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Module 12 — Competing Sensory Needs, Then and Now
The sensory worksheet about the house you grew up in, and the session that maps where your two nervous systems collide now.
Ask a couple what they fight about and you get money, chores, the in-laws. Ask them to describe a Saturday and you get the radio that is always on, the kitchen light, the restaurant you stopped going to. This session maps where those needs came from, and where they collide now.
Two nervous systems, one house
Summary: what happens in the session
1 The worksheet, filled in alone. Each of you answers about the house you grew up in.
2 Both grids on the screen. Six rows, four letters, and how your family handled a clash.
3 The labels, then and now. What it was called then, what it is called today, and four questions about your house.
4 What each of you goes looking for. The half of the picture nobody volunteers.
5 Down the four rungs, compromise last. Separate, buffer, schedule, and only then compromise. Then the cost.
6 Touch, and the bed. Which touch is welcome, in your own words. Then the bed.
Nothing here asks either of you to try harder or tolerate more.
Step 1. The worksheet, filled in alone
Competing Sensory Needs is a separate worksheet. Your therapist sends it once they have heard how a Saturday goes in your house. Each of you fills it in alone, about your childhood home. It takes well under an hour, asks about nobody’s wounds, and is fillable online at New Path Family.
Optional, and recommended. Like all the worksheets, this one is optional. If sensory issues were significant in the family you grew up in, we strongly recommend it.
Why we do this together, not alone. Most therapy about childhood happens one to one. We do it with your partner in the room, on purpose. Your partner gets to understand the wounds you carried into the relationship, and to see, often for the first time, how those wounds shape what happens between the two of you. Then the two of you have a chance to find a healing path together, rather than one of you doing it alone.
That only works if it is safe for your partner to hear it. Making sure that safety is in place is your therapist’s job, not yours. If it does not feel safe yet, say so, and we will work on that first.
Step 2. Both grids on the screen
Your therapist puts both childhood grids up side by side. Six rows, one for each sense: sound, sight, touch, movement, smell and taste, and interoception (the body’s own signals: hunger, cold, pain). One column per family member, one letter per box.
S is a seeker, who craved input.
A is an avoider, who was overwhelmed by it.
M is someone who missed it.
E is someone who endured it: noticed everything, and never said so.
The work starts where the letters clash.
The clash. In your house, sound was an S and an A at the same table. What happened at dinner, and who did it land on?
How your family handled a clash is usually how you are handling it now.
Why M and E are on the grid. The child who missed it was read as not caring.
The child who endured it was read as fine.
Nothing is scored. The gold letters are the ones nobody had a word for.
Step 3. The labels, then and now
Nobody in your childhood house called any of that sensory. Your therapist reads what each family did call it, then asks what the same thing gets called in your house today.
The labels did not stay in that house. Too sensitive grows up into controlling.
Obnoxious grows up into not making an effort.
Why we start in your childhood house. That is where the labels were made, not where the differences ended. Autistic adults report more sensory over-responsivity than other adults across sight, sound, touch, smell, taste and body position.1
Then the session turns to your house now. Thirty years of adapting around a sensitivity means you stopped noticing it, so your therapist asks about scenes, not traits. Your kitchen at six. The room you avoid, and when. What you need after the family lunch or the store. What the two of you have stopped doing together.
The kitchen. Walk me through your kitchen at six in the evening. Who is in there, what is on, what is the light doing, and who leaves?
Step 4. What each of you goes looking for
Not what bothers you: what you need more of. Loud music, heat, pressure, movement, strong flavors. Seeking never looks like a problem, so your therapist asks each of you directly.
The usual mistake. One of you becomes the sensitive one, and the other, never asked, becomes the easy-going one. Both halves are wrong: almost every autistic adult who fills in a sensory profile scores in the extreme range somewhere, and the profiles vary strikingly from person to person.2 So “I’m fine, I’m used to it” gets a second question.
The frame. There isn’t a normal setting here that one of you is deviating from. There are two settings, and they differ in different places. So we are solving a design problem, not deciding who is being difficult.
Where the markers sit close, the room already works.
The way this goes wrong. The quiet house. Everyone agreed on the fix: television off, lights down, music stopped, for the partner who complained. Six months later the other partner is flat and withdrawn. Nobody asked what they needed more of.
