Reparenting yourself through the Ideal Parent Figure method means more than a single visualization exercise. Most people encounter IPF as a tool: you imagine yourself as a young child being raised by loving, attuned parents. That's true, and it's a beautiful starting point. But it's only one piece of a much larger, carefully structured path from insecure to earned secure attachment.

This article lays out that full path. Where it starts, what the stages look like, and where it ultimately goes. If you're new to the Ideal Parent Figures method of reparenting, I'll give you a broad overview of what the method actually is and how it works. And if you're already familiar with IPF, read on. What follows goes well beyond the basic tool and into the complete pathway that often doesn't get discussed.

1. Foundations of Secure Attachment

There are five fundamental attachment needs that a child needs from their caregivers. When these are filled to a "good enough" extent, the child most likely will grow up with secure attachment. If any or all of these are not fulfilled to a good enough extent, the child will likely grow up with some degree of attachment insecurity.

When these qualities are properly modelled for the child, they become ingrained in the child's working model of relationships and they carry this way of relating into their adult relationships when they grow up. All of these qualities are also fundamental in healthy, secure intimate adult relationships and friendships.

The Three Pillars Method of treating attachment disturbances by Dr. Daniel P. Brown aims to be a complete and comprehensive path to reparenting yourself and establishing a new working model of attachment. This is not about just understanding and managing insecure attachment. It's about transforming the attachment style from the ground up.

His primary innovation, the Ideal Parent Figures (IPF), is becoming more well known. But most people only understand IPF as a tool, and don't understand it within the context of the complete path from insecure to secure attachment.

So in the article that follows, I am going to lay out the stages of the attachment healing path from start to finish. Note that I use the term "finish" lightly. In one sense, there is a measurable end point to this work. Earned Secure attachment is something that can be tested for and measured.

When someone takes an Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), the results of that test will tell them whether they are in the secure range or not. Being in the secure range is going to be good enough for most people to move on and do something else. That said, there is no point where a person is as secure as possible and cannot possibly become even more secure.

We're not looking for perfection. We're looking to become secure enough to have healthy, meaningful relationships, a strong sense of self esteem, and an ability to pursue one's life with purpose and meaning.

The Three Pillars of Secure Attachment

Dan Brown laid out a pathway to develop three pillars of secure attachment. These are not chronological. They all happen simultaneously, and there are also practices to focus on each individually.

It's worth noting that these three pillars reinforce each other continuously. Developing a secure internal working model through IPF tends to improve metacognitive capacity, and improving metacognition tends to deepen the quality of the IPF work. The pillars aren't separate tracks running in parallel. They're more like three aspects of the same unfolding process.

Overview of the Journey

Here is a rough outline of the stages. Keep in mind this is not perfectly linear, and none of these phases simply finishes before the next begins. The timeline is highly individual.

Imagining Ideal Parent Figures

Many people grow up insufficiently nourished in at least one if not all of these fundamental attachment qualities. As a result, it can be difficult for a person to even imagine what it feels like to receive true care. If you can't imagine what true secure connection even feels like, it's extremely difficult to expect it, advocate for it, and seek it out in your life.

The client imagines scenes of themselves where these IPFs protect them and help to create a safe environment. They imagine these IPFs really seeing and understanding them, delighting in their being, and soothing them when they're upset. When the child self feels really comforted and nurtured, the IPFs encourage the child self to play and explore the world, and celebrate their discoveries.

Here is a basic example meditation I made that gives you an idea of this:

Keep in mind, listening to a recording is very different from the context of working with a facilitator. In an actual session, you don't just do what the facilitator says. There's a back and forth of co-creating the scene in a way that is specific to your needs, working through challenges, working with positive imagery that spontaneously arises, etc. The recordings just give a taste of the method.

Working Through Resistance

In most cases, resistance comes up at some point. Something about receiving this care and attention from the IPFs is challenging, such as:

• "I can't trust that the care is genuine"
• "I can't trust that the IPFs won't go away, judge, or shame"
• "I can't imagine what the care would look like"
• "I feel ashamed of emotions"

Exactly how to handle the resistance is very context dependent on the client, their individual temperament, their resistance, and on whatever is unfolding in that particular moment. In any case, we're looking towards the positive opposite experience. Note, finding the positive opposite in this context is not about bypassing challenging emotions. It's about identifying and implementing the conditions that allow the relationship with the IPFs to feel safe and secure, allowing the challenges to be moved, transformed, expressed, or released.

For example, if the client feels they really can't trust the IPFs, the facilitator may give the prompt that "These IPFs see that you have a hard time trusting them, and they respond in just the right way that helps you trust them a little more."

Sometimes this alone works, and often it doesn't. There are many ways to explore and work through this resistance, but I'll lay out one pathway that I often find effective.

In this case, we might imagine that the scene is still happening, but we can step outside of the scene to view it from outside. Often the exchange goes something like this:

Notice that it's very easy for the client to talk about what they don't want. It's usually a lot more challenging for them to imagine what they do want. This is common in my experience.

