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Module 14 — Your Spiky Profile

The Trait Wheel gives every area two ratings, not one - and the session where you read each other's shapes and stop reading the gap between two areas as not trying.

The Trait Wheel asks about eight areas of your life and gives each one two ratings, not one: how much support that area needs, and how much of a strength it is. Most people expect those two numbers to be opposites. They are not. You can find almost every social situation costly and still be one of the few people somebody can really talk to. This is the session where both of you put that shape on the table and read it together.

The wheel session

Summary: what happens in the session

1 Both of you take a wheel at home. Sixteen questions, eight areas, two ratings each. It takes about ten minutes.

2 Each of you reads your own wheel out loud. One at a time, the whole thing, in your own words.

3 Where the strengths are, and where the support is needed. Said plainly, for both of you, with the shapes side by side.

4 What each of you has been reading as “not trying”. The gap between two areas, and what it actually means.

5 One thing you do differently. Toward each other, or toward yourself.

Step 1. Two ratings for every area

Before this session you each take a wheel on your own. There are three — the Autism Trait Wheel, the ADHD Trait Wheel and the AuDHD Trait Wheel — and you pick the one that fits. The eight areas are the same for everybody, which is why the partner who is not neurodivergent takes one too.

The two ratings. Each area gets a red one and a green one. Red is how much support that area needs; green is how much of a strength it is. Each one runs from zero to ten, and each wedge on the wheel reaches as far out as the number you gave it.

This is the picture you will actually be looking at. Sixteen wedges, two for each area: the red one is how much support that area needs and the green one is how much of a strength it is, each reaching as far out as the number you gave it.

The two ratings in an area are not a see-saw. A high red does not force a low green, and the space between them is the most useful thing on the page.

Take the first area, social. One question asks how much you struggle to connect in social situations; the other asks how well you build authentic, selective relationships. On the wheel above, that is an eight and a six.

An eight on the red side and a six on the green side is not a person contradicting themselves. It is somebody who finds most social situations costly and who is good at the few relationships that are the real thing.

Nothing there cancels out. The eight says a work party costs a whole evening and most of the next morning. The six says the handful of people who get the real version get something that is hard to find. Both describe the same person on the same Saturday.

A second area, rated the other way round. Routine, red 6: finds sudden change difficult.

Routine, green 9: thrives with routine and predictability.

Here the strength is the big number and the cost is moderate. Somebody else might put a nine on routine as a strength and a two on change being difficult, because they love their routines and can still drop them when a plan falls through. The wheel lets both of those exist. That is the whole reason there are sixteen questions instead of eight.

Do this once before the session. Move your cursor over any wedge on the live wheel and the sentence behind it appears with its rating. Go round all sixteen slowly: sixteen statements about your own life, each one carrying the number you gave it.

What the wheel is, and is not. We built the wheel ourselves. It is not scored, it has never been tested against anything, and it is not a diagnosis. What it does is put your own ratings of your own life on one page so the person you live with can look at it with you.

Step 2. Each of you reads your own wheel

In the session, your therapist asks one of you to share your wheel and walk through it, then the other. Not the extremes only — the whole thing, area by area, in your own words, with a day attached wherever one comes to mind.

Inviting the first wheel. “Take us round it. Eight areas, both numbers, in your own words.”

“Where a number surprised you when you gave it, say so.”

Thrives on routine, nine: I have made the same breakfast for eleven years and it is the best part of my day.

The wheel is self-rated, and it stays that way.

You will disagree with some of your partner’s numbers. You are not a nine on emotional attunement. That is real information and there is a session for it, the next one. A wheel corrected by the other partner has stopped being that person’s wheel.

Step 3. The strengths, the support, and the shape

With both wheels read, your therapist says the plain version out loud for each of you: here is where the strength is, here is where the support is needed. Then the two shapes get compared — not to decide who has the better one, but to look at how far apart each of you is from yourself.

