“Just Communicate Your Needs Better” Is Not a Helpful Strategy

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You’re on the couch. Your partner turns to you – with good intentions – and asks the question every relationship podcast told them to ask.

“What do you need from me?”

And you’ve got nothing.

Not because there’s nothing there. There’s absolutely something happening…. pressure in your chest, heat in your throat, a weight sitting somewhere behind your ribs. But if someone offered you a thousand dollars to name it in one word right now, you couldn’t do it. There’s just a shape in there. No label you can grab.

So you say the sentence you already know they don’t want to hear. “I don’t know.”

And you watch their face do the thing. The little flicker. Because “I don’t know” doesn’t land like “I don’t know.” It lands like I won’t tell you. Like resistance. Like you’re holding out.

And then someone – a therapist, your mom, an Instagram carousel with a nice font – says the line. You two just need to communicate your needs better. Directly. Clearly. Kindly.

Cool. Great. Thanks. How?

Here’s the reframe I need you to have before we go one step further:

You’re not a bad communicator. You’re a deep processor with a fuzzy translation guide, being asked to do a fast, verbal, face-to-face version of a thing your brain does slowly and internally (and then getting blamed when it doesn’t work.)

About this episode

This is a disruptor episode, because I’m taking a piece of advice that is absolutely everywhere – handed out by well-meaning therapists, podcast hosts, and carousels – and pulling it apart. Not because communication doesn’t matter. It matters enormously. But “communicate better” isn’t a strategy. It’s a hashtag that was built for neurotypical brains.

For neurodivergent women, that advice quietly assumes five things are true about you: that you can feel your feelings in real time, put words to them, say those words out loud immediately, do it while someone’s upset and waiting, and that your body will cooperate through all of it. On a good day, some of those are a stretch. Mid-conflict, with a nervous system that fires faster and louder? It’s asking you to read the fine print during a fire alarm.

So in Episode 16 I walk through the four reasons the advice breaks down for us specifically: slow-but-deep processing, alexithymia (feeling everything, with no words for it), the double empathy problem, and emotional flooding. Plus, the female layer that makes it worse: the fawn response, where “no, it’s fine” comes out sounding like communication but isn’t true. Then I give you the fix. Not “try harder.” Three swaps – timing, format, and target – that change the conditions so the words can finally come.

What you’ll learn

• The five hidden assumptions buried inside “just communicate your needs better” (and why they don’t hold for neurodivergent women)
• Why your best, clearest thoughts show up 40 minutes after the conversation ends (and why that’s processing, not avoidance)
• What alexithymia actually is, in plain words (and why your body knows the feeling before you have a word for it)
• The double empathy problem: why cross-wiring miscommunication is mutual, not your job to fix alone
• Why the fawn response makes you look like you communicated when the real thing never got said
• The Three Swaps: timing, format, and target. These make it much easier for you to communicate what your genuinely need
• How to create your go-to mid-moment phrase now, so you’re not composing anything in the moment when you can barely think, let alone put a coherent sentence together

Better communication isn’t a skill you’re missing. It’s a set of conditions you were never given.

Resources mentioned

• Free workbook: How to Feel Understood in Love (a two-way love map you and your partner fill in together)
• Free quiz: Is It Actually Me?
• Episode 14: You’re Not Overreacting — You’re Flooded: the deep dive on emotional flooding referenced in this one https://jennadalton.com/podcast-episode-14-flooded-pause-protocol/
• The double empathy problem: coined by autistic researcher Damian Milton
• Send Jenna a DM on Instagram: @neurodivergentlovelab

Ready to go deeper?

If you and your partner keep landing in the same “why won’t you just tell me what you need” loop, here’s where to start:

• Do the free workbook together. How to Feel Understood in Love is a two-way love map. You each fill in your side — how you process, what your quiet means, what you need when things get hard — then swap and actually talk about it. Because communication was always a two-way street. Grab it at JennaDalton.com/lovemap
• Take the free quiz to sort out whether what you’re navigating is your wiring, your relationship, or the intersection of both — JennaDalton.com/quiz
• Book a free 15-minute consultation if you’re in Alberta and curious about working together one-on-one Book Here

Loved this episode?

Subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming, leave a rating wherever you listen, and send this to the friend who’s been told to “just use her words” one too many times – or to the partner who hears “I don’t know” and doesn’t yet know it means “I’m still in here, still processing.”

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Episode transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.

Open

You’re sitting on the couch and your partner turns to you and says:

“Well, what do you need from me?”

They care. They want to know. They’re trying. This is them doing the good thing that the podcast and the book and the couples counsellor all told them to do.

And you’ve got nothing.

You can feel something. There’s absolutely something happening in your chest or your stomach or your throat. But if someone offered you a thousand dollars right now to name it in one word, you couldn’t do it. There’s just a shape in there. Pressure. Heat. A weight. But no label you can grasp.

