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Module 14 — Your Spiky Profile
The Trait Wheel exercise, and the session where the two of you read one partner's strengths and challenges together.
Nobody is evenly good or evenly bad at everything, and neurodivergent people are less even than most. This module is about the exercise that draws that shape, the Trait Wheel, and the session where the two of you read it together.
What this is about
Before this session, whichever of you the exercise fits takes it alone. There are three: the Autism Trait Wheel, the ADHD Trait Wheel and the AuDHD Trait Wheel. Each takes five to eight minutes. It asks sixteen questions in eight areas of life. For every area it asks two things: how much of a challenge this is for you, and how much of a strength. You rate both from zero to ten.
What you get back is a wheel with eight spokes, red for the challenge in each area and green for the strength. You can download it as a PDF and send it to your therapist before the session.
A nine next to a two is not a wheel that went wrong; it is the picture the exercise was built to draw.
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 does not tell you whether you are autistic or have ADHD. It puts your own ratings of your own life on one page, so the person you live with can look at it with you. Your therapist says all of that out loud before you take it.
If only one of you takes a wheel. There is no wheel for a partner who is not neurodivergent in the way the wheels ask about. They still have a job in the session, and it is at least as important. They read the other’s wheel and answer two questions about it.
Every area is rated twice, once for what it costs and once for what it gives, so a spoke like focus can sit near ten on the strength ring and near three on the challenge ring.
What happens in the session
The wheel goes on the shared screen, and the person it belongs to reads it first. Not all sixteen numbers, just the tallest spikes and the deepest dips. Your therapist is listening for a description of a day, not a verdict on a person.
The Wheel Session
1 Three spikes and three dips, with a day attached. The person whose wheel it is reads their three highest strengths and three deepest challenges. For each one they name a moment from the last month when it showed. Thrives on routine, nine: I have made the same breakfast for eleven years and it is the best part of my day.
2 The partner’s two questions. The partner who read the wheel says which strength they lean on every week without ever naming it, and which challenge they have been reading as character. That second question is where the labels from last session come back.
3 Every dip, paired with its spike. For each red dip, your therapist asks which green spike it is attached to, and in which room the same trait is the strength. Difficulty shifting attention is a dip at six in the evening and a spike at two in the afternoon.
4 Protect one, support one. One spike the household will protect this week, and one dip it will support. Both go into the working map, the one-page plan the two of you build two sessions from now.
If you did not take a wheel, the two questions are yours, and they are the hardest part of the session.
Assigning the wheel. This one is for you, on your own, before we meet. Rate the challenge and the strength in every area. It is not scored and it does not tell you what you are. It draws a shape, and I want to see your shape.
To the partner reading it. Look at the green side. Which of those do you lean on every week without ever saying so? Say it to him. Now the red side. Which of these have you been reading as character?
Protect one, support one. Which spike is the household going to protect this week? Say it as what will not be interrupted. And which dip gets supported? Say it as what somebody will do, not as what he will try harder at.
The wheel is self-rated, and it stays that way.
The partner reading it will disagree with some of the numbers, sometimes strongly. You are not a nine on emotional attunement. That disagreement is real information, and it belongs in the next session, where the two of you look at where you misread each other. It does not go on the wheel. A wheel corrected by the other partner is that partner’s wheel, and the person it was about has been told, again, that their read of themselves is wrong.
The way this goes wrong. Somebody takes the wheel and rates every challenge a nine and every strength a two. Thirty years of being told what is wrong with them is a lot of training, and the challenge questions are easier to answer. The wheel comes out all red.
Your therapist sends it back, kindly, with one instruction. For every area, name a day in the last year when the green side was true. Not a day when it felt true, but a day when it was. Most people find six of the eight without much trouble, and the two they cannot find are the honest dips.
The last area is the mask. On the autism and AuDHD wheels, burnout from sustained masking is paired with being able to mask on purpose while staying connected to yourself. It is the one pairing where the strength has a cost attached. The question is not whether you can mask; most of the people we work with do it expertly. It is whether the red number has been going up, and whether the household needs to know.
Why we do it this way
The wheel is built on one rule. Look at how the areas are written.
How the areas are paired. Finds sudden change difficult — thrives with routine and predictability.
Has difficulty shifting attention when focused — highly passionate about interests.
