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Module 2 — The Connection Exercise
The short exercise that opens your first session, step by step: what your therapist will offer, what you will be asked, and what to write down afterward.
The first thing we do in your first session is a short connection exercise, about ten minutes long. This module walks through it in the order it happens, so you know what will be offered before anyone offers it.
The first ten minutes
Summary: what happens in the session
1 Your therapist asks you to turn your chairs to face each other. You start out both aimed at the screen. Now you are aimed at each other.
2 The hands are offered. Holding hands, fingertips, or no contact at all. Nothing is read into whichever you pick.
3 A little eye contact. Glances, as much or as little as suits you. Nobody is asked to hold a gaze.
4 Your therapist asks what that was like. Each of you says what was easy and what cost you something.
5 A time you felt most connected. Most in love with, or most connected to, each other. One of you tells the other; then you swap.
6 A feeling word, or what you appreciated. What you felt back then, or what you appreciated about your partner at that time. One answer is plenty.
7 Your therapist carries what came up into the rest of the session. Whatever was easy, and whatever cost you, is where the work starts.
If any of it is too much on the day, we shorten it or skip it. An honest short version tells us more than a compliant long one.
Step 1. Turning the chairs
Sessions are by video, so both of you begin aimed at the therapist on the screen. That quietly makes the hour two people reporting to a third. So your therapist asks you to turn your chairs until you are facing each other. Now it is the relationship again, in the room, where we can see it.
We would like to see the two of you interact with each other, rather than describe each other to us.
Turning the chairs. Before we get into anything difficult, I would like to do a short connection exercise. Could you both turn your chairs so you are facing each other rather than facing me?
The screen does not go anywhere. It just stops being the thing you are both facing.
Step 2. The hands
Your therapist names every option before either of you chooses, so that picking the smallest one is an ordinary answer rather than a refusal. If you would like to change your mind partway through, that is ordinary too.
Offering the hands. If you are comfortable, you are welcome to hold hands. Or touch fingertips, or have no contact at all. I will not read anything into it.
Step 3. A little eye contact
Most neurodiverse couples manage the hands without much trouble. What varies is the looking, and that is what we are watching for.
Eye contact is not neutral for everyone. In a published analysis of hundreds of first-hand accounts, autistic people described what eye contact is like from the inside. What they described was physical, not shyness or lack of interest: a tightening body, nausea, a sense of being invaded.1 That is why we do not ask for steady eye contact. We invite glances, and we mean it.
The looking. Glance at each other if you would like to, as much or as little as suits you. I am not going to ask you to hold eye contact.
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.
For some people the hardest moment of the whole first session is right here: the hands a moment ago, or the first glance. The words are for exactly that moment. Saying them does not end the exercise. It tells us where to start.
Step 4. What that was like
Your therapist now asks each of you, in turn, what the hands and the looking were like. Whatever they cost you goes on the table in the first session, rather than months later.
Asking what it was like. Before we go on, I would like to hear from both of you what that was like. What was easy, and what cost you something.
The way this goes wrong. One of you does every part of it perfectly while quietly running out of capacity, and says it was fine. The other goes home believing hand-holding is easy, and the truth surfaces later as an argument about something else. If a part of it cost you, see if you can say so here.
Step 5. A time you felt most connected
Your therapist asks each of you to think of a time you felt most in love with, or most connected to, the other. Any time at all: a holiday, an ordinary Sunday, something last week. Most people find several. Pick one.
Not when you met. We do not ask about when you met, or when you first fell in love. For couples in trouble that question often lands badly, and plenty of neurodiverse couples had a rough beginning that does not represent what they built afterward.
Your therapist asks you to picture the moment rather than summarize it: who was there, what the weather was doing, what your partner was wearing. A scene you can picture tends to bring the feeling back. If pictures are not how your mind works, whatever you get is fine.
Then, one at a time, you tell your partner, not us.
It is easier to describe the memory to the therapist while your partner listens in, and couples do that without noticing. It turns the warmest thing in the session into a report. Your therapist redirects you, kindly, as many times as it takes.
The memory. Think of a time when you were most in love with, or most connected to, each other. Just pick one. Now tell each other what you were thinking of. Say it to them, not to me.
Step 6. A feeling word, or what you appreciated
While the memory is still in the room, your therapist asks two questions: what you were feeling back then, and what you appreciated about your partner. One, both or neither is a fine answer.
One word is plenty for the first. Naming an emotion is a different skill from having it. For a large share of autistic people it is the naming that is hard, not the feeling.2 So if we ask for an emotion word and none arrives, nothing has gone wrong and nobody is avoiding anything. Some people reach their own experience through a feeling, and some through a thought.
