Central Coherence

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I'm having a look at central coherence. Assimilating social, non-social and personal information is helped if a person has strong central coherence. Weak coherence is a feature of being an aspie. Of course, I paraphrase some theory that I was recently introduced to. I'm thinking through what it means to have weak central coherence and list some thoughts below.

I am interested in insights others might have?

In my case, I have a very 'strong' sense of how my world fits together but that 'strength' is more of a rigidity. It is only strong in the sense that I have built an edifice of coherence over the years that is not easily adapted. If and when my world view becomes obsolete and needs changing, I am likely to crack. For example, if I were to lose my job and was forced to do a job I have never done before I would become very stressed.

I spend inordinate amounts of time mulling over the events of the day, finances, career direction, the state of politics, society, the office politics, personal finances, whether so-and-so was joking or serious, the energy crisis etc. I am often paranoid or neurotic about perceived threats to human existence and/or what I see as threats to my career. I describe this as being a 'deep thinker' and while that is true, I think deeply without much of a progressive objective. I am becoming aware that all this thinking is not necessarily productive. It is just over-thinking of everything and the concept of weak central coherence is why I think so much. Basically, I have to think a lot about things because it takes longer for me to assimilate the stream of information that bombards me daily.

There are some advantages to this of course, which is ironically that I can handle large amounts of data of certain types. If exposed to a lot of technical, statistical or process-related information, I assimilate and work through this extremely well because (I think) I am very methodological. This is learnt. I was not always like this; in fact I have always been extremely absent minded, scatter-brained, day-dreamy etc. I learnt to be very systematic as the only way to make sense of what was happening around me.

I am subject to frequent meltdowns. Commonly, meltdowns occur when I am trying to complete some job or goal and am being obstructed in some way from approaching things the way I want to approach them or if the final outcome in my mind is not aligned with the outcome as pictured by others. Basically I do not like being told what to do and how to do it. I don't do teamwork at all well. For me, I either do it my way or I withdraw and let others get on with doing it their way. I cannot stand those teamwork situations where people muddle in and achieve a goal or task by a multiple of methods that they figure out as they go. I want to work out how to do a task and then do it on a planned basis.

What central coherence I have is very precious to me and hence if someone uses political/social power to force me to relinquish my views/beliefs/understanging in favour of some other ideas, I do not easily agree and if pushed I just tune out and if that isn't allowed, the melt down follows. It isn't that I don't take on new thoughts and ideas, just that I take a lot longer to do so.

It also means I am not an easy subordinate because I don't respond well to task/transactional instructions because I take a lot of time to work through how the task fits into the broader work objectives and goals and how I am going to approach the task. I tend to ask a large number of clarifying questions and have completely infuriated many people who just want me to get on with it. Of course, their lack of attention to detail frustrates me.

Weak central coherence explains why I'm a very focussed specialist and why my interests and skills are narrow. Essentially, I can maintain coherence in a narrow field and when I have that coherence I can handle large amounts of information in that ambit, but remain poor at handling anything external to the narrow field.

I think weak central coherence explains a lot in my case.

Wow! I can relate to most of what you posted because I am very similar. It makes a lot of sense to me.