One practice I’ve been doing a bit since January has been something called Ideal Parent Figure Protocol, which includes guided meditations (e.g.) for imagining yourself as a child with the kinds of idealized parents who are always perfectly supportive and understanding and available, to correct for any emotional lacks created by the ways in which your real parents were just human and non-perfect. One of the parts of the practice is something called “microhits”, which basically means making your ideal parents your shoulder advisors so that they’ll be available for emotional support whenever you need it. (I haven’t gotten this very strongly, but I’ve heard people say it’s really powerful if you do get it to work.)
The hard part of making something like this work is that if your parents were messed up enough for you need to do this, your concept of an “ideal” parent is probably pretty broken, though perhaps in subtle ways. There were a lot of counterintuitive things I had to realize about parenting that aren’t well-understood in popular culture, to get this kind of thing right.
(Also, if you do get it right, then a lot of the time you can just use memory reconsolidation on the events where things didn’t work out the right way, and then you don’t need the shoulder advising on that topic any more, because the new response is embedded in the schema for responding to situations like that.)
One practice I’ve been doing a bit since January has been something called Ideal Parent Figure Protocol, which includes guided meditations (e.g.) for imagining yourself as a child with the kinds of idealized parents who are always perfectly supportive and understanding and available, to correct for any emotional lacks created by the ways in which your real parents were just human and non-perfect. One of the parts of the practice is something called “microhits”, which basically means making your ideal parents your shoulder advisors so that they’ll be available for emotional support whenever you need it. (I haven’t gotten this very strongly, but I’ve heard people say it’s really powerful if you do get it to work.)
The hard part of making something like this work is that if your parents were messed up enough for you need to do this, your concept of an “ideal” parent is probably pretty broken, though perhaps in subtle ways. There were a lot of counterintuitive things I had to realize about parenting that aren’t well-understood in popular culture, to get this kind of thing right.
(Also, if you do get it right, then a lot of the time you can just use memory reconsolidation on the events where things didn’t work out the right way, and then you don’t need the shoulder advising on that topic any more, because the new response is embedded in the schema for responding to situations like that.)