So you say the sentence you know they don’t want to hear.

“I don’t know.”

And you watch their face do the thing. The little flicker. Because “I don’t know” sounds like “I won’t tell you.” It sounds like resistance. It sounds like you’re holding out. It sounds like you don’t care.

And then somebody, somewhere, says the line. Maybe a therapist. Maybe your mother. Maybe an Instagram carousel with a nice font.

You two just need to communicate your needs better. Directly. Clearly. Kindly.

Cool. Great. Thanks. How?

Today, I’m going to explain exactly why that advice fails you. Not because you’re bad at communicating. Because that advice is asking you to do something your brain, in that particular moment, is not able to do. And then I’m going to give you what actually works instead.

Intro

This is the Neurodivergent Love Lab. I’m Jenna Dalton, a psychologist who’s AuDHD. I help ADHD, autistic, and AuDHD women feel truly understood and deeply loved. And this is Episode 16: “Just Communicate Your Needs Better” Is Not a Helpful Strategy.

This one’s a bit of a disruptor episode, because I’m going to take a piece of advice that is absolutely everywhere, that gets handed out by well-meaning professionals, and pick it apart. Not because communication doesn’t matter. It matters enormously. But “communicate better” isn’t a strategy. It’s a hashtag designed to work for neurotypical brains.

So we’re going to flip it upside down and sideways and make it work for your neurodivergent brain.

What that advice is secretly asking you to do

Let’s pull the advice apart, because I think once you see what’s hiding inside it, you’ll stop feeling like a failure for not being able to follow it.

“Just communicate your needs better” and its cousins, “use your words,” “tell them what you hope for,” “just be honest about your feelings,” all quietly assume five things are true about you.

One. That you have access to your feelings in real time.

Two. That you have words for them.

Three. That you can produce those words out loud, immediately.

Four. That you can do all of that while someone is upset – or at the very least staring at you, waiting for an answer.

Five. That your body will cooperate and it will all magically come together seamlessly.

Five assumptions. And for a lot of neurodivergent women, some or all of these are challenging on a good day.

You’re flooded with overwhelming stimulation and you’re expected to verbalize what’s going on for you while your tongue has suddenly grown three sizes and your throat is closing? Yes. That sounds like a very doable thing.

So when you can’t do it, you don’t say “huh, that advice didn’t fit my brain.” You say “I’m bad at relationships because I shut down and can’t say the thing I’m supposed to say.” Because the advice arrived with such confidence, from such a trustworthy-looking source, that when it doesn’t work the only plausible explanation is that it’s you. You’re the problem.

Can I give you a reframe here? It’s not you. Let me show you exactly why I know that to be true.

The four reasons this doesn’t work for you

Part one. The four breakdowns.

Let’s talk about how this strategy isn’t neurodivergent-affirming and how it breaks down before you can even get it on the road.

Breakdown one. Processing takes time, and time is not something that you’re typically given in these moments. You’re expected to just know. Right now. We’re waiting.

A lot of neurodivergent brains process deeply rather than quickly.

So when a hard topic lands on you out of nowhere, your brain needs to disengage from whatever it was doing, load the new thing in the disk drive, hit start, let it warm-up for a little while, wait for it to run properly, and then get back to you.

That’s not you being avoidant. That’s not you being difficult. That’s you being asked to process at a much higher rate than you’re capable of.

And here’s the cost of that in real life. You say “I don’t know,” the conversation moves on, and forty minutes later, in the shower, the entire perfect answer arrives, fully formed. Every word. And it’s too late, because the conversation’s over and everyone’s decided you simply don’t care enough to share what’s coming up for you.

Breakdown two. You may not have the words. Actually, genuinely, not have them.

This is alexithymia, which we touched on last week, and it’s worth mentioning again.

Alexithymia means difficulty identifying and naming your own emotions. Not the absence of emotion. You’ve got plenty of emotion. Loads of it. You just can’t seem to stick a label onto it.

And here’s the tricky thing. Your body knows. The signal is there. Tight jaw. Hot face. That heavy pull on your shoulders. That weird feeling behind your eyes. What’s missing is the translation that turns “heavy pull behind my eyes” into “I feel unseen and misunderstood.”

So when someone says “just tell me how you feel,” they think they’ve asked you to report something you’re well aware that you’re holding. What they’ve actually asked you to do is perform a translation, live, at what feels like hyperspeed, using a language you were never taught.

Breakdown three. The double empathy problem, which puts the whole thing in a completely different light.

This one’s from an autistic researcher called Damian Milton.

The old story said autistic people are bad at reading other people. One-directional. Her deficit, her job to fix.

