth. (2013, October 22). Why we are wired to connect. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-we-are-wired-to-connect/

Real, T. (2021). Us: Getting past you and me to build a more loving relationship. Goop Press.

Real, T. (2008). The new rules of marriage: What you need to make love work. Harmony.

Silberman, Steve (2023, September 25). Autism, human connection, and the double empathy problem. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-human-connection-and-the-double-empathy-problem/

Smith, Jennifer (Ghahari, Ph.D., Editor.  (2022, June 3). Therapist Terrence Real on relationships. Seattle Anxiety. https://seattleanxiety.com/psychology-psychiatry-interview-series/2022/6/3/therapist-terrence-real-on-relationships#:~:text=Our%20relationships%20are%20our%20biospheres,thinking%20open%20up%20to%20us.

Snider, Naomi and, Gilligan, Carol.  International Psychoanalytical Association. (2021, March 10). Patriarchy hurts men and women. International Psychoanalytical Association. https://www.ipa.world/IPA/en/News/Patriarchy_hurts_men_and_women.aspx

Stop Ableism. (n.d.). The history of ableism. Stop Ableism. http://www.stopableism.org/p/ableism-history.html

The National Autistic Society. (n.d.). Double empathy: Understanding the relationship between autistic and non-autistic people. The National Autistic Society. https://www.autism.org.uk/advice-and-guidance/professional-practice/double-empathy

Walker, Nick.  NeuroQueer. (n.d.). Neurodiversity terms and definitions. NeuroQueer. https://neuroqueer.com/neurodiversity-terms-and-definitions/

Zamzow, Rachel.. (2022, March 21). Double empathy explained. The Transmitter. https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/double-empathy-explained/

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