It’s Not Your Fault, But It Is Your Responsibility: Neurodivergence and Relationships

There is a phrase I find myself coming back to when I think about neurodivergence and relationships: it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility.

I say that carefully, because there is a tension here. I don't want responsibility to become another word for try harder — another way of asking a neurodivergent person to override their needs in order to make life easier for everybody else. That isn't what I mean by responsibility at all.

Understanding neurodivergence can bring enormous relief. If you have spent years wondering why things that other people seem to manage relatively easily require an extraordinary amount of effort from you, discovering that your brain works differently can make sense of a great deal. Perhaps there is finally another explanation for the overwhelm, the forgotten appointments, the need to disappear after a busy day, the difficulty moving from one thing to another, the experience of apparently listening and then realising that your attention has gone somewhere else entirely.

For someone who has spent a lifetime being described as lazy, difficult, oversensitive, selfish or simply not trying hard enough, that understanding really matters. But there is something else that I think we need to be able to talk about, particularly in relationships, because understanding why something happens doesn't necessarily change what it is like to live alongside it.

The Fox Woman

There is an old story, told by my teacher, storyteller Martin Shaw, about a hunter and a Fox Woman.

The hunter has been living alone, and then one day he returns to his hut to discover that a Fox Woman has moved herself in. She brings warmth and companionship and his life becomes immensely richer with her in it.

But she also brings her pelt, the importance of which she makes clear to the hunter. She hangs it on the door of the hut, as all fox women do. In the early days, this is not a problem at all. Yet, over time, the hunter becomes more and more aware of the smell of her pelt. At first he lives with it, but gradually the smell starts to bother him. It gets into the hut, into his clothes, into the bed. He loves Fox Woman, but he doesn't love living with the smell of her pelt.

Eventually he wants it gone. In a moment of anger, he snaps and tells her to get rid of the pelt. Fox Woman leaves with it and she never returns to the hunter, who misses her for the rest of his days.

I'm always slightly reluctant to take an old story and "tell it what it is" psychologically. That said, I keep coming back to this story when I think about couples I work with who are trying to navigate the impact of neurodivergence on their relationship.

If you love a Fox Woman, you cannot reasonably expect her not to have a pelt. And yet, for the hunter, the pelt still smells. I think there is something important in being able to hold both of those things at once.

Perhaps your partner really does forget things because their working memory works differently. Perhaps the noise of family life genuinely overwhelms them. Perhaps, after holding themselves together all day, they really do need an hour when nobody speaks to them. Perhaps something you have interpreted for years as you don't care enough to remember has very little to do with how much they care about you.

Knowing that can change things enormously, but you still live with them. You may still be the person who remembers the appointments. You may be doing bedtime while they recover. You may be the one who notices that the milk has run out or that the school form needs returning or that somebody needs to phone the plumber. You may understand perfectly well why your partner struggles with these things and still find yourself exhausted by the impact of them.

You can love the Fox Woman and you can smell the pelt. I think we get into trouble when either of those realities is allowed to cancel the other one.

If the answer is I love you, but I need you to stop being a fox, then acceptance isn't really acceptance at all. A neurodivergent person shouldn't have to continually override their sensory needs, suppress overwhelm or perform a more convenient version of themselves in order to remain lovable.

But equally, this is just who I am cannot always be the end of the conversation. Not because somebody should be able to try hard enough to stop having ADHD or become less autistic, but because when we share a life with somebody, the ways we are in the world inevitably affect them.

So What Does Responsibility Mean?

I don't think it means try harder. If remembering things is genuinely difficult, telling somebody to remember better is fairly useless. If your nervous system becomes overwhelmed by noise, being told that you shouldn't find noise overwhelming doesn't alter how your nervous system responds to it. If hosting visitors or going to parties is like having an energetic hole in your bucket, then no amount of trying harder is going to change that.

What interests me much more is the question: what can I put around this difficulty so that my partner doesn't always have to become the thing that compensates for it?

That might be a shared calendar or an alarm. It might be simplifying family life. It might be paying for help if you can afford it. It might be recognising that there are some jobs one of you is simply much better suited to than the other and dividing things accordingly. It might involve medication, therapy or coaching. It might simply mean becoming better at noticing I'm nearly at capacity and being able to say that before disappearing or exploding. It might be saying no to visitors or particular social engagements that are not enjoyable.

There isn't one answer because neurodivergent people aren't all the same and neither are relationships. But I keep coming back to the pelt. The answer isn't to get rid of it. I think the question is what happens when we can begin to talk honestly about what it is like for both people to live with it.

When There Is More Than One Pelt in the Hut

This becomes even more complicated when one or both people discover their neurodivergence later in life. There can be something enormously freeing about beginning to recognise how much effort has gone into trying to function in ways that haven't always come naturally. But those adaptations don't necessarily look the same from the outside.

