🔼: [[🛠 Protector Toolkit]], [[🕯️ Self-Parenting]], [[💡 Attachment Theory]], [[Hypnosis]]
# Ideal Parent Figure Protocol (IPF)
The full protocol's intention is to treat Attachment Disorders in both children and adults. It includes fostering metacognitive skills and working with a facilitator to develop collaborative capacity and accelerate attachment repatterning, but there are guided meditations we can do any time in which we imagine perfect caregivers looking after us as children. From what little experience I've had with it, it's very similar to the [[💡 Witnessing#Do-Over|Do-Over]] stage in [[⭐️ Internal Family Systems|Internal Family Systems]].
The Ideal Parent Figure is not an attempt to live in a fantasy life, to say something difficult didn’t happen in the past, or to trick our minds into believing anything. Instead it’s to give the bodymind examples of what [[Secure Attachment]] looks like so we have a larger sense of what our relational possibilities are, because if we don’t know that something is a possibility we aren’t going to see it, and if we don’t see it we don’t choose it. Much like reading a book, the Bodymind doesn’t care if something actually happened to us or if it was imagined. It uses the experience to decide the next thing to do. If we can imagine an ideal outcome, the bodymind uses that to respond to our present lives. The IPF lets us respond to life and relationship opportunities from a new, more secure place, regardless of what we learned in childhood experience.
Often in childhood we limit our knowledge of what we really want because in childhood it would have been too painful because we weren’t going to get it from our caregivers. But as adults this translates to being unable to tell what we like or don’t like, what we want or don’t want because our imagination is limited. IPF helps us re-open our imagination.
###### Imagining Ideal Parents
- Present
- Consistent
- Reliable
- Interested
- Offers protection
- Attuned
- Soothing and reassuring
- Expresses delight in our being
- Encourages exploration
- Do not imagine your real-life childhood caregivers or anyone you know. It’s normal for that to arise early on, but just drop it.
- It’s okay if there isn’t a strong, highly detailed visual. The felt sense is more important.
I sometimes imagine myself as the Ideal Parent nurturing my younger self.
![IPF Meditation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2au4jtL0O4)
This is is a westernization of Deity Yoga. The Deities are idealized versions representing the [[Qualities of Presence ☀️]]. We reify Qualities of Presence into Deities to learn something about them, but you can use any figure that means something to you. It's a kind of imaginal [[💡 Play|play]].
###### Resources
- [Perfect Nurturer Meditation Library](https://attachmentrepair.com/meditation-library/?_sft_techniques=perfect-nurturer-reinforcement)
- https://attachmentrepair.com
- [r/IdealParentFigures](https://www.reddit.com/r/IdealParentFigures/)
- [Therapist Uncensored – Treating Complex Trauma and Attachment with Daniel P. Brown](https://therapistuncensored.com/episodes/tu-87-treating-complex-trauma-and-attachment-with-guest-dr-daniel-brown/)
- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/meditation-x-attachment-with-george-haas/id1125066071?i=1000429540267
- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/meditation-x-attachment-with-george-haas/id1125066071?i=1000431084700 Meditation starts at 22:10.
- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/meditation-x-attachment-with-george-haas/id1125066071?i=1000487036765
###### See Also
- [[Abundance Mindset]]
%%
https://www.reddit.com/r/idealparentfigures/comments/17kmzes/the_happiest_ive_ever_been/
%%
[^1]: