Over the past few years, my clinical practice has shifted significantly. Increasingly, I find myself working with couples where one or both partners identify as neurodivergent, autistic, ADHD, or AuDHD. While every relationship has its own history, attachment experiences, personalities, and unique challenges, I continue to notice similar relational patterns across these couples.
One pattern that consistently stands out is the pursue-withdraw cycle.
Traditionally, we understand this dynamic through the lens of attachment theory. One partner experiences emotional distance and instinctively moves toward connection through conversation, reassurance, affection, or repair. The other becomes overwhelmed, shuts down, or needs space. The more one partner reaches, the more the other retreats. Attachment theory has given us an invaluable framework for understanding this dance and it remains an essential part of couples therapy.
Yet as my work with neurodivergent couples has grown, I have found myself wondering whether attachment alone fully explains what I am seeing.
Again and again, I meet couples who have spent years trying to “fix” this pattern. They have explored attachment wounds, learned communication strategies, practiced validation and worked incredibly hard to understand one another. Yet many remain painfully stuck, often leaving therapy believing they aren’t communicating well enough, or that one partner just isn’t trying hard enough. I have come to believe something much deeper is happening.
For many neurodivergent couples, the pursue-withdraw cycle is not just an attachment dynamic, it is also a nervous system dynamic.
If we continue to conceptualize every pursue-withdraw relationship exclusively through an attachment lens, we risk asking neurodivergent nervous systems to function like neurotypical ones. We may unintentionally interpret nervous system protection as avoidance, processing needs as emotional distance, executive overload as indifference, or a need for autonomy as resistance. When we misunderstand what is driving the behaviour, even well-intentioned interventions can inadvertently reinforce the very cycle we are trying to interrupt.
This is why it matters so much that neurodivergent couples work with genuinely neuroaffirming clinicians: therapists who understand attachment and also understand how different nervous systems experience safety, overwhelm, autonomy, executive functioning, sensory processing, cognitive load and emotional regulation. When we stop asking “Why is this person withdrawing?” and instead become curious about “What is this nervous system trying to protect?”, the entire conversation begins to change.
A Persistent Drive for Autonomy
One concept that has influenced my thinking is a Persistent Drive for Autonomy, a term increasingly preferred over Pathological Demand Avoidance. The shift in language matters. “Pathological” locates the problem inside the person, framing their response to demands as a disorder to be corrected. “Persistent Drive for Autonomy” relocates it: the behaviour isn’t a malfunction, it’s a genuine and understandable need for agency, choice and self-determination. That reframe changes the clinical question from “How do we reduce this avoidance?” to “How do we honour this need for autonomy?” and in couples work, it changes whether a withdrawing partner is treated as resistant or as someone protecting something legitimate.
Although this concept emerged primarily within discussions of autism, I don’t believe the broader principle is exclusive to autism. Across many forms of neurodivergence, expectations can place a disproportionate load on the nervous system, though the reasons may differ.
A request that feels simple and connecting to one partner may be experienced very differently by another. For some autistic individuals, a request increases uncertainty, interrupts internal processing, creates transition demands, heightens sensory load, or reduces a sense of autonomy — the nervous system genuinely needs more time before it can engage meaningfully. For many people with ADHD, the same request can activate something different: increased executive demand, activated working memory, years of shame around disappointing others, or rejection sensitive dysphoria. What looks like avoidance from the outside is often an overwhelmed nervous system trying to organize itself before it can respond.
From the outside, these responses can look nearly identical: a partner delays responding, goes quiet, asks for more time, changes the subject, forgets to follow through, or withdraws from the conversation altogether. These behaviours are often read as emotional avoidance, disinterest, or a lack of investment in the relationship. But what if the behaviour itself isn’t the problem and what if it’s the nervous system’s best attempt to create safety?
For an autistic partner, withdrawal may be an attempt to preserve autonomy, reduce uncertainty, or create enough processing time before genuinely engaging. For an ADHD partner, it may come from wanting desperately to respond while feeling overwhelmed by the expectation to do so organizing competing thoughts, managing executive overload, or quieting the fear of disappointing someone they love again. The behaviours can look almost identical from the outside, even when the nervous system needs they’re protecting are quite different.
