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Module 15 — Where You Misread Each Other
Stop turning misread feelings into fights.
Watch first: the Module 15 video
A narrated, 3D-animated video of about 3 minutes that opens and closes on the Neurodiverse Couples Counseling Center logo. A couple at home trade speech bubbles, “I thought you were angry” and “I was just overwhelmed,” and a flowchart sorts a fight into a misread or a disagreement. It ends with a filled-in misread list of what each partner guessed, what was true, and the sign to look for, such as “Guess: Angry. Truth: Too much noise.”
Watch the Module 15 video: Where You Misread Each Other (MP4, about 3 minutes). The written lesson below covers the same ground in full.
Every couple guesses wrong about each other sometimes. In a neurodiverse couple, the wrong guesses tend to happen in the same places, and in both directions, and they often sit right in the middle of a fight. This module walks through the session where the two of you look back at a few fights and find the misreads inside them.
Finding the places you misread each other
Summary: what usually happens in the session
1 Your therapist explains what a misread is. A wrong guess about what your partner was feeling or thinking. Both of you make them.
2 You each bring three recent fights. Ordinary ones you both remember, not the worst. You talk them through; nothing goes on a screen.
3 You each say what you guessed, and your partner says what was true. One fight at a time. The guess is said, not defended.
4 You look at what was really behind each fight. Was a difference in how one of you works missed? Or was it something else, like two people wanting different things?
5 You find the sign that would have told the truth. For each misread, something the one who guessed could have seen.
One way this session can go, not a script. Your therapist will shape it to the two of you and to their own way of working.
Step 1. Your therapist explains what a misread is
A misread is a wrong guess about what was going on inside your partner.
Both of you make them. Most couples arrive believing in only one direction: the autistic partner misses things. Couples tell us the other direction is just as real, and research agrees. If you are both neurodivergent, the misreads still run both ways.
In one study, non-autistic adults watched videos of autistic people reacting to events. They guessed wrong more often, yet rated the autistic people as just as expressive.1 In another, non-autistic adults were worse at reading short animations made by autistic adults. The autistic adults read both kinds equally well.2 Autistic people show feelings differently, not less.
How your therapist opens. Today we are looking for the places the two of you misread each other, in both directions. Nobody is being graded. We are finding where the guesses went wrong.
Most couples arrive expecting to find only the first kind of wrong guess. This session looks for both.
Step 2. You each bring three recent fights
Before the session, each of you thinks of three recent fights. Ordinary ones that you both remember, not the worst. Small moments are hard to recall weeks later, but a fight usually stays with you, and a misread is often what started it or kept it going.
In the session you talk them through, one at a time. Nothing goes up on a shared screen. If a fight left either of you afraid of the other, it does not belong in this exercise. Raise it with your therapist alone first.
Where to find them. If you kept the log from What the Labels Were Describing, the evenings in it are a good place to start.
Some misreads are common. The figure below shows eight, mostly about the neurodivergent partner. In the other direction, the non-autistic partner often shows feelings through hints, sighs or a change of plan. The autistic partner then reads a judgment where there was only a mood.
An AuDHD partner may recognize rows from both groups. Any row can turn up in either partner.
The way this goes wrong. Every fight gets put down to the autistic partner missing a cue. That hurt is real, and often lonely, so your therapist does not set it aside. But in the same fight they also ask the other partner what they guessed, and check it. Often at least one of those guesses was wrong too.
Step 3. You each say what you guessed, and your partner says what was true
For each fight, your therapist asks each of you what you thought was going on inside your partner at the time. The one who guessed says only the guess. Then the partner it was about says what was really going on. The correction takes a sentence, not an argument.
The partner who was guessed about is the only one who knows what was true.
“I am not sure” is an answer. Some people find it hard to name what they felt, especially in the middle of a fight. Either of you can take time to answer, or write it down.
Almost every guess was reasonable. In many homes, silence does mean anger. That is why nobody checked it: a reasonable guess does not feel like a guess. Saying it out loud, and hearing the answer, shows it was one.
