As someone who has some of the hallmarks of sensory defensiveness but not to a “it makes my life a living hell” degree, I found this book interesting to read but ultimately not super helpful. The first part of the book details what life is like for many sensory defensive folks, people with a number of different types of defensiveness. The author herself is defensive in some ways and so she is able to describe these people’s lives with empathy and understanding.

The second part, which I was looking forward to, talks more about remedies and what people can do, and here it sort of lost me. While there was a lot of advice that seemed really on the mark, some of it seemed, for lack of a better word, woo. And that made me question a lot of other things the author had said. Maybe it’s really true that light therapy has been found to be useful for specific sorts of sensory defensiveness, or cranio-sacral work, but the skeptic in me had a hard time really getting past the “I thought this stuff was pseudoscience” feeling. That said, I’m also lucky to not really be in a place where conventional medicine is not working for me and I can’t quite put myself in that place. The book does have a long list of citations at the end of it that I didn’t really delve in to. Interesting but ultimately not-for-me book.