Additional information
by Katherine Sullivan (Author)
The Couple's Guide to Neurodivergent Parenting is the first book written specifically for couples raising a neurodivergent children - the book that finally asks what this experience does to the relationship, and gives you real, honest, practical tools to find your way back.
Everyone asked how your child was doing. Nobody asked how you were doing - as a couple.
Somewhere between the first diagnosis and now, something happened to the two of you. Not dramatically. Not with a fight or a clear breaking point. You just got so consumed by the most important thing - your child, their needs, the relentless work of understanding and advocating and surviving - that you quietly lost each other in the process.
You still love each other. But some days you feel more like co-managers than partners. More like people who share a crisis than people who chose each other.
This is not a book about parenting better together. It is a book about you - the partnership that has been carrying everything, without a map, without nearly enough support, and without anyone asking the right questions.
You will learn why the distance between you is neurological before it is relational - and why that changes everything about how to close it. Why your grief over the diagnosis is almost certainly not synchronised - and what that desfase looks like from each side. Why the load imbalance installed itself without anyone deciding to create it, and how to have the conversation that actually moves something. Why desire didn't disappear because you stopped wanting each other, but because the conditions for desire have been absent - and exactly how to rebuild them.
For couples where one or both partners is also neurodivergent: there is a full chapter for you, with the specific reframings that change everything about how you read each other's behaviour.
For any couple raising a neurodivergent child who has felt, at some point, that they were doing this entirely alone - even with someone right beside them. You are not alone. And you are not too far gone.
