Loving Someone Who Is Neurodivergent

You can love someone deeply, sympathize with their challenges, and still struggle with the realities of their neurodivergence. Knowing how hard your child works to get through the day can make it hard to admit how much supporting them demands of you. Others want to offer a partner grace without giving up on their own needs. Neurodivergence can help explain some of these experiences, but this stuff is complicated. The diagnosis doesn't come with a relational playbook.

What is reasonable to expect of your loved one? How can you communicate your needs when you're worried about the impact of your words? How do you support someone you love without organizing your entire life around their challenges?

Your needs matter too

If you’re used to organizing your life around someone else’s struggles, it's important to remember that your needs matter too. You may be skilled at anticipating what will overwhelm your loved one, choosing when to raise a concern, or putting off something you want for yourself.

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Over time, you may stop asking for what you need altogether.

Having fewer arguments may feel like a relief, but it can also be a sign of the growing distance between you. You may be neurodivergent yourself and sympathize with your partner’s experience, but that doesn’t mean you have the same needs, or that you have infinite capacity to support them.

Parenting a neurodivergent child

As a parent, I know firsthand that making decisions about how to raise a child can expose tensions between partners. We often spend so much time advocating for our child’s needs that there's no space left to attend to our own. Recognizing our own struggles in a child may make us more compassionate, but it can also bring up grief and shame about what we had to go through.

When much of your time together involves reminders, corrections, or arguments, you can lose touch with what you enjoy about one another. You may miss laughter, affection, curiosity, or the freedom to do something spontaneous and fun.

How therapy can help

I help individuals, couples, and families understand the experiences behind recurring conflict and share what those experiences have cost them. We can work on hearing someone’s hurt without immediately defending ourselves, expressing a need without withdrawing it at the first sign of a reaction, and making achievable commitments to one another.

If your loved one isn't ready to participate, or you are unsure about the future of your relationship, you can seek support on your own. We can make room to consider what you want, what you can offer, and what is no longer working for you.