Train Your Brain
: The Five Essential Skills© Rick Hanson, Ph.D., 2005
INSIGHT
: Key Points"Like waking up from a bad dream."
What Is Insight
(A) In the moment, seeing how factors in your mind have distorted your perceptions, or intensified your reactions, or colored them negatively.
(B) Over the long-term, you can work to reduce these factors or control them better.
Kinds of Factors
- Temperament
- Issues related to both autonomy and intimacy
- Material transferred into the present from childhood
- Attachment style: secure, insecure-anxious, insecure-avoidant
- Gender, in both its biological and cultural patterning (nature and nurture)
- Influences due to race and class and religion and culture
- The Enneagram, with its nine types
- Jung's typology of thinking-feeling/judging, sensing-intuiting, introversion-extroversion
- The spectrum running from extreme pessimism to extreme optimism
Wanting to See What Is True
Similarly, upon waking you could set your highest intentions for yourself, like: "May I be clear, calm, and loving today." Or: "I know I'll stay sober today."
Temperament
- What's your nature with regard to that aspect of temperament?
- How has your nature in that regard affected your life?
- How have you, or how could you, work with that aspect of your temperament?
Baseline emotional inclinations
wistful/melancholy/sad, or a little irritable/frustrated/aggressive/angry, or a little guilty/remorseful/ ashamed/inadequate.
Orientation to the world, especially other people
Range of reactivity
Issues with Autonomy and Intimacy
Introduction
The gender angle
You can be more skillful inside yourself by:
Schizoid and narcissistic dynamics
Childhood Material
Why stir up that old crud? What's the use?
Exercise