The feeling, then the appreciation. Can you feel what you felt at the time? What emotion was that? And what did you most appreciate about your partner, back then?
The second door is not a consolation prize for people who could not open the first. Both open onto the same room.
Step 7. What your therapist does with the answers
Nothing in the exercise is graded. What your therapist has been collecting is a first honest reading of how the two of you are wired: what touch costs, what a glance costs, whether a feeling word or a thought comes first. That reading shapes the conversation about goals that follows, and every session after it.
Neither of you communicates worse than the other.
The difficulty is not in one of you, and it is not politely split down the middle either. It lives in the crossing between two ways of sending and receiving. That is why this is couples work, and why the exercise is watched rather than reported.
The light comes on during the drive. An exercise that brings something up has done its job.
After the session
The workbook below is for afterward. Try to write down the specifics, not a summary: what each of you found out about touch, about eye contact, and which of the two questions was easier. Later modules refer back to those details.
What you did not say. Write that down too. If something cost you and you said it was fine, this is the place to correct that, and the next session is the place to say it early. It is a kind thing to do for your partner as well.
The one thing, if that is all you have. If you remember one thing: the part of the exercise that is hard for you is the part we most want to hear about.
Your workbook
Your answers save to this device only - we cannot see a word of what you write. Fill this in after your first session.
Touch and eye contact
Steps 2 and 3. Say what you actually chose, including if it changed partway through.
What I chose with my hands (holding, fingertips, no contact), and whether I wanted to change it
What the eye contact was like for me: what was good about it, and what it cost me, if anything
Next time, you would rather — About the same, Fewer glances, Skip the eye contact, Not sure
The memory
Steps 5 and 6. Not a test of what either of you picked.
The emotion you were feeling back then, if a word came
What you appreciated about your partner at that time
Which of the two questions was easier for you? — The feeling, The thing I appreciated, Both were fine, Neither came today
What you did not say
Step 4 is the important one. Write what you said out loud, and anything you did not.
What came up during the exercise that you did not say in the room?
One thing from the exercise you want to work on, if there is one
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 connection exercise is the practice’s own. The sequence and the words come from our first session outline, not from a published protocol. It opens the first double session, before the conversation about goals.
The lesson cites two studies. The eye contact finding comes from a qualitative analysis of first-hand accounts by autistic people, gathered from public videos and forum posts.1 The point about naming feelings comes from a meta-analysis of fifteen studies on alexithymia in autism.2 Both are peer-reviewed and reported at the size they found. Each describes a population; neither tested this exercise.
No trial has compared a connection exercise offered as an invitation against the same one delivered as instructions, so we cannot tell you the first produces better outcomes. What stands behind the design is what we have watched happen, thousands of times, when the standard version is used: it reliably costs the partner it is hardest for, and it hands the therapist an inaccurate reading of that partner. That is clinical judgment built on volume of cases, and we would rather say so plainly.
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. Trevisan DA, Roberts N, Lin C, Birmingham E (2017) How do adults and teens with self-declared Autism Spectrum Disorder experience eye contact? A qualitative analysis of first-hand accounts. PLOS ONE, 12(11), e0188446. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188446 Qualitative analysis of first-hand accounts from 364 people with self-declared autism, drawn from public YouTube videos and WrongPlanet forum posts. The themes describing the experience itself were adverse reactions, invasion, sensory overload, social nuances and nonverbal communication, with participants describing a tensing body and nausea during enforced eye contact. Limitation: self-declared rather than clinically confirmed autism, and publicly posted accounts, so people with strong feelings about eye contact are likelier to be represented than those without.
2. Kinnaird E, Stewart C, Tchanturia K (2019) Investigating alexithymia in autism: A systematic review and meta-analysis. European Psychiatry, 55, 80-89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2018.09.004 Meta-analysis of 15 studies comparing 366 autistic and 348 non-autistic participants. Alexithymia was present in 49.93 per cent of the autistic group against 4.89 per cent of controls, risk ratio 6.50 (95 per cent CI 3.26 to 12.93). Limitation: the authors note the TAS measure has only been validated in samples previously described as high-functioning, so it may not generalize to autistic people with greater language or communication difficulty.
This is genuinely how our first session starts
The Neurodiverse Couples Counseling Center works with couples where one or both partners are autistic, ADHD or AuDHD. The exercise above is offered exactly as it is written here. Therapy for clients in California, coaching worldwide, all by telehealth. A first conversation costs nothing.
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