I got the most value out of their previous courses / resources on something called “Ideal Parent Figure Protocol”, though they’re no longer offering that, since there was apparently some kind of a copyright dispute with the person who created that protocol. Archive.org still has their old “resources” page with some guided IPF meditations; I got quite a lot of value from just repeatedly listening to some on a daily basis.
They have a revised Attachment Repair course that uses a somewhat different sort of guided meditation instead, while trying to stick to similar principles; I’ve heard that some people consider the new meditation even better than the old one, but I haven’t tried it personally.
Doing (some facilitated, some on my own) Internal Family Systems and Bio-Emotive Framework sessions were also useful for me for working through specific hang-ups and issues.
Here’s what I wrote about IPF back in January; I’ve been intending to do a longer writeup of it, but haven’t gotten around that:
Attachment theory says that young children develop a subconscious emotional model of how they should react to their caregivers in order for the caregivers to treat them well. In the best case the children learn a model saying that it’s safe to just feel whatever they feel and that they are basically safe, but if their caregivers are un- or overresponsive then the children may develop emotional models that imply behaviors such as “best not to ask too much” or “need to be careful not to upset my caregiver by having the wrong emotions or needs”.
Those models then form the basic template of how to relate to people other than your caregiver—feeling basically safe and confident and relating to other people in a healthy way that’s neither clingy nor too obsessively independent, or not. And that basic foundation has a big impact on how things such as one’s self-esteem, concern about what others think of you, ability to set boundaries, and romantic relationships develop later on.
Now attachment repair is aimed at reprogramming insecure learning that one may have picked up at a young age, by leaning into the fact that the emotional brain that the programming is located in can’t reliably distinguish imagined experiences from real ones. So if you imagine yourself as a young child having the kinds of parents that are ideal from the perspective of developing a secure attachment bond, then this reprograms that original learning and can become as good as having had such a safe foundation all along, also helping you fix the kinds of issues that have developed later on due to not having a sufficiently secure attachment foundation.
Standard talk therapy typically cannot fully access this emotional learning, because much of it is laid down at the age of 6-24 months, so exists in a pre-verbal form. The attachment repair people claim that this technique can reprogram it, and that seems plausible at least based on my experience so far. [EDIT: I’m not totally bought into the precise claims about what age range IPF covers. It seems plausible to me that while it’s more capable of tapping into very early life experiences better than other therapies, it does also affect insecure conditioning developed somewhat later in childhood; I’ve had stuff come up while doing it going up to at least age 7 or so.]
I took Cedric’s earlier retreat on this and have been doing daily Ideal Parent Figure (IPF) practice afterwards. I’ve felt definite changes towards the better, with improved self-esteem, more of a sense of lightness in relating to other people, a sense of some early sexual hang-ups sorting themselves out, more thoroughly reprocessing and healing traumatic experiences which I thought I had processed already but which had still left lingering traces, and a general feeling of increased background safety that makes issues in general easier to handle. (Also a lot of other things but properly documenting all of it would require A Proper Big Writeup and I want to make sure that the changes stick before doing one.) Part of all of that is no doubt also due to unrelated inner work that I had been doing just before the retreat, but it’s also obvious that doing the IPF continues to produce additional healing.
If you have done something like Internal Family Systems before, then it feels like IPF acts as a super-charger to it. When I’m doing IFS alone, it can often be hard to unblend from parts with an agenda in order to have genuine sympathy towards specific parts. In IPF, you don’t really need to unblend, as it’s not your job to solve the problem, but rather it’s the task of the ideal parents. Your job is just to be a child and feel whatever it is that you feel and let them take care of any problems.
In theory I guess you shouldn’t need this course / practice if you are already securely attached. In practice I expect everyone to have some insecure attachment conditioning, though of course if you don’t have very much of it, then fixing it will be less useful than if you have a lot of it.
I got the most value out of their previous courses / resources on something called “Ideal Parent Figure Protocol”, though they’re no longer offering that, since there was apparently some kind of a copyright dispute with the person who created that protocol. Archive.org still has their old “resources” page with some guided IPF meditations; I got quite a lot of value from just repeatedly listening to some on a daily basis.
They have a revised Attachment Repair course that uses a somewhat different sort of guided meditation instead, while trying to stick to similar principles; I’ve heard that some people consider the new meditation even better than the old one, but I haven’t tried it personally.
Doing (some facilitated, some on my own) Internal Family Systems and Bio-Emotive Framework sessions were also useful for me for working through specific hang-ups and issues.
Here’s what I wrote about IPF back in January; I’ve been intending to do a longer writeup of it, but haven’t gotten around that: