Any other specific methods of internal work that you recommend for this kind of self-work?
(This whole area is my main special interest for hobby study, though I still have a long ways to go in my own personal progress, so I will eagerly look into any number of resources that come recommended from people who got real value out of them)
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.
Transform Your Self by Steve Andreas is good for working on self-concepts. Kaj worked with it a while with personal improvements that were visible to coworkers and then we (some rationalists in Berlin) had a reading group for it.
To give you one example of what it did for me personally, in 1-2 hours I adopted the self belief of “I’m attractive” that I previously didn’t hold.
Yeah, the self-concept work was really useful earlier on. But it’s worth noting that the self-concept work was still anchored in a paradigm of “my sense of emotional security is dependent on what probability I assign to other people liking me”; you can see this in my original writeup, where I said:
Suppose that you have an unstable self-concept around “being a good person”, and you commit some kind of a faux pas. Or even if you haven’t actually committed one, you might just be generally unsure of whether others are getting a bad impression of you or not. Now, there are four levels on which you might feel bad about the real or imagined mistake:
Feeling bad because you think you’re an intrinsically bad person
Feeling bad because you suspect others think bad of you and that this is intrinsically bad (if other people think bad of you, that’s terrible, for its own sake)
Feeling bad because you suspect others think bad of you and that this is instrumentally bad (other people thinking bad of you can be bad for various social reasons)
Feeling bad because you might have hurt or upset someone, and you care about what others feel
Out of these, #3 and #4 are reasonable, #1 and #2 less so. When I fixed my self-concept, reaction #1 mostly vanished. But interestingly, reaction #2 stuck around for a while… or at least, a fear of #2 stuck around for a while.
#1 and #2 seem to indeed have disappeared; however, I’ve still continued to experience insecurities which have taken the forms of what seems like excessive worries of #3 and #4 (thinking that I’ve displeased someone in a way which will make them like me less, as well as worrying that someone might have felt upset over something that they in all likelihood won’t even remember). These seem to be the kinds of issues that can’t be fixed by internal work alone, since they are about the external world: in order to evaluate how justified these are, I need to actually test the extent to which something e.g. makes other people dislike me.
Self-concept work was basically about assembling evidence for me having some particular trait, such as “I’m likeable”. But there was a sense in which that approach, while helpful in many ways, was still buying into a deeper insecure emotional schema of “I need to accumulate enough evidence for people in any given interaction actively liking me”, rather than seeing the possibility that it’s possible to achieve deeper changes where the whole question becomes less important.
Reading your other post it seems like IPF is for solving the issues causing problems that are learned before the second birthday and self-concept issues are problems that arrise later then that.
I would expect that for many people both kind of issues are important to resolve.
Yeah, though I should probably add to my other comment (I’ll go edit it in) that 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.
But I agree with your general point that self-concept work and IPF seem complementary. (I’ve actually also been going back to self-concept work a bit more in the very last week, since it feels like the possibility of having more strongly positive self-concepts has gotten more “unlocked” after IPF/IFS/Coherence Therapy work.)
What parts of https://attachmentrepair.com/ did you get value out of in particular?
Any other specific methods of internal work that you recommend for this kind of self-work?
(This whole area is my main special interest for hobby study, though I still have a long ways to go in my own personal progress, so I will eagerly look into any number of resources that come recommended from people who got real value out of them)
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:
Transform Your Self by Steve Andreas is good for working on self-concepts. Kaj worked with it a while with personal improvements that were visible to coworkers and then we (some rationalists in Berlin) had a reading group for it.
To give you one example of what it did for me personally, in 1-2 hours I adopted the self belief of “I’m attractive” that I previously didn’t hold.
I hadn’t heard of that (that I recall), happy to hear that. :)
Yeah, the self-concept work was really useful earlier on. But it’s worth noting that the self-concept work was still anchored in a paradigm of “my sense of emotional security is dependent on what probability I assign to other people liking me”; you can see this in my original writeup, where I said:
And then, in my later follow-up to the work, I wrote:
Self-concept work was basically about assembling evidence for me having some particular trait, such as “I’m likeable”. But there was a sense in which that approach, while helpful in many ways, was still buying into a deeper insecure emotional schema of “I need to accumulate enough evidence for people in any given interaction actively liking me”, rather than seeing the possibility that it’s possible to achieve deeper changes where the whole question becomes less important.
Reading your other post it seems like IPF is for solving the issues causing problems that are learned before the second birthday and self-concept issues are problems that arrise later then that.
I would expect that for many people both kind of issues are important to resolve.
Yeah, though I should probably add to my other comment (I’ll go edit it in) that 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.
But I agree with your general point that self-concept work and IPF seem complementary. (I’ve actually also been going back to self-concept work a bit more in the very last week, since it feels like the possibility of having more strongly positive self-concepts has gotten more “unlocked” after IPF/IFS/Coherence Therapy work.)