Milton said hang on. When two people with different neurotypes misunderstand each other, that’s mutual. You’re both struggling to read someone who processes and expresses things differently from you. And a study a couple of years ago backed this up in a way I find really satisfying. When researchers looked at conversations, non-autistic observers rated the mixed conversations – when there was an autistic person and a non-autistic person – as the least smooth. They seemed to be talking past each other and neither of them were understanding what the heck was going on. But two autistic people talking to each other? They got it. They did fine.

Which tells you the breakdown isn’t sitting inside the autistic person. We know how to interpret the conversation when we’re chatting with each other. The miscommunication happens when you get a neurotypical and neurodivergent person in the room and essentially try to force the one person to understand westcoast slang while the other one needs to know how to interpret eastcoast slang. They’re both speaking English. Just a different version of it.

And that reframes “you need to communicate better” completely. Because that advice puts one hundred percent of the work on one person. Usually you. The neurodivergent person. The one who’s already doing all the translating in the relationship, and in her family, and at her job, and has been since she was that little girl that everyone thought was quirky and weird.

You don’t have to be the only one who needs to “just communicate better.” It’s much more of a two-way street than that book made you believe.

Breakdown four. When you’re overwhelmed by emotion, your ability to express what’s coming up for you is just not happening.

We went deep on this a couple of weeks back in Episode 14: You’re Not Overreacting – You’re Flooded (Why You Over-Explain, Shut Down, and Apologize Anyway) so I’ll keep it short. When conflict heats up, your threat system fires, and the part of your brain that does careful, fair, articulate analysis of what’s going down gets drowned out. And in a neurodivergent brain carrying rejection sensitivity, that alarm fires faster and louder.

So telling someone to use precise emotional language during a fight is like handing someone the fine print during a fire alarm. The words are all fuzzy because you’re honestly just really focused on trying to get out of there alive!

And now the layer that’s specific to us.

The female version of all four of these is worse, and here’s why. If your nervous system runs the fawn response, appease, accommodate, keep everyone comfortable, then under pressure you don’t just go blank. Something worse happens. Words come out, and they’re agreeable, and they’re not true.

“No, it’s fine.” “You’re right.” “I’m just tired.”

That’s the sticky part. You look like you communicated. Your partner walks away thinking the conversation happened. And the actual thing, the real thing you’re feeling deep down, never got said out loud. So the problem doesn’t get solved, it gets postponed.

You’ve spent your whole life translating for everyone else. Reading the room, catching the shift in someone’s tone, working out what they needed before they asked. You’re, honestly, an excellent communicator. You’re so practised at it. You’ve just been doing it entirely in one direction, outward, on everyone else’s behalf, for decades.

So what actually works?

Part two. So what does actually work?

Here’s the reframe I want you to grasp.

Better communication is not a skill you’re missing. It’s something that’s dependent on conditions you haven’t been given.

Say that one again in your own head. It’s not a skill you’re missing. It’s based in conditions you haven’t been given.

Because when the conditions are right, you communicate beautifully. You know you do. You’ve written the text message that made someone cry. You’ve explained something to a friend at midnight when she really needed you to show up for her with total clarity. You’ve composed entire flawless paragraphs in the car on your way to that uber important meeting.

The words exist. They just don’t turn up on demand, out loud, under pressure, on a neurotypical schedule.

So the fix isn’t “try harder to do the impossible thing.” The fix is changing three conditions. Time. Format. And target.

The tool: the three swaps

Swap one. Swap the timing.

A delayed answer is still an answer. This is the one you have to believe or none of the rest works.

The problem is that “I don’t know” lands like a door slamming. So don’t say “I don’t know” on its own ever again. Say “I don’t know yet,” and then add the return time.

Here are the actual words:

“I want to give you a real answer, not a fast one. I’m going to think about it and then can we talk about it again after dinner?”

“My brain needs a minute to catch up. I’m not brushing you off. Give me till tomorrow morning and I’ll have something to share.”

“I’m not shutting you out. I’m still trying to figure out what’s coming up for me.”

The return time is doing all the work there. A pause with a return time is processing. A pause with no return time can make your partner feel abandoned and hopeless. Your partner can wait a very long time if they know the waiting ends with knowing how to show up for you in a way that supports your relationship, makes you happy, and gives them the gold star of best partner ever.

The key is to make sure you follow-through.

If you say tomorrow morning, come back tomorrow morning. Every single time you come back when you said you would, you’re teaching both nervous systems that waiting is safe. That waiting ultimately leads to positive outcomes.

Swap two. Swap the format.

Speech is only one option for how to communicate – and for a lot of us it’s genuinely the hardest one. So stop insisting on the hardest one being the only way it happens.

Try writing it. A note. A text. A shared document you add to and take away and build together. Writing gives you the thing speech takes away: time to revise, no face to read, no clock running as you try to find the words.

