EMBRACING DIVERSITY: The Field Guide: Practical Strategies for Navigating the World as Your Neurodivergent Self (The Psychology of Wellbeing Field Guides Series Book 1)

The book you read in the car park before walking back inside.
You know the theory. You’ve read about neurodivergence, maybe even done the deeper work of understanding your brain. But right now you’re sitting outside a work function, or staring at a message you can’t reply to, or trying to decide whether the family braai is worth the three-day recovery — and what you need isn’t insight. It’s a plan.
This is that plan.
The Field Guide is a practical strategies guide for neurodivergent adults — autistic, ADHD, AuDHD, or still figuring it out — who need real coping strategies for the situations that come up most often in adult life. Not theory. Not inspiration. Scripts you can actually use, permission structures for the decisions you’re already making, and options calibrated to how much energy you have today.
What’s inside:
Scenario-based chapters covering social situations, workplace survival, disclosure decisions, sensory overload management, relationship navigation, executive function and daily life, autistic burnout recognition and recovery, self-advocacy with professionals who don’t get it, and the communication differences that get you misread as rude when you were just being honest.
Each scenario gives you the situation, why it’s hard for your specific neurology, and multiple practical options — from low-energy survival mode to full self-advocacy — so you can pick the one that costs least right now.
Written by a clinical psychologist who is also neurodivergent.
Dr. Melanie du Preez brings over 26 years of clinical experience and the lived reality of late-diagnosed AuDHD to every page. This is not a guide written by someone who studied neurodivergence from the outside. It is written by someone who has sat in the car park, rewritten the email seven times, and arrived forty minutes late because time is, apparently, a concept her brain has agreed to acknowledge only intermittently.
This book is for you if:
You need coping strategies for adults that actually account for how your brain works. You want a field guide you can open to the relevant page when your nervous system is filing a formal objection. You are tired of self-help books that assume you have executive function to spare. You want something honest, clinically grounded, and written by someone who genuinely gives a damn.
A companion to Embracing Diversity: The Authentic You, and part of The Psychology of Wellbeing Field Guides Series by Dr. Melanie du Preez.