Given that I specialize in working with neurodivergent people and their loved ones, I often come across situations where a client is in a relationship with someone of a different neurotype, which is a common source of conflict, communication problems, and distress. I’ve also experienced this personally, as an autistic person who has had an active romantic life for 40 years and has been married twice. Autistic people, ADHDers, and neurotypical folks communicate and relate in very different ways, with very different expectations. Dr. Damian Milton pinpointed the core issue in his “double empathy problem” concept, introduced in 2012, which at its core can be summarized thusly: people of the same neurotype (autistic to autistic, ADHD to ADHD, neurotypical to neurotypical) generally communicate and understand one another quite well. It’s when we cross neurotypes (autistic to ADHD, for example) that we run into problems. It isn’t, as conventional “wisdom” might tell us, that autistic people have poor social skills or don’t know how to communicate. It’s that our patterns and expectations and interpretations and modes of communicating are just different. From a neurotypical normative perspective, that’s viewed as a “deficit” or “deficiency.” But watch autistics interact with each other, and you’ll see we generally do just fine.

Ask an autistic like me to communicate with an ADHDer, however, and hoo boy, do we have problems. Before I’ve even begun to formulate my thought, they’re on to the next topic, and their constant interruptions (as their brains are exploding with ideas and associations and new topics) feel to me like repeated train derailments. And to the ADHDer, my droning on and on about all the nuances of a topic they (believe they) got within the first 15 seconds after I started speaking sound like the Peanuts teacher, and all they hear is “wah wah wah.”