I want to take this moment to just geek out about Ideal Parent Figures.
This email will not tell you how to use it better or how to achieve secure attachment. This is just the beautiful backstory of (and my personal reverence for) one of the most stunningly beautiful, effective, and interesting modalities that I’ve ever stumbled across.
Ideal Parent Figures was developed by Dr. Daniel P. Brown in collaboration with Dr. David Elliott and others at Harvard University. Dan Brown was a psychologist at Harvard and one of the leading pioneers in attachment theory since the days when attachment theory was quite new and unknown in the 70s.
Dan Brown’s Experience in Tibetan Buddhism
Dan Brown was also one of the world’s foremost and most knowledgeable masters of Tibetan Buddhism. He spent many, many years in direct mentorship, deeply studying the traditions of Mahamudra and Tibetan Buddhism. But the breadth of his knowledge was incredibl, about a wide variety of lineages of Buddhism.
His proficiency was such that when Tibetan Buddhists wanted to translate their ancient texts of practices into English, they told Dan that he was the only person in the world who could do it because he was the only person in the world who had a mastery of the work and who was also fluent in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and English.
The monks who knew the practices were very old, and the texts didn’t exist in English anywhere. They said that If he didn’t do it, those practices would be entirely forgotten within 10-15 years.
And so, as he said in an interview, “What was I going to do? Say no?”
So, he took sabbatical for ten years from Harvard to go be with Tibetan Buddhists and the Dalai Lama to translate the ancient Tibetan texts into English, so that they would be available for the West.
Tibetan Roots of Ideal Parent Figures
Ideal Parent Figures is essentially an adaptation of Tibetan Buddhist practices that Brown learned, then adapted for Western psychology and attachment theory.
In Tibetan Buddhism, the pathway to learning is that before you ever learn meditation itself, you spend two years working with a teacher on preliminary practices that purify the mind and put it into a naturally unfolding positive state. They believed that it was much smoother and easier to transcend the ego and move into deeper spiritual practices if the mind was stabilized in a naturally positive way.
One of those practices involved imagining the infinite compassion of your mother, and letting that love fill your soul and pour out to the world.
Dan recognized how this practice nourished a deep attachment need. He tried to teach these practices in the West, but found that people in the West often had too much of an ambivalent relationship with their parents to be able to imagine infinite compassion from their mother.
“Imagine the infinite compassion of your mother”
“Dude, what are you talking about? Have you met my mom?”
So he adapted that and said, “Okay, it’s not your actual parents, it’s these ideal parent figures who are perfectly suited to you and your nature who can fulfill all of your attachment needs.”
What are the Attachment Needs?
The attachment needs these IPFs fulfill are not random. They are based on decades of research in attachment theory.
- Safety,
- Attunement
- Delight
- Soothing
- Encouragement of exploration.
The results he found in treating people with attachment disturbances with this method were astounding. Levels of magnitude more effective than any other treatment that was available.
It works because Ideal Parent Figures nourishes attachment needs in a very unique way from any other modality that existed then or now (to my knowledge).
It’s the chance to not just understand, but actually experience on a felt-sense level what it is like to be in secure relationship and to receive true care. That experience creates corrective experiences for pre-verbal, pre-memory attachment experiences.
Behavioral vs Narrative Memory
Experiencing that felt sense of true care is essential because your attachment style exists in your behavioral memory.
Your “narrative memory” is everything you remember. This comes online after about 4 years of age.
Your “behavioral memory” is everything your body remembers, even if you don’t actually remember what happened. This comes online in the first four years of life, and it is where your attachment style lives.
Talking about your attachment alone doesn’t shift it, because talking about it only activates your narrative memory. Felt sense experiences activate your behavioral memory.
Giving vs Receiving Care in Reparenting
Other modalities that include reparenting elements (like Internal Family Systems) places you as the parent, parenting your own inner child. While giving you the experience that you can hold and parent yourself is very valuable, it is not the same as fully receiving parenting as the child.
I believe that this full receiving perspective is crucial for fully nourishing unmet childhood needs. While it’s great to care for yourself in a secure way, that only teaches independence. We’re looking to develop secure interdependence which requires the experience of being secure with “the other”.
I haven’t seen any other complete modality so thoroughly thought out and put together that creates the possibility of experiencing that secure interdependence is a reliable reproducible way.
Conclusion
I’m so grateful to Dr. Daniel P. Brown for his lifetime of work that produced this modality. I started this subreddit because I felt like this modality is so deeply unique and valuable, and there are a lot of people who would really benefit from it if they knew about it. I’m just so grateful to be alive at a time when a practice like this is available, and I hope to see the access and awareness of it continue to grow over the coming years.