Those are not two traits that happen to sit together; they are one trait, seen from the side that costs and the side that pays.
Which side you see depends on the room.
The couples who arrive angriest about the six o’clock version are usually the ones who most depend on the two o’clock version, and the partner’s first question exists to close that gap.
Where the name comes from. The words spiky profile come from research on neurodivergent adults at work: difficulty with planning and organizing set against real strengths in the same person.1 It was never an insult. The unevenness is the information.
The pairing rule has support of its own. When researchers interviewed autistic adults about the advantages of being autistic, the same traits worked as an advantage or a disadvantage depending on the situation.2 And when autistic adults are asked what they are good at, the same list keeps coming back: focus, memory, creativity, honesty.3 The green side of the wheel is there because most people have never been asked.
What the wheel does not measure. People hear spiky profile and picture a test score, brilliant at one thing and poor at another. The largest population study of intelligence in autism looked for that pattern and found only limited evidence of it.4 The spikes on your wheel are your own ratings of your own life, and for a marriage that is the more useful thing.
The session runs in this order because of what thousands of neurodiverse couples have told us. The strength side is the side nobody has ever asked them about, and the partner who lives with them has usually been leaning on it for years without saying so. Once that is said out loud, the challenges are easier to hear as the other side of the same trait.
After the session
Retake it in about six months. Save the PDF where you both can find it, next to the drawing of your family. Not weekly, which would turn it into a scoreboard. Capacity changes, and the red side of the mask area in particular moves with the year you have had. When the two wheels sit side by side, watch the strength ring rather than the challenge ring.
The workbook below is the reading, in writing: the spikes and dips, the partner’s two questions, and the one to protect and the one to support this week.
We start with the spike rather than the dip, because a strength that gets interrupted every evening stops being available to the household.
Both of you have a spike to protect and a dip to support, whether or not a wheel was taken. On this partner the tall one is reading a room and the low one is sustained focus, close to the reverse of the one above.
The one thing, if that is all you have. If the whole wheel is too much this week, answer one area, both sides, and name one 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 the reading of the wheel, in writing, for whichever of you took it and whichever of you read it.
Three spikes, three dips
For whichever of you took a wheel. In your own words, with a day from the last month attached to each.
The wheel you took: — Autism, ADHD, AuDHD, I did not take one - I read my partner's
Your three tallest strengths, each with a day it showed
Your three deepest challenges, each with a day it showed
The partner's two questions
For the partner who read the wheel. The first question is the one people skip.
Which of these strengths do you lean on every week without naming it?
Which of these challenges have you been reading as character - and what was the label?
Protect one, support one
This week. Protect is what will not be interrupted. Support is what somebody will do.
The spike the household will protect, and how
The dip the household will support, and what somebody will do
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 the practice. It has no evidence base of its own: it is not scored, it has never been validated against anything, and the lesson says so before anyone takes it. Its use in the session, the pairing rule and the protect-and-support list are practice moves, developed in use rather than tested. What the research supports is the frame the wheel draws, not the wheel.
The spiky-profile review1 presents no new data. It is cited for the term and for the consensus it describes among researchers of neurodivergence at work. The autistic-advantage study2 is twenty-eight interviews, and its central finding, that the same trait works as an advantage or a disadvantage depending on context, is the pairing rule the wheel is built on. Twenty-eight people cannot say how common any trait is, and the study excluded people with severe intellectual or language impairment.
The workplace-strengths survey3 is sixty-six autistic adults, self-report, predominantly women and from the education sector. It is cited for the list it produced and for how closely that list matches the green side of the wheel. Neither study can say how typical the strengths are.
The population study4 is 156 children aged ten to fourteen, weighted to estimate the whole autistic population of its region. It is the honest brake on the word spiky. 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, which is a further reason not to read the wheel as a cognitive measurement of an adult.
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. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
An uneven shape, read by the person who lives with it
The Neurodiverse Couples Counseling Center works with couples where one or both partners are autistic, ADHD or AuDHD. The wheel session puts one partner's own picture of their strengths and challenges on the screen and asks the other two questions that most couples have never answered. Therapy for clients in California, coaching worldwide, all by telehealth. A first conversation costs nothing.
Up next
Module 15 — Where You Misread Each Other