Step 5. Down the four rungs, compromise last
Compromise feels fair, and on a sensory clash it is the worst option.
Meeting in the middle on volume leaves the music at a level neither of you wants, permanently. So for each clash your therapist works down a ladder.
Separate comes first. Two people comfortable in separate rooms spend more of the evening together than two people braced in one.
Buffer is next. Earplugs, a lamp instead of the ceiling light, a door that closes. Cheap, fast, and where most of the quick wins are.
Schedule is third. Same room, different hours, agreed ahead. A predictable noise costs far less than one that arrives unannounced: when autistic adults describe their senses in their own words, much of it is about control.3
Most of what couples bring can be solved two or three rungs above where they have been living.
The cost, said out loud. Every rung has one. Left unnamed, it comes back as resentment.
The cost. In this arrangement, one of you is giving something up. Say what it is, out loud, and let it be heard.
Step 6. Touch, and the bed
“Does he like being touched?” has no useful answer. A touch is at least six things: which kind, where, how much pressure, with or without warning, who starts it, and for how long.
One of you has been refused many times and concluded you are not wanted.
The other was getting one of those six wrong, usually the same one.
So your therapist writes down, in your own words, exactly which touch is welcome (the touch specification). A yes stops being a gamble.
Time counts too. Welcome in the morning, unbearable at night: that is capacity, not rejection.
You can always say it. If any of this starts to feel like too much, you can say I am uncomfortable. That is a complete sentence. Nobody has to explain it or defend it. We stop, we look together at what is happening, and we decide as a group whether to stay with it or to understand first what is getting in the way.
Being asked about touch with your partner in the room can be a lot. The words move it to another day.
Your therapist will also raise the bed, because couples rarely do. Two people with different thresholds for heat, touch, noise and light are asked to do the hardest sensory negotiation in the house while asleep, and couples report more conflict after poor nights of sleep.4
Sleeping apart is often the right answer.
What stops most couples trying it is what it seems to mean, not what it does. Many land on apart on weeknights, together on weekends.
The bed. Are the two of you sleeping well in the same bed? Not whether you love each other. Whether you are sleeping.
After the session
The buffer rung works fast. Often, within a week, a clash that has run for years is simply gone, and nobody was wrong. The rest of the program is built on that.
The list of what you stopped doing together gets one item back: one restaurant, chosen for the corner table and the early hour, recovery time planned for. The workbook below is the room interview, done at home.
If the grid made you wonder about your own column, the free self-discovery course has a sensory profile screener. Take it for the items that make you stop, not the number.
The one thing, if that is all you have. If the whole sheet is too much this month, fill in one column: your own six letters. Then answer one question: which room do you avoid, and when?
Your workbook
Your answers save to this device only - we cannot see a word of what you write. This one is the room interview, done at home, before or after the session.
The room interview
About the house you live in now. Scenes, not traits. Your answers save to this device only.
Your six letters now, as an adult, in this order: sound, sight, touch, movement, smell and taste, interoception (S seeker, A avoider, M misses it, E endures it, or a blank)
Your kitchen at six in the evening: who is in it, what is on, what is the light doing, and who leaves?
Which room do you avoid, and when?
After the biggest regular thing - the family lunch, the store, the school pickup - how long do you need afterward? — Minutes, About an hour, The rest of the evening, Into the next day, I have never let myself have any
What have the two of you stopped doing together? All of it.
What do you go looking for? Not what bothers you - what you need more of
The bed, and the cost
Two questions your therapist will ask. Answer them here first.
Are the two of you sleeping well in the same bed? — Yes, Not really, and neither of us has said so, No, and we have talked about it, We already sleep apart and it works, We already sleep apart and it hurts
In the arrangement you are most likely to make: who gives up what, and has it been said out loud?
Where this comes from
Every source below was checked against the published record. They are grouped by the kind of evidence they are, so the numbers may not run straight down the page — a number points back to where the source is used in the lesson.
Research discussion
The worksheet, the four room questions, the ladder and the touch specification are practice tools. They were developed in use rather than validated, they are presented to couples on that basis, and they are revised roughly once a year as the practice learns. What the research does establish is that sensory differences in autistic adults are common, large, and different from one person to the next.