For one person, neurodivergence might show up as difficulty initiating things, forgetting what needs to happen, becoming overwhelmed or relying heavily on their partner to hold parts of everyday life together. For another, it might have contributed to an almost opposite adaptation: becoming extraordinarily responsible, competent or vigilant; anticipating what needs doing, noticing what other people need and pushing themselves beyond their own capacity in order to feel acceptable.

And, of course, those two people might find each other.

Sometimes the ways we have learnt to survive fit together remarkably well, at least for a while. One person forgets and the other remembers. One doesn't notice and the other anticipates. One becomes overwhelmed and retreats while the other steps in and keeps everything moving. Gradually, without either person necessarily choosing it, one person can begin to underfunction while the other overfunctions.

That arrangement may keep a family or relationship going for years. It may even look, from the outside, as though it works. But it can come at an enormous cost to both people.

This is where unmasking can become particularly complicated, because unmasking doesn't necessarily mean the same thing for each person. For some, it may mean allowing themselves to need more rest, more quiet or more space. For others, it may mean something almost opposite: allowing themselves to stop being endlessly capable. To say no. To stop automatically compensating. To discover whether they can have limits and still be acceptable.

If being useful, accommodating or competent has been part of how somebody has learnt to belong, saying no may feel surprisingly vulnerable. If I stop doing all of this, will you still want me? Can I disappoint you and still be loved? Can I have needs and limits of my own without becoming the difficult one?

At exactly the same time, their partner may be beginning to understand why they have struggled with things that have previously been compensated for. Neither person is necessarily becoming more selfish. They may both be becoming more truthful about what things actually cost them.

But that truthfulness can destabilise a relationship. If one person's underfunctioning has been made possible, in part, by the other person's overfunctioning, what happens when the overfunctioning partner stops? And if being competent, useful and endlessly capable has been part of somebody's way of making themselves acceptable, what happens when they discover that they no longer want to pay that price for belonging?

I don't think the answer can be go back to masking. But neither can understanding neurodivergence mean that one person's difficulties or limitations automatically become the other person's responsibility.

Perhaps the question is broader: How do we build a life which takes both of our nervous systems, capacities and limitations seriously, without either of us having to disappear in order to make the relationship work?

I don't think there is a neat answer to that. I think each couple has to find one for themselves.

When It Becomes About More Than the Washing Basket

This is where Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy becomes particularly interesting to me, because after a while couples are rarely fighting simply about the washing basket or the forgotten appointment. They are fighting about what those things have come to mean.

I've asked you three times may contain something much more painful underneath it: I'm exhausted. I feel alone in this. Do you see what I'm carrying? Do I matter enough for you to notice? But what the other person hears may be: You've failed again.

And underneath the defensiveness that follows there may be something equally painful: I am trying so hard and it is still not enough. Perhaps who I actually am will never be enough for you.

So one person pushes harder because they are trying to be seen, while the other retreats or defends themselves because they are trying to protect themselves from feeling inadequate. Of course, the retreat makes the first person feel even more alone, so they push harder still.

Suddenly nobody is talking about milk anymore. They're trying to answer much bigger questions about whether they matter, whether they are acceptable, whether there is room in this relationship for them to be who they are.

And I think this is the place where both things can be true becomes enormously important. Your partner's experience of living with you can be real without being a verdict on who you are, and your neurodivergence can be real without making your partner's experience of its impact somehow illegitimate.

But perhaps there is another layer to this too. The partner who has been remembering, organising, anticipating or keeping things going may also be asking an attachment question of their own: If I stop doing all of this, am I still acceptable to you? Can I say no and still be loved?

Both people may, in very different ways, be wondering whether there is room in the relationship for them to be more fully themselves.

Can We Talk About the Pelt?

I keep coming back to the hunter and the Fox Woman, and wondering what would have happened if there had been another possibility. Not one in which Fox Woman had to hide her pelt in order to remain loved, but not one in which the hunter had to pretend he couldn't smell it either.

Of course, in a relationship between two people, perhaps it is never quite as simple as one person having the pelt and the other having to live with it. We each arrive carrying something. We each have limits, sensitivities and ways of protecting ourselves. We each affect the person with whom we share the hut.

What would it have been like if they could have talked about the pelt? If she could hear the smell affects me without hearing there is something disgusting about you, and if he could hear the pelt is part of me without hearing therefore your experience doesn't matter.

Perhaps the important thing isn't finding somewhere else to hang the pelt at all. Perhaps it is whether they can both remain in the hut, each knowing that their experience matters to the other.

Ultimately, this is what we are trying to do in relationships: not to pretend that our differences don't matter, and not to require the person we love to get rid of the parts of themselves that make life more complicated, but to find ways of living together in which neither person's reality has to disappear.

Your neurodivergence isn't your fault. Your needs and limits are real, and so are your partner's. Neither of you should have to disappear to accommodate the other.

Perhaps responsibility is simply what happens when we begin to care about both.

If this resonates, you might also find these relevant: What Neurodivergent Children Reveal About Adult Regulation and The Third Way: Where Independence and Connection Meet. Or find out more about working together here.