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Module 10 — Your Childhood Wound
Learn to care for the hurt your partner carried out of childhood, and let them care for yours.
Watch first: the Module 10 video
A narrated video of about four minutes in a paper-craft style that closes on the Neurodiverse Couples Counseling Center logo. It traces a line from “Childhood Home” to “Present Day,” with a couple in a video-call session, an “Emotional Menu” of feeling words such as “Hurt” and “Lonely,” “The Neurodivergent Wound” as a gradual accumulation, workbook prompts, and a diagram that turns the “Childhood Wound” into an “Actionable Request.”
Watch the Module 10 video: Your Childhood Wound (MP4, about 4 minutes). The written lesson below covers the same ground in full.
Once your family has been drawn, the work goes somewhere most couples do not expect: back into the house you grew up in. Not to find someone to blame, but to find the wound you carried out of it, say it to your partner, and turn it into something they can do this week.
The thing you needed and did not get
Summary: what usually happens in the session
1 Often in the same session as your family drawing. One of you at a time. If the drawing takes the hour, or you want a slower pace, this gets a session of its own.
2 Finding the wounds. With your therapist: the strengths and weaknesses of the people who raised you, then the wound page behind it. What you needed and did not get, how you felt, how you coped.
3 The wounds of a neurodivergent childhood. Your therapist adds that layer: not being understood, and not being accepted. If that is nearer yours than anything on the page, it belongs in the room.
4 Sharing the wounds with your partner. You turn your chairs to each other and tell them. Your partner gives it back, and stops.
5 The same three about now, and your partner says those back too. How it shows up between the two of you today, how you feel, how you cope.
6 What you need from your partner today. One thing, small enough to happen before next week. It gets written down.
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. Often in the same session as your family drawing
This works from your Family of Origin worksheets and the drawing from Drawing the Family. It most often happens in the same session as the drawing, or in a session of its own if the drawing takes longer or you want a slower pace.
Step 2. Finding the wounds
Two worksheet pages go together here, and you go through both with your therapist, out loud. The first asks about the people who raised you: your parents, or whoever that was, with their strengths in one column and their weaknesses in the other. Right behind it is the wound page.
It can be hard to see your own wounds. Asked straight out what hurt you as a child, many people go quiet. Looked at alongside a parent’s strengths and weaknesses, the wounds come into view, and they are often more than something missing. Just after saying critical, anxious, never satisfied about a parent, most people can say what was done to them, as well as what they did not get. The strengths column keeps the page from turning into a prosecution.
Before the page. Pointing at your parents’ weaknesses does not make them bad parents, and it does not make you disrespectful. It makes the wound page answerable.
Both columns are filled in with the same care.
For the wound page, your therapist asks you to think of yourself as a child, at the age when it was hardest, and to answer as that child: the eight-year-old boy, or the ten-year-old girl. Then three things, in this order.
The three, about back then. What did you most need from them, and not get?
How did you feel?
How did you cope?
The feeling comes from a menu. It is the hardest of the three for many of the people we work with. About half of autistic adults find it hard to identify and describe their own emotions.1 Half is not everyone, so the menu is offered to both of you and assumed of nobody: hurt, ashamed, frightened, lonely, worthless, angry, invisible. A body report counts too: something went tight in my chest. Having the words improves how finely people can tell one feeling from another,2 so the list comes first.
If something is not safe to say yet. If what comes up includes abuse, or anything you are not ready to say in front of your partner, you can tell your therapist on your own first. If you do not feel safe with your partner now, this session waits.
Step 3. The wounds of a neurodivergent childhood
Next, your therapist adds the neurodivergent layer, and invites you to consider a kind of wound that is easy to miss. For many autistic and ADHD people the wound is not one event but an accumulation: corrected, managed, told to stop, asked to explain yourself again. Not being understood, and not being accepted.
How that difference got treated can carry the weight of a trauma, even where nothing happened that anyone would call one.
It is easy to discount for that exact reason. A childhood with no terrible day in it can still leave somebody sure that who they are is a problem to be managed. If you were diagnosed as an adult, it can include the years when nobody had a word for what was different.
Naming it. If years of not being understood are closer to your wound than anything on the page, that goes into what you tell your partner next.
