The Loneliness Breakthrough: The Fieldguide- Practical Strategies (The Psychology of Wellbeing Field Guides Series Book 3)
About
For autistic adults, ADHD adults, and AuDHD adults who want practical strategies for making friends and building social connection, this field guide offers something the standard loneliness self-help books don’t: scenario-based, clinically grounded approaches written for a brain that processes the social world differently.
You know the feeling. The group chat you keep meaning to reply to. The friend who lives twenty minutes away that you haven’t seen in eight months. The Sunday afternoon that stretches out with no one in it. Loneliness is not a personal failing — but for many people, the practical work of building and keeping friendships is genuinely harder than the advice acknowledges. The standard advice was not written for a brain like yours.
This Field Guide is a practical companion to The Loneliness Breakthrough. It doesn’t explain loneliness; the main book does that. What this book gives you is specific strategies for the actual situations:
— Starting a conversation when small talk feels like a foreign language — Group situations when your nervous system is already at capacity — Finding and joining online communities without burning out — Maintaining friendships through executive-dysfunction weeks — The difficult moments: cancellations, conflict, repair — Building deeper connection without performing — Managing social anxiety in real time — before, during, and after — Special chapters for chronic illness, grief, relocation, and the particular loneliness of being partnered
Written for: autistic and ADHD adults, AuDHD adults, late-diagnosed people, the chronically lonely, and anyone who has read the “just put yourself out there” advice and wanted to throw the book across the room.
Dr. Melanie du Preez is a clinical psychologist with more than 26 years of practice, trained in Brain Working Recursive Therapy (BWRT) Levels 1 and 2. She is also a late-diagnosed AuDHD adult — which means this book is written from the inside as well as from the consulting room.
This is the second Field Guide in the Psychology of Wellbeing Field Guides Series. Read it in any order. Start with the chapter that matches the situation you’re in this week.
Honest about what it offers: this book will not make connection effortless. What it gives you is a set of real options for the moments when you don’t know what to do next.