The Mapping Spectrum: From Cognitive Maps to Relationship Flowcharts in Neurodiverse Couples Therapy

Friday, July 11, 2025. This is for Keaghan… My Tuesdays at 1:00

It starts with a scribble.

A simple line. Maybe a circle. Then a box with the word “shutdown” inside it, and a sad little arrow pointing to a stick figure sulking under a weighted blanket.

Congratulations. You’ve just begun the ancient, noble, and wildly underrated practice of therapeutic mapping.

If you’re a therapist working with neurodiverse couples—or a neurodiverse human trying to love another human without exploding—you already know this: words are slippery.

Feelings are murky. And memory? Memory is a drunk historian rewriting your day while you’re still living it.

Enter the map.

A good map can do what no amount of couples dialogue, Instagram carousel, or mindful eye-gazing ever could. It can show you where the hell you are. And how you got there. And perhaps how to get out without anybody crying in the Trader Joe’s parking lot again.

This post is a modest introduction to the spectrum of maps that matter in therapy—not just cognitive ones, but flow maps, concept maps, empathizing-systemizing overlays, and the long-lost art of tracking the emotional weather patterns of your relationship like a low-budget meteorologist in a storm shelter.

Let’s chart the territory.

Cognitive Mapping: A Trail of Breadcrumbs Through the Brain Fog

Cognitive mapping is the darling of top-tier therapists for drawing a picture of what the hell just happened.

It works like this:

• You feel something.

• That something turns into a thought.

• The thought triggers a reaction.

• That reaction leads to either repair, a fight, or a numbing YouTube spiral.

When drawn out, these moments form a causal chain. It’s neat. It’s logical. And it’s a godsend for brains that love systems.

Dr. David Schnarch called it “Brain Talk” (2018). Because “non-pathologizing perspective-taking through externalized tracking” has no ring to it whatsoever.

Which is a fancy way of saying: let’s put it on paper so your partner doesn’t think you’re gaslighting them when you say, “I wasn’t even mad.”

But cognitive maps have a shadow side. They’re great at tracking what happened but terrible at showing what matters.

So let’s upgrade.

Concept Mapping: Love, But Make It a Venn Diagram

Where cognitive maps tell a story in a straight line, concept maps tell you what ideas are bumping into each other at the same time.

Imagine putting “intimacy” in the middle of a page, then drawing lines to “touch aversion,” “executive dysfunction,” “past betrayal,” and “forgotten to buy toothpaste again.” That’s a concept map.

Novak & Cañas (2006) call it “a structured, hierarchical network of related concepts.”

In therapy, I call it finally making visible the stuff couples swear they’ve been trying to explain for years but never had the whiteboard marker for.

It can work beautifully with neurodivergent couples.

Concept maps can show, for instance, that a meltdown isn’t just sensory overload—it’s also a loss of agency, a fear of disappointing your partner, and maybe, just maybe, the trauma of being told for 30 years that “you’re too much.”

Drawn out, it looks less like a pathology and more like an ecosystem. Which is exactly what it is.

Narrative Flow Mapping: Plot Twists in the Love Story

Some clients don’t think in concepts or cognition. They think in story.

That’s where narrative flow mapping comes in—a visual timeline that shows the arc of a moment:
Build-up → Incident → Coping → Shutdown → Repair.

One neurodivergent couple I worked with mapped their entire 48-hour conflict cycle after a fight about… a cereal bowl.

The map revealed it had nothing to do with dishes. It had everything to do with unsignaled transitions, unprocessed grief, and one partner’s unspoken fear of being “the difficult one.”

It turned shame into data.

Narrative mapping is powerful because it brings time into the picture. You see the weather system of your relationship—not just the thunder, but the barometric pressure change before it.

What I find deeply encouraging is when a couple maps three or four of these, and then they start predicting the storm before it hits.

That’s not therapy. That’s alchemy.

Flow Mapping: When the Map Becomes the Territory

Now let’s get a little weird.

Flow mapping is a technique I shoplifted (lovingly) from neurodivergent creators who’ve been mapping their flow states on Discord, Reddit, and in notebooks since before anyone called it therapy.

In short: it’s mapping what feels good. I use this approach with my autistic kids in my role in public mental health quite often.

It answers the question: When do you feel most alive, engaged, safe, and connected?

Then it asks: What sensory inputs, relational signals, and internal narratives helped create that?

For neurodiverse folks—especially those living with monotropism (a deep, sustained focus on one thing at a time)—flow isn’t just a productivity hack.

It’s an emotional lifeline.

When couples map their shared flow states (e.g., cooking together, parallel play, hiking in silence), they start to rebuild intimacy not through forced conversation, but through co-regulated presence.

I call this “Asynchronous Repair,” and I dare you to find a better use for an erasable marker.

Empathizing-Systemizing Maps: Two Processors, One Relationship

Finally, let’s talk E–S theory (Baron-Cohen, 2009), which posits that human brains tend to lean toward either empathizing (feeling others’ emotions) or systemizing (understanding rules and logic).

In couples therapy, this means one partner might need emotional context, while the other is desperate for a flowchart.

So? Give them a dual-processing map:

• Use color coding to show emotion vs. logic.

• Track moments of misfire: “I needed validation, you gave me a checklist.”

• Map the repair: “You needed steps, I gave you a feeling.”

Suddenly, the incompatibility becomes complementarity. You’re not broken. You’re just running different firmware.

Build-a-Map Toolkit: Mix, Match, Make Meaning

Let’s say you’re ready to try this at home or in session.

Here’s a starter kit:

• Cognitive Map: Thought → Emotion → Action → Consequence.

• Concept Map: Core concern in the middle; branches to values, triggers, protective behaviors.

• Narrative Map: Plot out the latest blow-up like a Netflix drama: Act I, Act II, Act III.

• Flow Map: Good days → What worked → What to repeat.

• E–S Map: One color for empathy moments, one for systems, arrows showing mismatch and repair.

Use whiteboards, apps, sticky notes, or literal sidewalk chalk.

The point isn’t the medium. The point is seeing yourself outside of yourself, and seeing your partner not as the enemy, but as someone on the same map.

Final Thought: Therapy as Cartography

The goal of therapy isn’t to build a perfect map.

It’s to help people realize that what felt like chaos had somewhat of a shape all along.

Sometimes love is a highway. Sometimes it’s a cave. Sometimes it’s a sketch on the back of a napkin with the words “please don’t shut down again” scrawled in pencil.

Whatever form it takes, mapping lets us say: this is where we are.

And with solid, science-based couples therapy, we can get to: this is where we’d like to go next. I can help with that.

Be well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Baron-Cohen, S. (2009). The empathizing-systemizing theory of sex differences and the extreme male brain theory of autism. In Progress in Brain Research (Vol. 186, pp. 167–175). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-53630-3.00011-7

Novak, J. D., & Cañas, A. J. (2006). The theory underlying concept maps and how to construct and use them. Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.

Schnarch, D. (2018). Brain Talk: How Mind Mapping Brain Science Can Change Your Life & Everyone In It. Sterling Publishers.

Dashnaw, D. (2024). Understanding Neurodiverse-Affirming Couples Therapy. https://danieldashnawcouplestherapy.com