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Module 10 — Your Childhood Wound
Three questions about back then, the same three about now, your partner saying each set back, one thing you need this week, and the wound of not being understood.
The second and third sessions go somewhere most couples do not expect: the house each of you grew up in. Not to find someone to blame, but 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.
The thing you needed and did not get
Summary: what happens in the session
1 Your worksheets come back, and one of you goes first. You are told in advance whose turn it is, and there is a full session between the two turns.
2 The strengths and weaknesses of the people who raised you. You go through that page with your therapist, in your own words.
3 You turn your chairs to each other and answer three questions. What you needed and did not get, how you felt, how you coped. Your partner gives those same three back, and stops.
4 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.
5 What you need from your partner today. One thing, small enough to happen before next week. It gets written down.
6 Your therapist names the wound that runs under many neurodivergent childhoods. Not being understood, and not being accepted. If that is nearer yours than anything on the page, it belongs in the room.
Step 1. Your worksheets, and whose turn it is
After the first session, two sets of Family of Origin worksheets go out, one to each of you. They cover your childhood up to eighteen and can be draining, so give yourself real time. Try to send them back an hour ahead, so your therapist has read them.
One of you per session. You are both told in advance who goes first, and there is a full session between the two turns. Doing both in one hour tends to become a contest over whose childhood was worse.
For the first part of the session you are talking to your therapist rather than to each other, with your family drawing on the shared screen.
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. The parents or caregivers page
The first page asks about the people who raised you: your parents, or whoever that was. Their strengths in one column, their weaknesses in the other. You go through it with your therapist, out loud.
An absence is hard to describe cold. Asked straight out what you most needed and did not get, most people go quiet. Asked it just after saying critical, anxious, never satisfied about a parent, the answer usually arrives within seconds. 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 next page answerable.
The page never asks what you missed. The missing thing turns up in the space between the two columns.
Step 3. Turning your chairs, and three questions about back then
Your therapist now asks you both to turn your chairs away from the screen and toward each other.
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 turn back to me, I will go quiet and look across at them. I am saying that now so the silence does not read as disapproval.
A frightened person talks to the safest person in the room. On a video call, that is whoever is not in it.
Then the wound row. Your therapist asks three things, in this order, and does not hurry the middle one.
The three, about back then. What did you most need from them, and not get?
How did you feel?
How did you cope?
Asking the wound. Looking at those two columns. Say all three to your partner, not to me, and take the middle one as slowly as you need.
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.
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, and that is fine. Saying them does not lose your turn. It moves it.
Then your partner says all three 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. The job is narrower than that.
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, if you mean it.
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.
Each one comes by reflex, and each one moves the conversation off the person who just spoke.
Asking whether it landed. That was for you, not for me. Did it land the way you meant it, or did the words arrive without the weight?
Three ways it goes wrong, and none of them ends the work. It comes back flat: a partner who does not easily find feelings may be doing this right and sounding wrong, and your therapist will say so. It does not come, and they read it back off the page. Or it comes with an edge, and the exercise stops for the day.
Step 4. The same three about now
The way you learned to cope as a child is still running in your marriage today.
So your therapist asks the same three again, in the present tense. Most couples find the coping has not changed at all, and that saying so out loud is the first time either of them has seen its shape.
The three, about now. How is that showing up in your relationship now?
How do you feel?
How do you cope?
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.
Step 5. What you need from your partner today
The last question is in the present tense. Not what that child needed: what you need from the person opposite you, this week. Not a feeling — a thing, at a time.
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 injuries with someone close, saying the unmet need out loud to that person was one of two things that resolved it.3 Here that person is your partner.
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. Could you make it that size?
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.
Step 6. The wound of not being understood
Before the session ends, your therapist names something that does not always arrive on its own. 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.
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 that is nearer your wound than anything on the page, it belongs here.
Naming it. For a lot of people wired the way you are, the wound is not one thing that happened. It is years of not being understood. If that is closer to yours, say that to her, in your own words.
Said to a therapist, it is useful information. Said to your partner, and given back, it is where this session does the most good.
After the session
The request was the point. Next week your therapist brings it back and asks how many times it actually happened. A request nobody follows 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 parents or caregivers page and one wound row, and bring it. We would ask you to hold off on running 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 thing you need this week, small enough to happen on a Thursday.
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
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 one-in-two figure is a meta-analysis of fifteen studies and is as solid as this literature gets.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 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.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.
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