Having just finished this book, I’m making a quick post about it, as much for my own reference as anything.
(1) The human need for “inclusion” or “attention” is profound and omnipresent. (~p115)
It’s better to be the pantomime villain, the political radical, the disruptive student, the class fool, or (to use an example from Milton Erickson) the inconsolable melancholy relative – all of these are better than being ignored, forgotten. In the ancestral stone age, social exclusion meant death. (And a lot of the social, political, and religious views of people – specifically, the views where the person has no personal expertise or direct interest – these get imported from whomever is paying attention to them.)
(2) The “autistic spectrum” is more usefully thought of as “Caetextia” – context blindness. (~p218)
- Asperger’s is a type of this
- left- and right- brained caetextia have different symptoms
- right-brain caetextia is often co-morbid with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome,
(3) Three vital principles: (p242)
- The brain is primarily a pattern matching process.
- Emotion comes before thought – all perceptions and all thoughts are ‘tagged’ with emotion. (Emotion is what prioritises a course of action or thought.)
- The higher the emotional arousal, the more primitive the emotional/mental pattern that is engaged.
(4) The RIGAAR model for effective therapy: (p307)
- Build rapport
- gather information
- set goals
- access resources (e.g. ‘remember that time they were confident’, to get the ‘confidence’ resource, etc)
- agree strategy with the client
- rehearse success
(5) The Rewind technique (p336)
- EMDR, EFT, and the Rewind technique may all have the same underlying mechanism. (p335)