What we mean by spiky. A spiky profile means the distance between a person’s own highest and lowest areas is wide. In the couples we work with, the neurodivergent partner’s wheel usually has both taller peaks and deeper troughs, and the other partner’s sits nearer the middle most of the way round — a smooth wheel and a spiky one.

Both wheels are honest, and neither is the good one. What differs is how far apart a person is from themselves. “Usually” is doing real work in those two labels: this is the pattern we see, not a rule, and plenty of wheels do not follow it.

We should be straight about the status of that idea. It is not a measurement and it has not been settled by research; it is a pattern we keep seeing in the couples who come to us, and we find it useful enough to build a session on. If you want the studies and what they do and do not show, they are at the foot of this page.

Spiky is not better or worse at life. It is further apart, inside one person.

Step 4. What you have been reading as “not trying”

Now the part of this session that changes the week. When somebody is visibly excellent in one area and visibly stuck in another, the person living with them does the arithmetic everybody does: he can clearly do hard things, so this one must be a choice. On a smooth profile that arithmetic is often right. On a spiky one it is wrong almost every time.

This is the sentence most couples come in carrying, and it is the one the wheel is best at. Nobody argues with the numbers; what changes is what the distance between two of them is taken to mean.

The question this session is really for. “Looking at your partner’s wheel: which of those red areas have you been reading as him not bothering?”

“And which of the green ones do you lean on every week without ever saying so?”

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.

The first question asks one of you to say out loud what you have been thinking about the other. Either of you can stop it there.

The reframe is small and it is not a pardon. It does not say the missed message did not matter or that nothing has to change. It says the gap between a ten and a two in the same person is a fact about how that brain is built, not a message about how much you are worth to them.

Step 5. One thing you do differently

The session ends with one question each, and it points two ways on purpose.

The closing question. “Now you have seen this, is there one way you want to treat each other differently?”

“And is there one way you want to treat yourself differently?”

The second half catches people off guard, and it is often the one that lands. The person whose wheel has the deep red areas has usually been running the same arithmetic on themselves for years, and for a good deal longer than their partner has. Write both answers down. They go into the working map you build two sessions from now.

After the session

Keep the PDFs and retake in about six months. Not weekly, which turns the wheel into a scoreboard. Capacity moves with the year you have had. When two of your own wheels sit side by side, look at the green ring first.

The word that tends to survive the week is not spiky. It is the pause before somebody says you could have, when they remember which area they are standing in.

The one thing, if that is all you have. If the whole wheel is too much this week, do one area, both sides, and name a day in the last month when each side was true.

Your workbook

Your answers save to this device only - we cannot see a word of what you write. This one is your own wheel in writing, the gap you have been misreading, and the one thing each of you does differently.

Your own wheel

Both of you fill this in. Two numbers per area is the point; they do not have to be opposites.

The wheel you took: — Autism, ADHD, AuDHD

Your two highest green areas, and a day in the last month when each one showed

Your two highest red areas, and what support in each would actually look like

The one rating that surprised you as you gave it

The gap you have been reading as "not trying"

For each of you, about the other. This is the one that changes the week.

Which of your partner's red areas have you been reading as a choice - and what have you been calling it?

Which of your partner's green areas do you lean on every week without ever saying so?

One thing you do differently

Two answers. The second one is the one people skip.

One way you want to treat each other differently

One way you want to treat yourself differently

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 Trait Wheel is a self-reflection exercise built by this practice. It has no evidence base of its own: it is not scored, it has never been validated against anything, and no number on it means what a test score would mean. How it is used in the session — both partners taking one, reading their own out loud, and the not-trying reframe — is a practice move developed in use rather than tested. The lesson carries no citations on purpose. None of the four studies below is evidence for the wheel; they are the honest limits of the idea behind it.

The term spiky profile comes from a review of neurodivergence at work: difficulty with something like planning set against real strength in the same person.¹ That review presents no new data and is cited for the term and for the consensus it reports among researchers in that field. It is not a finding that neurodivergent profiles are measurably spikier than neurotypical ones. That claim, as the lesson says, is ours from practice.

