Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn't Designed for You

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This book is powerful, much-needed for our times, and Jenara Nerenberg offers a unique blend of personal, scientific, and societal analysis. The author's passing endorsement of training cops about ways autistic traits can look like disobedience feels especially ignorant, given the amount of young autistic Black men and women who have been arrested or assaulted by police who knew they were autistic. When it comes to women, sensory processing differences are often overlooked, masked, or mistaken for something else entirely.

Her clients and previous speaking engagements include the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Tahirih Justice Center, Park Day School, OZY Media, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and others. This wonderfully positive and accessible introduction to the neurodiversity paradigm is packed with life-changing insight for anyone whose way of experiencing the world diverges from the ordinary. I'll start with the actual writing itself: definitely needed more editing, topics do not flow well into one another, and the surface level coverage of too many topics ends up feeling disorganized altogether. If this book were published prior to the Black Lives Matter movement's founding rather than in 2020, I might have let that slide.

I know that most of my audience isn't as passionate about psychology as I am so I understand if you don't understand why I love this book which is totally fair. Divergent Mind is really for all women, giving them the chance to understand each others’ invisible differences and gifts. I also must criticize the amount of time that is spend grouping typical human behavior into neurodivergence.

I agree with a lot of people who are slightly put off with this book because it doesn’t really dive deep enough into different types of neurodivergent women who fall into these spectrums. My hope is that this thought process continues to push society to think outside the box - less Dustin Hoffman's "Rain Man" or even Jim Parsons' Sheldon and more nuanced (and not necessarily male). Between a flawed system that focuses on younger, male populations, and the fact that girls are conditioned from a young age to blend in, women often don’t learn about their neurological differences until they are adults, if at all. But that's fine, because it is MUCH more useful than that to a reader who wants an easy-to-digest summary of a lot of recent work in understanding neurodivergence particularly as it manifests in womenBetween a flawed system that focuses on diagnosing younger, male populations, and the fact that girls are conditioned from a young age to blend in and conform to gender expectations, women often don’t learn about their neurological differences until they are adults, if at all. ACT Contact / FAQ About Events / Videos Merch / Subs Sign in/up Divergent Mind : Thriving in a World That Wasn't Designed for You Nerenberg, Jenara More by this author. Worth the read but may make you crave for a deeper dive of a book which hopefully is on the way from Jenara or other authors. This book focuses on the sensory-sensitivity that is a common theme across multiple neurodivergences, and which I'm just beginning to appreciate as a major component of WHY I find certain environments stressful or overwhelming. The author names problems, and gives systemic solutions, but no practical advice for the individual on the small scale.

I'm not a woman, but since I spent my first 18 years of my life perceived in all my offline social spheres as a girl, my experiences from then are more like late-diagnosed autistic women's than late-diagnosed autistic men's. People that may be in a different socioeconomic group, differing sexualities or gender identities (those of us socialized as women, but no longer identifying as women), or women of color. There is a lot of discussion around HSP, with no mention of the harmful and incorrect things Elaine Aron has said about autism.Divergent Mind is a long-overdue, much-needed answer for women who have a deep sense that they are “different. I really found this enlightening; this is, in some ways, the successor to Susan Cain's "Quiet", the book about introversion. This book is geared towards late-diagnosed autistic women who are able to have a "normal" job, given sufficient sensory and social accommodations. It felt like everyone interviewed was a professionally successful woman, there is no mention of blue collar work and nothing on the massive racial disparities that currently exist.