Step 4. Sharing the wounds with your partner
Turning the chairs. Could you both turn your chairs so you are facing each other rather than me? From here on, tell your partner. If you find yourself turning back to me, I will gently invite you to bring your attention back to them.
A frightened person talks to the safest person in the room. Here, that is the therapist on the screen.
Sharing the wound. Think of yourself at the age when it was hardest. Answering as that child, tell your partner all three, and the part about not being understood if it is yours.
Said to a therapist, a wound is useful information. Said to your partner, and given back, it is where this session does the most good.
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.
This is the session where the words get used most. Saying them does not cost you your turn.
Then your partner says it all back. The instinct that makes this hard is the instinct to help.
The listener will want to say well, you have me now. It lands as a correction: the feeling should stop. It is fine to jot the three down, and to take a moment before you speak.
To the listener, before they speak. Give her those three back, in her words. Then stop, even if it feels unfinished. A thank you is a good place to stop.
The three, given back. What you needed was somebody to tell you it was all right to get things wrong.
It left you feeling small, and careful about everything.
And you got through it by not trying things you might fail at.
The four “don’ts” come by reflex, and will not provide the healing that is needed at the moment.
Asking the listener whether it landed. That was for you. What did it feel like for you to hear that?
Step 5. The same three about now
The way you learned to cope as a child is often still running in your relationship today.
So your therapist asks the same three again, about now. For many couples the coping has hardly changed, and this is the first time either of them has seen it clearly.
The three, about now. How is that showing up in your relationship now?
How do you feel?
How do you cope?
The same three questions, asked about then and about now.
The three, today. Now the same three, about the two of you. Same order, same rule: say them to him. Then, to you, all three back.
If you are listening and hear yourself in the answer, it is not a verdict on you. It is an old feeling meeting something ordinary.
Step 6. What you need from your partner today
Not what that child needed: what you need from the person opposite you, this week. A thing, at a time, not a feeling.
The last question. So what do you need from him today? Not back then. Today, and small enough that it could happen before I see you again.
Why it ends here. A history that stops at the feeling gives nobody anything to do this week. In one study of old hurts with someone close, saying the unmet need to an empty chair standing in for that person went with resolving it.3 Here your partner is really there.
When the request is too general. “Be more supportive” is not something anyone can do on Thursday. “Notice when I get something wrong and say it is all right” is.
The way this goes wrong. Sometimes the wound is the partner: what you needed then, somebody to notice when you were struggling, is what the person opposite you does not do now. The request has nowhere to land. Your therapist names that instead, and takes it as its own piece of work.
After the session
The request was the point. Next week your therapist brings it back and asks about a time you saw your partner’s childhood wound show up, and were able to respond the way they asked. The workbook below has a place to write it down.
If the partner who shared says it is welcome, the partner who listened can ask about it during the week.
If you have not started therapy yet. Fill in the parents or caregivers page and one wound row, and bring it. We suggest doing the session once with your therapist before trying it at home; the listening half is harder than it reads.
If this is hard to do. If the worksheets are hard to face this week, there is no need to push through them. Spend some time with your partner talking about what makes it hard, and share the feelings that come up when you talk about your family. That conversation is part of the work.
What if I can't name what I felt as a child?
For many people that is the hardest of the three questions. Your therapist offers a feelings menu to both of you: hurt, ashamed, frightened, lonely, worthless, angry, invisible. A body report counts too, like something going tight in your chest. Many autistic adults find it hard to identify their own emotions, so the words come first, and nobody is assumed to need them.
My childhood had no terrible event in it. Can being autistic or ADHD still leave a wound?
It can. For many autistic and ADHD people the wound is not one event but an accumulation: being corrected, managed, told to stop, asked to explain yourself again. Not being understood and not being accepted can carry the weight of a trauma, even where nothing happened that anyone would call one. If you were diagnosed as an adult, it can include the years when nobody had a word for what was different.
What should I say when my partner tells me their childhood wound?
Your therapist may invite you to give the three things back in your partner's own words, then stop, even if it feels unfinished. A thank you is a good place to stop. The instinct to help, such as saying "well, you have me now", can land as a correction that the feeling should stop. It is fine to jot the three down and take a moment before you speak.