The strongest brake on the word is a population study of 156 autistic children aged ten to fourteen, weighted to estimate the whole autistic population of one English region.² It found some evidence of a gap between verbal and performance scores, no link between that gap and any pattern of traits, and only limited evidence of a distinctive IQ profile. It is a study of children and of IQ, which is two further reasons not to read the wheel as a measurement of an adult’s cognition.

What the research does support is the pairing the wheel is built on. In twenty-eight interviews with autistic adults about the advantages of being autistic, the same trait counted as an advantage or a disadvantage depending on the situation.³ A survey of sixty-six autistic adults about strengths at work produced a list — focus, memory, creativity, honesty — that sits very close to the green side of the wheel.⁴ Neither can say how common any of it is. Both samples were self-selected, predominantly white and highly educated, and the first excluded people with severe intellectual or language impairment.

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.

Peer-reviewed research

1. Doyle N (2020) Neurodiversity at work: A biopsychosocial model and the impact on working adults. British Medical Bulletin, 135(1), 108-125. https://doi.org/10.1093/bmb/ldaa021 Narrative review with no new data. Describes a consensus that some conditions are neurominorities with a spiky profile of executive-function difficulties set against neurocognitive strengths as a defining characteristic, and recommends multidisciplinary work within a biopsychosocial model. Limitation: a review covering four conditions, presenting no data of its own; cited for the term and the framing.

2. Charman T, Pickles A, Simonoff E, Chandler S, Loucas T, Baird G (2011) IQ in children with autism spectrum disorders: Data from the Special Needs and Autism Project (SNAP). Psychological Medicine, 41(3), 619-627. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291710000991 Population-based study of 156 children aged 10 to 14 with an autism spectrum diagnosis, weighted to estimate the whole population. An estimated 55 percent had intellectual disability, 28 percent average intelligence and 3 percent above-average IQ; there was some evidence of a clinically significant performance-verbal discrepancy, which did not associate with any symptom pattern, and only limited evidence of a distinctive IQ profile. Limitation: children, not adults, in one English region; cited here for what it did not find.

3. Russell G, Kapp SK, Elliott D, Elphick C, Gwernan-Jones R, Owens C (2019) Mapping the autistic advantage from the accounts of adults diagnosed with autism: A qualitative study. Autism in Adulthood, 1(2), 124-133. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2018.0035 28 semi-structured interviews with autistic adults, sampled for maximum variation in support needs, analyzed by content and thematic analysis in two stages. The traits most often cited as advantages were hyperfocus, attention to detail, memory and creativity, with honesty, loyalty and empathy for animals and other autistic people on the social side; traits functioned as advantageous or disadvantageous depending on social context, controllability and extent of expression, and the authors suggest strengths and weaknesses may be a false dichotomy. Limitation: a qualitative study that excluded people with severe intellectual or language impairment; it cannot say how common any trait is.

4. Cope R, Remington A (2022) The strengths and abilities of autistic people in the workplace. Autism in Adulthood, 4(1), 22-31. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2021.0037 Online questionnaire completed by 66 autistic adults about their employment-related strengths, analyzed thematically. Reported strengths included cognitive advantages such as creativity, focus and memory; efficiency and personal qualities such as honesty and dedication; and the ability to offer a unique autism-specific perspective. Limitation: self-report by people able to complete an online questionnaire, in a sample that was predominantly female and from the education sector.

Two numbers for every area, read by the person who lives with you

The Neurodiverse Couples Counseling Center works with couples where one or both partners are autistic, ADHD or AuDHD. The wheel session puts both of your shapes on the table, names where the strengths and the support are, and takes apart the reading that does the most damage - that a gap between two areas means somebody is not trying. Therapy for clients in California, coaching worldwide, all by telehealth. A first conversation costs nothing.

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