The adult over-responsivity finding1 comes from a large online survey, cross-sectional and self-report. It shows the difference is present in adulthood and goes with autistic traits, not that it persists unchanged from childhood in any one person. The profile study2 is a small sample on a single questionnaire, and its message is the variability between people. It does not on its own show one person seeking in one channel and avoiding in another. That is a clinical observation, and the M and E letters rest on it.
The own-words study3 is forty-nine adults, co-produced with autistic stakeholders, and it is cited for what it set out to fill in: seeking and under-reactivity, and the themes of control and other people. It cannot say how common any of it is.
The sleep study4 is two studies of couples from the general population, not neurodiverse couples. It measured conflict and how accurately partners read each other after poor sleep. It did not test sleeping arrangements, so it supports the claim that sleep is upstream of conflict and not the claim that separate beds fix anything. That second claim is clinical experience.
Who this research was done with. The couples studies behind most of this module drew heavily on white, comparatively well-off, English-speaking participants. If your household carries pressures those samples did not — money, immigration, racism, disability, unsafe housing — the practice still applies, but the room you are practicing in is harder. That is the room, not you.
Peer-reviewed research
1. Tavassoli T, Miller LJ, Schoen SA, Nielsen DM, Baron-Cohen S (2014) Sensory over-responsivity in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Autism, 18(4), 428-432. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361313477246 Online survey of 221 autistic and 181 non-autistic adults using a sensory processing scale, the Autism Spectrum Quotient and a reasoning test. Autistic adults reported more sensory over-responsivity across visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory and proprioceptive domains, and over-responsivity correlated positively with autistic traits across and within groups. Limitation: cross-sectional and self-report, so it shows the difference is present in adulthood rather than tracking it from childhood, and the abstract gives no effect sizes.
2. Crane L, Goddard L, Pring L (2009) Sensory processing in adults with autism spectrum disorders. Autism, 13(3), 215-228. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361309103794 Autistic adults completed the Adult/Adolescent Sensory Profile, a 60-item self-report questionnaire. 94.4 percent reported extreme levels of sensory processing on at least one of its four quadrants, with striking within-group variability: different individuals showed very different, yet similarly severe, patterns. The authors conclude that sensory processing differences extend across the lifespan. Limitation: a small sample on a single questionnaire (sample sizes are not stated in the abstract), and the variability it reports is between people, not a demonstration that one person seeks in one channel and avoids in another.
3. MacLennan K, O'Brien S, Tavassoli T (2022) In our own words: The complex sensory experiences of autistic adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 52(7), 3061-3075. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-05186-3 Mixed-methods study, co-produced with autistic stakeholders, of 49 autistic adults who completed an online survey about their sensory experiences. Content analysis across modalities covered hyperreactivity, hyporeactivity and seeking; thematic analysis produced four themes: Outcomes, Control, Tolerance and management, and The role of other people. Limitation: a qualitative account of what sensory reactivity differences can involve; it cannot say how common any experience is, and no numerical results are given in the abstract.
4. Gordon AM, Chen S (2014) The role of sleep in interpersonal conflict: Do sleepless nights mean worse fights? Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(2), 168-175. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550613488952 Two studies. In a 14-day daily experience study, participants reported more conflict in their romantic relationships following poor nights of sleep. In a laboratory conflict conversation, one partner's poor sleep was associated with a lower ratio of positive to negative affect, self-reported and observed, and with decreased empathic accuracy for both partners; conflict resolution occurred most when both partners were well rested. The effects were not explained by stress, anxiety, depression, relationship satisfaction, or the partner being the source of the poor sleep. Limitation: general-population couples rather than neurodiverse couples, sample sizes not stated in the abstract, and sleeping arrangements were not tested.
Two nervous systems, one house, and a design problem instead of a verdict
The Neurodiverse Couples Counseling Center works with couples where one or both partners are autistic, ADHD or AuDHD. The sensory session maps both of you, not the one who complains, and works down the ladder before it reaches for a compromise. Therapy for clients in California, coaching worldwide, all by telehealth. A first conversation costs nothing.
Up next
Module 13 — What the Labels Were Describing