You can also try moving. Have the hard conversation on a walk. Side by side beats face to face for a huge number of neurodivergent people, because you’re not spending sixty percent of your processing power monitoring their expression and running interpretations and trying to figure out if that eyebrow was surprised or mad or anxious. Also, the movement itself helps if you’re easily overwhelmed by your feels.

Try a different room, a different time, a lower-stakes moment. In the car. Doing dishes. Anywhere your hands are busy and nobody’s staring at you waiting.

And try being mindful of capacity. Big topics do not go well at eleven at night at the end of a long day when everyone’s battery is at four percent. That’s not the time for honesty, that’s the time for tea, a good book, and bed.

None of that is avoiding the conversation. It’s staging the conversation in a way that optimizes the chances it’ll go well and actually lead to positive change.

Swap three. Swap the target.

Stop trying to name the feeling. Aim at something you can actually hit.

If the feeling word won’t come, you’re not stuck. You just need a different target. There are three easier ones, and any of them gives your partner more than “I don’t know” ever did.

Target one: your body. What are you physically noticing? “My chest is tight.” “I’ve gone hot.” “I feel like I want to leave the room.” No interpretation needed. Just saying out loud what’s happening inside.

Target two: focus on the moment. What do you notice? “When you said that thing about my sister, something changed for me.” You’re not accusing them of anything. You’re talking about what you notice in yourself.

Target three: explore the need – however small it may be. “I don’t know what I feel, but I know I don’t want to keep talking about it sitting down right now.” “I know I want you to stay in the room but I just need silence for a little bit.” “I know I need the TV off because it’s making it hard to think right now.”

So the whole sentence becomes: “I can’t name the feeling yet. Here’s what I do know.”

And then you give them one of the three.

“I can’t name it yet. Here’s what I know. My chest went tight when the plans changed, and I know I need ten minutes to just bring myself back down.”

Look at what that gives them compared to “I don’t know.” That’s real information. It’s honest. It doesn’t require you to have a vocabulary you don’t have. And it’s completely true, which matters, because the fawn version, “no, it’s fine,” is self-abandonment wrapped up in a pretty “I’m supposed to manage your feelings right now” package.

One more thing and then we’ll wrap. Pre-load the placeholder phrase. Pick one short sentence now, today, while you’re calm, that means “I’m still here, I’m still processing.” Whatever fits for you. “I’m going to think about it.” “Give me a minute.” “My words are gone right now but I just need time to figure it out.”

Then when the moment comes and speech has left the building, you don’t have to compose anything. You just say the thing you’ve already rehearsed (because we both know how good you are at rehearsing a conversation 47 times in your head!)

That’s not being fake. That’s being prepared. Every professional who speaks under pressure has prepared lines. You’re allowed to have some too.

Something I find myself saying to my neurodivergent clients all the time: the goal isn’t to stop yourself from rehearsing as if it’s a problem to fix. The goal is to use that natural tendency strategically to help lessen your anxiety around whatever social situation you’re about to walk into.

Brené Brown, Michelle Obama, and Greta Thunberg don’t waltz on stage without rehearsing. Rehearsing isn’t bad. It simply needs to be used strategically to address anxiety rather than fuel it.

Where the workbook fits in

Now, here’s a key part. So listen up.

Every one of these swaps needs your partner to know what’s happening. If you disappear for twenty minutes and they don’t know you’re processing, they’ll fill in the blank, and the blank they fill in is almost never generous.

So they need to know what’s going on. Which is exactly why my free workbook exists. It’s called How to Feel Understood in Love, and it’s a two-way love map. You each fill in your side of the story. How you process, what your quiet means, what you need when things get hard, and then you exchange answers and chat about what showing up differently for each means.

And I built it that way on purpose. Communication is a two-way street.

Get it free at JennaDalton.com/lovemap. That’s JennaDalton.com/lovemap.

Close

Here’s what I want you to take from our hangout today.

You’re not a bad communicator. You’re a deep processor with a fuzzy translation guide who has been asked, your entire life, to perform a fast, verbal, face-to-face version of a thing your brain does slowly, internally, and with intentional depth.

And when that didn’t work, everyone told you to try harder at the thing that was never going to work.

So here’s your permission slip. You’re allowed to answer late. You’re allowed to write it instead of saying it out loud. You’re allowed to say “I can’t name it right now, but here’s what I do know.” You’re allowed to stop performing “I’m fine” and start telling the truth in a way that feels true for you.

That’s communication at its finest. When your partner really gets you. Even if you got there in a way that has neurotypical people saying “Huh? I don’t get it.” You get it. That’s what matters.

So pick one swap this week. Just one. And go do the workbook together at JennaDalton.com/lovemap.

Thanks for spending this bit of your day with me. Remember, you deserve to feel truly understood and deeply loved. I’ll talk to you soon.

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Neurodivergent Love Lab is for educational purposes and is not a substitute for therapy or mental health care. If you’re in crisis, please reach out to a local crisis line or emergency service.