Map-Making In Your Neurodiverse Relationship

Let’s start with a little illustration before we dive into thinking about “mapping” in your neurodiverse relationship.

Picture this: You plug a destination into your GPS app on your phone, like you’ve done dozens of times before. You start your engine and drive down the road, dutifully following each prompt that comes your way.

Turn right here. Take a left there. Go through the next traffic light.

All is going well, until you come upon a scene like this one:

Your GPS tells you to keep going, but obviously, there is no way through the construction zone up ahead of you.

What do you do next? (I mean…after you yell “UGHHHHH!” and mutter a few swear words and move through panic, overwhelm, frustration and…)

Do you:
A) Make your best guess, based on what you’ve learned in the past about how to get around this part of town?
B) Find a kind stranger on the street or phone a friend and ask for help?
Or C) Get mad at yourself and sink into shame because the GPS misdirected you?

The picture above was taken by me just a couple of blocks from my office. The scenario I described above is one I’ve run into many, many times over the past few years (yes, YEARS) our area has been undergoing extensive road construction. I’ve learned I can’t trust my GPS these days, I’ve had to work on finding alternate routes through a combination of guesswork and the accumulation of my navigational experience.

Hopefully you haven’t had cause to practice this scenario as often as I have, but my guess is that when you have, you’ve found it’s most effective to go with A or B. Likely, C sounded a little silly to you — it wasn’t your fault the GPS was wrong, it was the GPS’s fault!

Here’s the thing: this illustration is a metaphor for one of the most important, effective changes you can make in your neurodiverse relationship. The standard “maps” aren’t going to get you where you need to go — in fact, they’ll probably take you to some ugly torn up roads and sketchy back-alley dead ends. You’ll need to hold the “maps” everyone else uses with a lot of skepticism and instead rely on yourself (and your partner’s) lived experiences and guesswork to guide you around the territory of your relationship.

While there’s not a GPS app that literally maps how to be in relationships (sometimes I wish there were!), there are plenty of what we call socially constructed maps that give us a lot of guidance about what to do and what not to do in relationships. These maps come from tv and movies, social media, friends and family, stand up comedy routines, self-help podcasts, and any other place where we encounter commonly held assumptions about how relationships are “supposed” to work.

Without even consenting to this process, many of us end up with parts of these socially constructed maps programmed into us. We buy into the ideas we’ve heard repeated a thousand times, often never questioning them at all, or even when we do question them, we may live by them anyway to avoid the risk of judgment or ridicule from others.

These maps are not necessarily good or bad, but they can be accurate or inaccurate. When we navigate our relationships using commonly held rules and frameworks, we can end up stuck and grumbling in frustration when those maps are inaccurate for our life circumstances (and when your relationship is neurodiverse, because you’re part of a marginalized group the generalized maps are especially likely to be inaccurate for you).

Unfortunately, we often don’t realize that it’s our (socially programmed) map that is wrong. We might erroneously place blame elsewhere — on ourselves, our partners. We may sink into shame and guilt, beat ourselves up, resign to being hopelessly “broken”. We may yell at or criticize our partner, attempt to fix them against their will, push them away. None of this is any fun, it heaps on misery and it in no way gets us any closer to being able to move forward.

So what can we do?

We can learn to recognize when our socially constructed relationship maps are at odds with our on-the-ground reality in neurodiverse relationships. And, we can work within our neurodiverse relationship to build our own maps using guesswork and data from our own lived experiences.

There are two broad types of work that go into the simple-sounding proposition above. The first is concrete data gathering and the second is emotional awareness and growth.

Let’s briefly look at each.

Data Gathering: Data gathering is anything that helps you notice, understand, and catalog interactional patterns and processes in your neurodiverse relationship. This can include learning about neurodiversity (especially your neurotype and your partner’s neurotype), having conversations with your partner where you both attempt to better understand one another’s brains, and seeking neurodiversity-informed support from an objective professional (like a therapist).

You want to try to think like a researcher about your own experiences: what works, what doesn’t, what responses correlate with one another, what patterns emerge. Try to stand outside of your preconceived biases about relationships in general and observe your own, detaching from judgment or assumptions as much as possible.

Emotional Awareness & Growth: Emotional awareness is anything that helps you notice feelings of shame and or blame; emotional growth is developing coping skills that help you let go of shame or blame. These are the feelings that keep us clinging to inaccurate maps (and getting bogged down in road construction) instead of developing our own and moving forward.

Practices like meditation, yoga, self-compassion, and journaling can all be great tools. Making time for self-care (like rest, movement, relaxation) can be important, too. Individual therapy and support groups (especially when neurodiversity-informed) are additional really effective pathways for making these sorts of changes.

Overall, both of these types of work support each other — and both need to involve individual reflection as well as teamwork as a couple. These are tasks that are worth revisiting over and over again as you and your relationship evolve. It takes consistent effort and practice to shift your orientation, but even a little bit of attention here can go a long way to improving your connection and satisfaction in your relationship.

Happy navigating!

If you’d like some help with mapping your own neurodiverse relationship, I’ve got a free mini-workbook process I developed that can be a great resource. For an even deeper dive and more support, mapping is a huge focus of my online weekend workshop for neurodiverse couples.