Two Different Definitions of Safety
This realization has really changed how I understand the pursue-withdraw cycle itself. Instead of viewing one partner as anxious and the other as avoidant, I’ve come to see many neurodivergent couples as regulating two different experiences of safety.
For the pursuing partner, safety is restored through connection. When distance appears, their attachment system seeks reassurance, responsiveness, repair, and closeness moving toward their partner is how their nervous system attempts to restore equilibrium.
For the withdrawing partner, regulation depends on something else entirely: space, autonomy, predictability, processing time, reduced cognitive load, or confidence that they have enough capacity to engage well. Their withdrawal is not a movement away from the relationship more often, it’s a movement toward enough internal regulation that connection becomes possible again. This is precisely where the cycle intensifies.
The more disconnected the pursuing partner feels, the more urgently they seek reassurance, conversation, or repair; understandable bids for connection, not attempts to control or pressure their partner. But those same bids may land very differently on the withdrawing partner’s nervous system, registering as increasing expectation. As expectations accumulate, so does cognitive load, emotional overwhelm, loss of autonomy, or fear of getting it wrong, and the nervous system shifts its attention from connection to self-protection.
In response, the withdrawing partner seeks more space, more time, fewer demands, the very strategies that make connection possible in the long term often make it feel less available in the short term. To the pursuing partner, that distance rarely feels like nervous system regulation; it feels like abandonment or evidence that they don’t matter, which triggers more bids for connection, which the withdrawing partner experiences as more pressure. Before long, both nervous systems are responding to each other’s protective strategies rather than to each other’s intentions.
The tragedy is that neither partner is intentionally moving away from the relationship. Both are moving toward the same outcome: a relationship that feels safe, secure and connected. Their nervous systems have learned very different pathways for getting there. For one partner, the question is:
Are we connected?
For the other, the questions sound very different:
Do I still have enough choice? Do I have enough capacity to do this well? Can I process this before responding? Am I about to disappoint the person I love again?
These are different nervous system definitions of safety, and recognizing that has changed how I work with couples.
What This Changes in the Room
Rather than focusing primarily on helping the withdrawing partner engage faster, or encouraging the pursuing partner to tolerate more distance, I’ve become interested in what each person’s nervous system is trying to protect. Behaviour stops looking like resistance, avoidance, or dysfunction and starts looking like an adaptive attempt to create safety.
Instead of asking “How do we stop this behaviour?”, I get curious about what happened immediately before it emerged. What did the nervous system perceive? What meaning did each partner make of the interaction? What happened in the body? What was each person trying to protect and what meaning did their partner assign to that behaviour?
Together, we slow the interaction down and map the sequence rather than judge the outcome: the moment one partner’s attachment alarm activated, where executive functioning overloaded, where sensory overwhelm increased, where autonomy felt threatened, or where old shame and rejection resurfaced. Behaviours that once seemed confusing, or even intentional, start to make sense through the lens of nervous system regulation.
As a therapist, my role is to help each partner become a student of the other’s nervous system. As that understanding deepens, blame gives way to curiosity. The interaction is no longer one partner trying to hurt the other, instead, it becomes two nervous systems, each doing its best to create safety in the only way it knows how.
From there, the work pivots away from changing each other and focuses on building new relational experiences where both nervous systems can feel safe: offering connection without it registering as demand, and honouring autonomy or processing time without it registering as abandonment. The goal is enough flexibility, understanding and compassion that connection no longer comes at the expense of regulation, and regulation no longer comes at the expense of connection.
I don’t believe this perspective replaces attachment theory, I believe it expands it. Attachment remains essential to understanding intimate relationships, but for many neurodivergent couples, it’s only one part of a larger picture. When we integrate attachment with a neuroaffirming understanding of nervous system regulation, we stop asking “Who needs to change?” and start asking “What is each nervous system trying to protect?” For me, that has become one of the most important questions in my clinical work with couples.
This is the shift I keep coming back to: the goal was never to make one partner’s nervous system behave more like the other’s. It’s to help both partners recognize what safety actually requires for each of them and to build a relationship spacious enough to hold both. When couples get there, the pursue-withdraw cycle doesn’t just quiet down. It stops being necessary.