In one study, onlookers judged autistic people more harshly than the people talking with them did.3 Listening reads a person better than guessing.
Saying the guess. In that fight, what did you think was going on for your partner? Just the guess. Now you: what was really going on for you?
When the one who guessed starts to defend it, your therapist says something like: I am not asking whether it was reasonable. It was reasonable. I am asking whether it was right, and your partner has just told you it was not.
Step 4. You look at what was really behind each fight
For each fight, the two of you and your therapist look at what was underneath it. Sometimes it was a misread: a guess about your partner’s feelings was wrong, often because a difference in how one of your brains works was missed. The noise, the need for time, a flat face that was not a cold one. That kind of fight ends with “now I know.”
Sometimes it was something else. The guess was right, and the two of you simply want different things. Or one of you was exhausted and it would have gone badly anyway. Those matter too, and they get their own time.
Disagreements wait. This session does not try to settle them. They go on a separate list, and later modules take them up one subject at a time.
A misread still hurt. Learning that it was the noise does not erase a lonely evening. Your therapist makes room for that before moving on.
Sorting a fight. So the guess was right: she did want to leave at nine. That part is not a misread. It goes on the other list, for when we get to evenings out.
Treating a disagreement as a misread wastes the evening, because more information will not settle it. Those fights go on a separate list.
Step 5. You find the sign that would have told the truth
For each misread, the two of you look for something the one who guessed could have seen at the time. “When he stops using my name at a restaurant, it is the noise.” The sign goes on the list, beside the misread.
“They said they were fine.” That line comes up in many fights. Masking means hiding how you feel so that you look fine, and it produces exactly that guess. Its sign might be a too-polite voice or eyes on the floor. Once your partner knows the sign, they can ask gently, and in time it may feel safer to stop hiding in front of them.
Each of you fills in your own guesses. The sign is something the one who guessed could have seen, not something the partner should have said.
Then your therapist invites you both to look at all six fights together and say what you notice. Which kinds of misread come up most, and in which direction? If a misread had no sign, the answer is to ask, and you agree on a short, kind way to do it.
Finding the sign. What could she have seen in that moment that would have told her the truth? Not what you could have said. Something visible.
After the session
Your misread list goes into the shared folder, beside the Trait Wheel and the drawing of your family. In the next module, Who I Am, in My Own Words, each of you puts what you have learned onto one short page about yourself.
The signs often start working before anyone has practiced anything.
Once you know the flat voice is the noise, you respond differently. The workbook below holds your list.
If this is hard to do. If this is too much right now, there is no need to push through. Spend some time with your partner talking about what makes it hard, and share the feelings that come up: embarrassment at having guessed wrong, hurt at years of being misread, the urge to defend yourself. That conversation is part of the work.
Is it only the autistic partner who misreads?
No. Many couples arrive believing misreads run in one direction, but both partners make them, and research agrees. In small laboratory studies, non-autistic adults guessed wrong more often about autistic people's reactions, while rating them as just as expressive. If you are both neurodivergent, the misreads still run both ways.
What do we bring to the session?
Before the session, each of you thinks of three recent fights. Ordinary ones you both remember, not the worst. In the session you talk them through one at a time, and nothing goes up on a screen. For each fight, the one who guessed says only the guess, and the partner it was about says what was really going on.
What if a fight left one of us afraid?
If a fight left either of you afraid of the other, it does not belong in this exercise. Raise it with your therapist on your own first. The rest of the session is for ordinary fights you both remember, talked through one at a time, so that both of you can speak safely.
What if the guess was right and we just want different things?
Then it was not a misread, and it still matters. Sometimes the guess was right and the two of you simply want different things, or one of you was exhausted and it would have gone badly anyway. This session does not try to settle those disagreements. They go on a separate list, and later modules take them up one subject at a time.
Your workbook
Your answers save to this device only - we cannot see a word of what you write. This one is your misread list, in writing: your fights, which ones held a misread, and the signs to look for.
Your three fights
Recent, ordinary fights you both remember. Not the worst ones.
