**2. February 2010: An experiment**

Five years ago, I conducted an experiment that led to a drastic change in my work. Introducing a new intervention in the field of autism requires courage and determina‐ tion. Accepting innovation requires an open mind and readiness to review pre-existing concepts. The name ReAttach was chosen because of the importance of the attachment theory [1] in my work as an educational psychologist. This name does not indicate that I think that autism is an attachment disorder, nor do I blame the parents of autistic chil‐

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dren. ReAttach emerged from the idea that we can learn from healthy child development and the manner in which healthy children process information, emotions and events. We therefore required a multimodal approach. On 26 February 2010 I was reading a manual for schema therapy [2], a book describing a treatment for adults with trauma and person‐ ality disorders. I tried to understand the authors' viewpoint and to integrate this view‐ point into the concepts that I have built from my own working experience. In my opinion, the behaviour patterns described in this book strongly matched the behaviour patterns of children with early maladaptive schemas. Children are able to cope with their stressful events during play if they have fundamental environmental support that provides them with the confidence and safety to work out their negative emotions through play. As an educational psychologist, for me, playing is processing [3]. Playing made me create an experimental treatment session in which I simulated the optimal conditions needed to process defensive excluded information through play. The results of this experimental treatment were positive, and I started to conduct practical research with traumatized adults. In July 2010, I realized that it should be possible to develop a special intervention for people with autism and to focus on cognitive training to improve information processing and daily life functioning. We made special adjustments for people with autism because we had to overcome their individual problems with arousal regulation and multiple sensory integra‐ tion processing to be able to teach new social cognitive skills and to improve executive functioning. For the autistic children and adults who voluntarily joined the cognitive training the first results were amazing. We observed improvements in facial expressions and social cognitive skills, and high-functioning adults with autism reported that it felt as if the computer in their brain was updated and now contained multiple processors.

This process, which was the beginning of ReAttach for Autism, needed to be described in a protocol, and we needed to investigate how we could share this multimodal intervention with other professionals. Finally, we had to wait to determine whether the results would last after we ended the cognitive training. We started practical research and made improvements in the process of transferring the intervention to colleagues and during collaboration with parents and partners. In November 2012 I felt that there would be more options for strengthening the treatment process (i.e., information, emotions and events) if we could gather fragmented pieces of information stored in the long-term memory and reprocess this information in a coherent manner to reflect the following concepts: self, significant others and social. To reprocess information, the arousal level of a patient must be regulated slightly above the level of 'falling asleep' at the Alpha-Theta border (7-8 Hz). This arousal level is important for transitioning from deep relaxation, visualization, creativity, and learning to information acquisition from long-term memory [4, 5].

We currently work with two different arousal levels using the multimodal approach of ReAttach. We need a high arousal level for optimal information processing, good joint attention, active stimulation of multiple sensory integration and training social cognitive skills. To help participants with autism process information in a coherent manner, a near-sleep condition is required to access fragmented information that needs reprocessing. Both arousal levels might be reached by changing the tapping frequency at the back of the participants' hands.
