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Module 14 — Your Spiky Profile
Understand why you can shine at one thing and struggle with another.
Watch first: the Module 14 video
A narrated video of about 4 minutes in a flat, silhouette illustration style that opens and closes on the Neurodiverse Couples Counseling Center logo. Bar charts show that cost and strength coexist (sending a text can take more energy than systems architecture), and a wheel gives “Two numbers for every area,” support needed in red and strength in green, contrasting a smooth profile with a spiky one. An “old reading” and “new reading” side by side recast “He is not trying” as a spiky profile.
Watch the Module 14 video: Your Spiky Profile (MP4, about 4 minutes). The written lesson below covers the same ground in full.
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 usually 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 You each name one thing you will do differently. Now that you understand each other’s wheels: one way to treat each other, and one way to treat yourself.
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. 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, so both of you take one, whether one of you is neurodivergent or both are.
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.
A second area, rated the other way round. Routine, red 6: finds sudden change difficult.
Routine, green 9: thrives with routine and predictability.
The same picture as the social area, but this time the strength is the bigger number.
Somebody else might rate routine a nine as a strength and a two for change, because they love their routines and can still drop a plan when it falls through. The wheel lets both exist.
Do this once before the session. Move your cursor over any wedge on the live wheel to see the sentence behind it and the rating you gave it. Go round all sixteen slowly.
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. If reading it aloud is hard, you can share your screen or send the PDF ahead, and take your time before you answer.
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. If you are both neurodivergent, you may both have spiky wheels, with the gaps in different places.
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. The studies 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”
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. That arithmetic works better on a smooth profile. On a spiky one it is often wrong.
This is the sentence many couples come in carrying. The numbers on the wheel stay as they are; 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 your partner not bothering?”
“And which of the green ones do you lean on every week without ever saying so?”
Then the same two questions the other way round. Misreading runs in both directions.
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. The partner who has been waiting on that message has often been lonely, and that is real too.
Step 5. You each name one thing you will do differently
Understanding shows up in what people do. So the session ends with one question for each of you, pointing two ways: toward your partner, and toward yourself. Not a feeling. Something you can do.
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 with the deep red areas has usually been judging themselves the same way for years. Write both answers down. They can go on the page you write about yourself 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.
If this is hard to do. If this is too much right now, there is no need to push through. You can start with one area, both sides. Or spend some time with your partner talking about what makes it hard, and share the feelings that come up: embarrassment at the red side, worry about what your partner will think, or plain tiredness. That conversation is part of the work.
What is the Trait Wheel?
The Trait Wheel is a self-reflection exercise this practice built, with an autism, an ADHD and an AuDHD version. It asks sixteen questions about eight areas of your life and takes about ten minutes. Each area gets a red rating for how much support it needs and a green rating for how much of a strength it is. It is not scored, it has not been tested, and it is not a diagnosis.
Do both of us take a wheel, even if only one of us is neurodivergent?
Yes. The eight areas are the same for everybody, so both partners take a wheel and pick the one that fits, whether one of you is neurodivergent or both are. If you are both neurodivergent, you may both have spiky wheels, with the gaps in different places. In the session, each of you reads your own wheel out loud, one at a time, in your own words.
What if I disagree with my partner's ratings?
Many couples do, and that is real information. The wheel is self-rated, and it stays that way, because a wheel corrected by the other partner has stopped being that person's wheel. Disagreements about the numbers have a session of their own, the next one, so they do not get lost.
Does calling it a spiky profile mean nothing has to change?
No. The reframe is small and it is not a pardon. It does not say a 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. The partner who has been waiting has often been lonely, and that is real too.
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 its numbers are not test scores. How it is used in the session — both partners taking one, reading their own out loud, and the not-trying reframe — comes from clinical practice and has not been tested. 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; it is cited for the term. 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 named focus, memory, creativity and honesty, 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.
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. 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.
Up next
Module 15 — Where You Misread Each Other