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Module 10 — Your Childhood Wound
One of you names the thing you needed as a child and did not get, and turns it into a request to your partner for this week.
The second and third sessions go somewhere most couples do not expect: the house each of you grew up in. The point is not to find someone to blame. It is to find the thing you most needed and did not get, say it to your partner, and turn it into something they can do this week.
What this is about
After the first session, two sets of Family of Origin worksheets go out, one to each of you. They ask about your childhood up to eighteen. They can be draining, so give yourself real time. Send them back at least an hour before the next session, so your therapist has read them.
One of you per session. Sessions two and three are about your family. You are both told in advance who goes first, so nobody spends the week wondering whether their childhood counts. There is a full session between the two turns, on purpose. Doing both in one hour turns into a contest over whose childhood was worse.
The way you learned to cope as a child is still running in your marriage today.
The past is not the point. The session finds that old way of coping, names it to your partner, and gives them one concrete thing to do about it this week.
Watch
Family of Origin and Neurodiversity, for clients
Harry Motro, PsyD, LMFT
Harry walks through what the worksheets are for and how to approach them. Watch it before you open them.
What happens in the session
The session opens with the drawing of your family on a shared screen, the one the module before this one, Drawing the Family, walks through. Then one of you is the focus for the rest of the hour. The wound row on your worksheet has five columns, and you say them, in order, to your partner and not to us. Your partner’s job is to listen, and then to answer in a very specific way.
Most couples expect to spend the hour telling the therapist about each other; here the chairs face each other, so what is said lands on the person it is about.
The Wound Session
1 The caregivers’ page, and the permission line. Your therapist goes through the strengths and weaknesses you circled. Before that, they say the permission line, which is in the box below, so the page is safe to answer.
2 Turn to each other: the wound, the feeling, the coping. You tell your partner what you most needed and did not get, what you felt as a child, and what you did about it. Then the same three today: when that feeling shows up between the two of you, and whether you still cope the same way.
3 What the child needed, and one request for this week. What that child needed to hear, in the past tense. Then one thing your partner could do this week. Not a feeling. A thing. You can write it on Sunday and read it out on Tuesday.
4 Your partner says it back in four sentences, and stops. The four sentences are on the screen in front of them. They say them, and then nothing else. Your therapist asks you, the one who spoke, whether it landed the way you meant it.
If any part of this is too much on the day, it shortens or stops. The magic words from the first session, I feel uncomfortable, apply here as much as anywhere.
Before the page. Pointing at your parents’ weaknesses does not make them bad parents, and it does not make you disrespectful. It makes the next page answerable.
When the request is too big. “Be more supportive” is not something anyone can do on Thursday. “Notice when I get something wrong and say it is all right” is. Can you make it that size?
To the listener, before they speak. Four sentences, and they are on the screen. Say it back. Say how old she was. Say what it cost her. Say thank you. Then stop, even if it feels unfinished.
Your therapist speaks up only to stop something: a fix arriving too early, a request that has become a complaint, or a reflection with an edge.
Tell your partner, not me
A frightened person talks to the safest person in the room, and that is your therapist. So the drift toward them is constant. When you turn to them mid-sentence, they will not answer. They will say tell him, and look at your partner. They warn you first that they are about to go quiet, because silence without warning reads as disapproval.
Three things make this easier. “Turn to each other” does not mean hold a gaze; glances are fine, and looking away is fine. The feeling comes from a menu, offered to both of you: hurt, ashamed, frightened, lonely, worthless, angry, invisible. A body report counts too: something went tight in my chest. And the request can be written in advance and read aloud.
The listening partner’s job
The instinct that ruins this is the instinct to help.
A partner who hears that his wife needed somebody to tell her it was all right to get things wrong will reach for well, you have me now. It lands as a correction. It tells her the feeling should stop.
So the listener gets four sentences in advance, on the screen. They have to be accurate, and then stay put.
The four sentences. What you needed was for somebody to tell you it was all right to get things wrong.
And you were eight.
That sounds lonely.
Thank you for telling me.
A fix, a defense of the parent, a diagnosis or a story from your own childhood all come by reflex, and each one moves the conversation off the person who just spoke.
Three ways it goes wrong, and none of them ends the work. It comes back flat: a partner who cannot easily find feelings may be doing this correctly and sounding wrong, and your therapist will say so. It does not come at all, and they read the sentences instead. Or it comes back with an edge, and the exercise stops there for the day. Your therapist takes that seriously, and does not try to repair it in front of you.
The way this goes wrong. Sometimes the wound is the partner. What you needed then, somebody to notice when you were struggling, is exactly what the person opposite you does not do now. The request cannot be answered, because the thing you are asking for is the thing that is already missing between you. Your therapist will not run that as a request. They will name it and take it as its own piece of work.
Why we do it this way
Why the caregivers’ page comes first. Nobody can describe an absence in the abstract. Ask a person cold what they most needed as a child and did not get, and you usually get silence or a slogan. Ask the same person after they have just written critical, anxious, never satisfied next to a parent’s name, and they can tell you within seconds. The strengths column keeps it from turning into a prosecution.
The page never asks what you missed; it asks who your caregivers were, and the missing thing shows up next to the list.
Why the request. A history that stops at the feeling is moving, but it gives nobody anything to do this week. One study looked closely at what resolves an old injury with a parent. Saying the unmet need out loud to the other person was one of the two things that moved it.1 Here the other person is your partner, and the need gets a request attached to it.
The feeling step is the hardest one for many of the people we work with. About half of autistic adults find it hard to identify and describe their own emotions.2 Half is not everyone, so the menu is offered to both of you and assumed of nobody.
A menu is not a lowered standard. Giving people the words measurably improves how finely they can tell one feeling from another.3 So the list comes before the question, not after.
Why say it to each other and not to us? Said to us, it is a good conversation with a spectator in it. Said to your partner, it is intimacy: choosing to show something tender from childhood and having it met with love and understanding.
After the session
The request was the point. Next week your therapist brings it back: last time you asked him to notice when you get something wrong and say it is all right. How many times did that happen? A request that is never followed up teaches a couple that the session was the thing. The workbook below has a place to count.
If it feels safe, and only then, the partner who listened can ask during the week about what they heard.
If you have not started therapy yet. Fill in the caregivers’ page and one wound row, all five columns, and bring it. Do not try to run the session at home until you have done it once with your therapist. The listening half is harder than it reads.
The one thing, if that is all you have. One wound row, not four. One request, small enough to do on a Thursday. If even that is too much this week, tell your therapist and the turn moves. It does not disappear.
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 where that same way of coping still runs between the two of you today
What that child needed to hear, in the past tense
One request to your partner for this week: a thing they could actually do, at a time. Write it here so you can read it in the room.
For the listener, and for afterward
The four sentences are the whole job. Fill in the last question during the week, not in the room.
If you are the one listening: which of the four will be hardest for you? — Say it back, Say its age, Say the cost, Say thank you, 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
The request: how many times did it happen this week? — Not yet, Once, Two or three times, More than that, We have not got to the request yet
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 strongest single warrant for the request step is small: twenty-six clients, in individual therapy, working with an empty chair rather than a partner.1 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.
The one-in-two figure is a meta-analysis of fifteen studies and is as solid as this literature gets.2 The caution is the one the lesson makes: half of autistic participants did not meet the threshold, and alexithymia is not autism. So the ramps are 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.3 It supports the principle that vocabulary changes what people can tell apart. It does not test the menu as we use it.
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. 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.
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. 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.
3. 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.
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