"The Common Ground Model: A Framework for Couples Nervous System Regulation Couples don’t dysregulate in isolation — they dysregulate together, in recursive patterns that become the relationship itself. Despite significant advances in both attachment-based couples therapy and nervous system science, clinicians have lacked a framework that bridges these two bodies of knowledge into practical, session-ready application. The Common Ground Model was developed to fill that gap. Rooted in Emotionally Focused Therapy, polyvagal theory, and systems theory, the Common Ground Model offers a relational map for understanding how couples co-regulate — and co-dysregulate — across time. Rather than treating nervous system activation as an individual problem to be managed within the self, the model treats the couple’s shared regulatory experience as the primary clinical focus. What happens between partners matters as much as what happens inside them. The model is organized around three core components. The first is a two-axis grid that maps co-regulatory states between partners, giving clinicians and couples a shared visual language for tracking where each person is — and where they are together — at any moment. The second component, vulnerability doors, reframes circular patterns of reactivity not as character flaws or communication failures, but as predictable nervous system responses shaped by each partner’s history and wiring. The third component, the spiral of safety sequence, describes the conditions through which couples move from dysregulation toward safety and connection — the positive cycle, named within the model’s own language. The model has particular clinical urgency for neurodivergent couples. When one or both partners have ADHD, sensory processing differences, or other neurological variations, the relationship often becomes a site of chronic misattunement — not because partners don’t love each other, but because their nervous systems speak different languages. Emotional flooding, demand-withdrawal cycles, rejection sensitivity, and inconsistent emotional availability are frequently misread as personality problems or signs of relational incompatibility. They are not. They are nervous system patterns — and they respond to nervous system interventions delivered within a relational frame. For clinicians working with neurodivergent adults and couples, the Common Ground Model offers something that has been largely missing: a framework that takes neurological difference seriously without abandoning the relational context in which that difference lives. This presentation introduces the model’s theoretical foundations, its clinical architecture, and its application across diverse couples presentations. Attendees will leave with a concrete framework they can integrate immediately into their existing practice.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​"