Welcome.
If you’re a woman experiencing relationship burnout with a partner who is on the autism spectrum (or might be), you’re in the right place.
Rediscovering Happiness is your place to connect with friends, grow, and thrive.
Join us for revitalizing retreats, personalized coaching, and a supportive community tailored specifically for women navigating complex relationships with partners who are (or may be) on the spectrum.
Retreats
Join us for a soul-restoring getaway with women who “get it.”
Coaching
Get one-on-one attention or sign up for group support. Even better—do both!
Community
Our private online community is in the works—details coming soon!
Let happiness find you
This is our safe place to put the focus back on ourselves.
Together, let's take our lives back and feel like ourselves again!
Feeling Exhausted and Emotionally Deprived?
If you’ve been searching for answers online—
—it’s no accident you’ve found us. We’ve been there, too. We get it!
Feeling more and more alone?
If you've lived it, you know.
The thing about many neurodiverse marriages...
These relationships are not easy. As much as we love and support our partners who are (or may be) on the autism spectrum, many of us find ourselves feeling emotionally drained and deeply alone. This kind of emotional deprivation in marriage—especially in a neurodiverse relationship—isn’t something people talk about, but it’s real.
After a while, we feel isolated and nearly dead inside.
We know it’s not all their fault. We try anything and everything to take responsibility for ourselves and try to “just be happy.” But the truth is we have physical, emotional, and spiritual needs that are not being met in our neurodiverse relationship.
Where we should feel connection—in our most intimate relationship—we feel a deep and painful disconnection. For some of us, the empathic and joyful women we used to be have deteriorated into helplessness, resentment, and being constantly on-edge.
Complex trauma, anyone?
You take care of others. Who's taking care of you?
On top of everything else, no one in our lives seems to understand what we live with. Our spouses have no idea why we’re upset half the time. Our relationship problems don’t get solved. Friends and family can’t wrap their heads around how someone so sweet and helpful can be so damaging behind closed doors. No one sees it but us.
We start to think we’re crazy or maybe we want too much. Over time, we lose friends and close relationships because we aren’t able to share the truth of our lives with them without being judged, minimized, or completely dismissed.
And we get SO tired of trying.
Figuring it out
When we finally found the term “Cassandra Syndrome,” it felt like someone had named the invisible pain we’ve been carrying for years.
We had been so busy trying to fix things at home and feeling like we were the problem, we missed some of the signs that our partners were neurodivergent.
In all reality, most of us were never taught what the actual signs of autism are. We knew some stereotypes, but now we know the disorder (and the depths of our emotional deprivation) all too well.
The therapeutic community is just now starting to understand the dynamics of neurodiverse relationships and their effects on non-spectrum partners, but unfortunately, many of us are already exhausted, depressed, or physically ill from chronic stress.
What's a girl to do?
Learning about autism helps. The more we can understand how our partners think, the less we take personally. We can mitigate our troubles if we learn how to avoid so many meltdowns, and we can build our resiliency so we bounce back faster.
ND couples therapy can help. It’s nice to improve communication in our relationships, and our partners can sometimes hear what we’re saying better when the words come from a third party.
ND couples coaching can help. Both partners gain tools to help them get along better in daily life, and put some agreements in place.
Support groups can help. There are more and more spaces for Cassandra Syndrome support, NT spouse circles, Facebook groups, and beyond… where you can share your story and everyone there understands. Being seen, heard, and believed can be profoundly healing.
All of these approaches can help.
But some of us find they are not enough.
We need more. We need something transformative. We need each other’s support to lift us up.
What makes Rediscovering Happiness special is that we carve out time to re-focus on what we really DO want.
We say:
Join as many of the support groups & programs out there as you can, because we all need all the help we can get! But don’t let all of the work you’re doing on your relationship stop you from being who you were meant to be… today!
Some other groups devolve into too much negativity. It’s understandable why that happens. However, there comes a point when dwelling on the problems just makes them worse.
At Rediscovering Happiness, we don’t waste time bashing our partners. We focus on who we are and what we want to create. We find ways to meet our social and emotional needs so that we feel like ourselves again (and everything else in our lives tends to improve as we feel more fulfilled). We focus on positivity in a way that doesn’t dismiss our challenges.
We get it! We know how bad things can be, and we’ve all been there. But we don’t have to stay there. We can enjoy our lives now.