In each fight: what you guessed was going on for your partner, and what your partner says was true
In each fight: what your partner guessed about you, and what was really going on in you
Misreads, disagreements and signs
A misread was a wrong guess, and ends with now I know. A disagreement is a right guess and two different wants. A sign is something your partner could see.
Of your six fights, how many were about wanting different things rather than a misread? — None, One, Two or three, Most of them
Which kinds of misread came up most, in each direction? For example: noise, energy, direct words, masking, time, memory, attention, being locked on a task
For each misread: the sign to look for, and which of you watches for it next time
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 steps in this session come from our clinical work with neurodiverse couples, and from one line in the guide our therapists work from: find the specific places each partner misreads the other. They have not been tested in a trial. Nobody has yet tested whether changing how you read your partner changes what you do next.
The session rests on the idea that misreading runs both ways between autistic and non-autistic people. Researchers still debate how far that idea goes. None of the studies below looked at couples.
The video study1 found that non-autistic observers guessed wrong more often about autistic people’s reactions, while rating them as just as expressive. The animation study2 found that non-autistic adults were worse at reading animations made by autistic adults, while autistic adults read both equally well. Both are small laboratory studies with strangers. They show the non-autistic direction exists, not how often it happens at home.
In the conversation study,3 102 non-autistic students rated videos of men meeting for the first time, some of them autistic. The students judged the autistic men more harshly than their conversation partners had. Its limits: only men, and strangers rather than partners.
Who this research was done with. The studies behind this module, none of them of couples, 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.
Clinically reviewed by Harry Motro, PsyD, LMFT · California LMFT #53452 · Founder and Clinical Director, Neurodiverse Couples Counseling Center · Clinical supervisor · Updated September 27, 2026
Peer-reviewed research
1. Sheppard E, Pillai D, Wong GTL, Ropar D, Mitchell P (2016) How easy is it to read the minds of people with autism spectrum disorder? Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 46(4), 1247-1254. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-015-2662-8 Autistic and neurotypical targets were video-recorded reacting to four events; neurotypical participants then had to identify which event each target had experienced. Participants were more successful for neurotypical than autistic targets, rated autistic targets as equally expressive for three of the four events, and gave different verbal descriptions of the two groups' reactions. The authors conclude that autistic people react differently but not less expressively, and that neurotypical people are ineffective at interpreting the difference. Limitation: a small laboratory study of staged events and strangers, not partners.
2. Edey R, Cook J, Brewer R, Johnson MH, Bird G, Press C (2016) Interaction takes two: Typical adults exhibit mind-blindness towards those with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 125(7), 879-885. https://doi.org/10.1037/abn0000199 Autistic and typical adults each produced triangle animations depicting mental-state interactions; the autistic participants' animations showed increased jerk on kinematic analysis. Typical adults identified the mental state more accurately in animations made by typical than by autistic participants, while autistic participants performed comparably on both. Limitation: a laboratory task with animated shapes; group sizes are not stated in the abstract.
3. Jones DR, Botha M, Ackerman RA, King K, Sasson NJ (2024) Non-autistic observers both detect and demonstrate the double empathy problem when evaluating interactions between autistic and non-autistic adults. Autism, 28(8), 2053-2065. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613231219743 102 non-autistic adults rated the interaction quality and traits of 42 autistic and 44 non-autistic men interacting in same- or mixed-neurotype pairs. Observers rated mixed interactions as the least successful, evaluated autistic participants more negatively than their conversation partners had, underestimated the trust and intelligence ratings the autistic participants made, and reported less social interest in the participants than the participants reported in each other. Limitation: student observers, male participants only, first meetings between strangers.
Wrong guesses, found in both directions
The Neurodiverse Couples Counseling Center works with couples where one or both partners are autistic, ADHD or AuDHD. In the session on misreads, each of you brings three recent fights and says what you guessed and what was true, in both directions, with a therapist who makes sure neither of you is the only one being corrected. Therapy for clients in California, coaching worldwide, all by telehealth. A first conversation costs nothing.
Up next
Module 16 — Who I Am, in My Own Words