Post by Bridgette Hamstead, MS

I want to start somewhere that might surprise you: I'm a fan of John Gottman's work. I have been since graduate school. I met him in person. He invited me to consider applying to work with him as a graduate assistant in Seattle. The methodological rigor he brought to relationship research was genuinely significant, and I don't want to bury that. What I also can't do is pretend that his research serves neurodivergent people well, because it doesn't, and the clinical harm produced by applying it to us without examination has been real and ongoing for decades. The Love Lab studied neurotypical people. It described neurotypical interaction patterns and assigned value to those patterns, and then that value system was used to evaluate all human relationships, including relationships where one or both partners are autistic, ADHD, or AuDHD. The Four Horsemen, the 5:1 ratio, the concept of bids for connection, the entire Sound Relationship House: all of it was built on a neurotypical baseline that was never stated as a baseline because it was never recognized as one. It was just assumed to be how relationships work. When autistic shutdown gets misread as stonewalling by a clinician applying Gottman's framework, the couple receives a clinical intervention calibrated to a dynamic that isn't actually happening. When alexithymia makes the 5:1 positive-to-negative interaction ratio structurally inaccessible, the AuDHD partner gets told their relationship is in danger for reasons that have nothing to do with how they actually feel about each other. These are not edge cases. They're what happens when a framework built on neurotypical norms gets applied to people it was never designed to include. This guide is the structural analysis that the field owes neurodivergent people and hasn't produced. https://lnkd.in/e-xMmQeQ