What if something from my childhood is not safe to say in front of my partner?
If what comes up includes abuse, or anything you are not ready to say in front of your partner, you can tell your therapist on your own first. If you do not feel safe with your partner now, this session waits. You can contact your therapist on your own to say so, and the work can go from there.
Your workbook
Your answers save to this device only - we cannot see a word of what you write. The sharing partner fills in the middle group before the session; the listening partner fills in the third.
Whose turn
Both of you fill this in. The order is agreed in advance so nobody spends the week wondering whether their childhood counts.
This week I am: — The one sharing, The one listening, Not agreed yet
One wound row, for the partner sharing
Pick one, not four. The request is the column that matters, and it is allowed to be small.
What you most needed as a child and did not get
What you felt as a child, in one or two words. Hurt, ashamed, frightened, lonely, worthless, angry, invisible, or your own word
How you coped then, and how you cope now, when that same feeling shows up between the two of you
What that child needed to hear, in the past tense
What you need from your partner today: a thing they could actually do this week, at a time. Write it here so you can read it in the room.
For the listener, and for afterward
Giving the three back is the whole job, and you do it twice. Fill in the last question during the week, not in the room.
If you are the one listening: which of the three will be hardest to give back? — The wound, The feeling, The coping, None of them - stopping afterward will be
If you were the one sharing: did the reflection land the way you meant it? — Yes, Mostly, The words yes, the weight no, No, Not my turn yet
Was there a time this week when you saw your partner's childhood wound show up, and were able to respond the way they asked you to? Describe it.
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 protocol in this module is the practice’s own. It comes from what thousands of neurodiverse couples have told us about the sessions where the old way of coping finally got named. It has not been tested in a trial, and neither has any couples protocol for this population. What the research can do is support the individual moves.
The one-in-two figure pools fifteen studies.1 The caution is the one the lesson makes: half of autistic participants did not meet the threshold, and alexithymia is not autism. So the feelings menu is offered to everyone and assumed of no one. The vocabulary study is a laboratory intervention with a general sample, not a trial of feelings menus in couples therapy.2 It supports the principle that vocabulary changes what people can tell apart. It does not test the menu as we use it.
The strongest single warrant for the request step is small: twenty-six clients, in individual therapy, working with an empty chair rather than a partner.3 Expressing the unmet need to the other, and shifting one’s view of them, went with resolution, and did so more strongly than the working alliance did. It does not show that doing this with a spouse present produces the same thing. We think it transfers; we cannot show you that it does.
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.
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. 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. 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. Also the source of the caution that about half do not meet the threshold.
2. Vedernikova E, Kuppens P, Erbas Y (2021) From knowledge to differentiation: Increasing emotion knowledge through an intervention increases negative emotion differentiation. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 703757. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.703757 120 participants randomized to an emotion-knowledge training or a control condition, with negative emotion differentiation measured before, after and at follow-up using a scenario rating task. Differentiation increased in the trained group and not in the control group. Limitation: a laboratory intervention with a general, non-clinical sample, and no effect size is stated in the abstract. It supports the principle behind a feelings menu; it does not test a feelings menu in couples therapy.
3. Greenberg LS, Malcolm W (2002) Resolving unfinished business: Relating process to outcome. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 70(2), 406-416. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.70.2.406 26 clients in individual emotion-focused therapy working on unresolved feelings toward a significant other, using empty-chair dialogue. Clients who expressed the previously unmet need to the other, and shifted their view of the other, showed better outcomes, and the presence of that resolution process predicted outcome better than the working alliance did. Limitation: twenty-six people, individual therapy, an empty chair rather than a present partner. It supports the request step as a mechanism; it is not a test of running it with a spouse in the room.
Sessions two and three are where most couples first feel it move
The Neurodiverse Couples Counseling Center works with couples where one or both partners are autistic, ADHD or AuDHD. The family-of-origin sessions are run as this module describes: one partner at a time, said to each other, with a feelings menu and a written request. Therapy for clients in California, coaching worldwide, all by telehealth. A first conversation costs nothing.
Up next
Module 11 — The Family You Grew Up In Was Neurodiverse Too