We go back into the scene from there, and often the client is able to have the positive, secure experience with the Ideal Parent Figures. Please keep in mind that the exchange above is just an example. What the resistance might be, what emotions are felt, and what the client wants from the Ideal Parent Figures is entirely individual.

But in any case, the process of noticing the resistance, why it's there, and finding the pathway to connection helps build a lot of trust in the secure connection with the IPFs. This is also a highly relevant skill in real, adult relationships.

It's very common that adults in romantic relationships can label that they're upset and don't feel good. But that doesn't help establish a pathway back to connection. The pathway from disconnection to connection in adult relationships relies on the capacity to name the problem, imagine the positive vision of connection, voice what needs have to be met for that connection to happen, and then enact it.

The scenes of working through resistance with the Ideal Parent Figures is a training ground that helps the client practice and actually experience this pathway on a felt-sense level.

Once receiving true care from the IPFs feels quite fluid, we move into resolving specific traumas and triggers, processing memories and doing memory reconsolidation in the Activations phase.

In between sessions, throughout the week, the client notes all the experiences that brought a certain activation to their attachment system. Their partner or friend didn't respond to their text and they felt a sense of abandonment. Their boss criticized their work and they felt like a failure. The local barista didn't laugh at their joke and they felt rejected. Or literally anything else. The list of potential triggers is endless and unique to each individual.

When we're triggered by these external experiences and start to play out maladaptive stories of "I'm not good enough" or "I'm all alone" or "I have to please everyone else," it's because the body remembers something. The body remembers a time when these stories were important for self-preservation and protection.

Tracing Back Body Memories

The client comes into the session with the facilitator talking about one or more significant activations they've experienced. The facilitator guides the client to imagine themselves in the moment of that activation to start connecting with the felt sense. Where exactly does that come up in the body? How does the body react?

Usually this is not a foreign feeling. It's usually quite familiar, something they've experienced before.

The facilitator then guides the client to float back through the years to the first time they felt this way. It's not important that this is verifiably the first time this was felt. We don't even have to be 100% sure that the memory actually happened. We work with whatever is revealed. We don't want to analyze — we'll just follow whatever memories naturally arise.

Reimagining the Memory

The facilitator guides the client to imagine the scene of that memory, but this time the client has the support of the Ideal Parent Figures to support and protect them. They see right away what's wrong and know exactly what the child-self needs.

The IPFs see right away how they're feeling, and give the client comfort and soothing, letting them know they're truly loved and cared for. Or maybe the IPFs see the child needs to be removed from the situation, so they pick the client up and bring them to safety.

Having the support and protection of the IPFs also frees the client up to respond in this imaginary scene in exactly the way they would have wanted to originally if they knew they had this support. In the original memory, maybe they said nothing when they really wanted to speak up, so now they can say whatever they wish they could have said.

Play it Forward

Once the client has been fully comforted and soothed by the Ideal Parent Figures, the facilitator may guide them carrying the new emotional learnings of the activation experience into scenes of themselves at older and older stages of development. First as a young child, then an older child, adolescence, older teenager, up and up until the present day.

Then, possibly, they may reimagine the moment from their present day life that caused the activation being explored. This time they can imagine reacting to that present day scene as an adult in a new way, informed by the resolving experience they've been through.

Not Denying the Past

This process of memory reconsolidation is not about pretending the actual memory didn't happen the way that it did. We're not changing the biographical content of the memory.

The activations process opens up a new emotional conclusion to the triggering event. If the original event led to the emotional conclusion that "It is dangerous for me to set boundaries," then the possibility of imagining the event with a sense of feeling safe and protected creates an experiential mismatch to that assumption, and opens up the possibility that "I feel empowered in myself when I set boundaries."

Expanding Emotional Capacity

A traumatic memory gets stored as a traumatic memory in the body because the emotional content is too much for the nervous system to experience directly. So instead of being processed and released, it gets stuck.

The support from the Ideal Parent Figures expands the capacity to experience the memory without getting overwhelmed, which creates the opportunity to challenge the assumptions of that memory. This process expands the window of tolerance to experience the related sensations.

A Note on EMDR

Full disclosure: at the time of writing, I am not trained in EMDR, so my description below gives my best understanding of the process based on my research.

EMDR also contains a process of revisiting traumatic memories with the support of nurturing caregivers. These nurturing caregivers act as a resource that help the client to process the traumatic memory without becoming overwhelmed.

Secure Intimacy

We've felt what it's like to be in secure relationship as a child with the Ideal Parent Figures. In Secure Intimacy, the facilitator guides the client first to imagine that felt sense of security with the IPFs. Then the facilitator guides the client to take that felt sense of security and imagine them feeling that same secure connection with an imaginary Ideal Partner in a romantic relationship as an adult.

The difference here is that the relationship between the child self and the IPFs is hierarchical, with the IPFs taking on the responsibility of fully caring for the child without any expectation of reciprocity. In Secure Intimacy, the five qualities of secure attachment are all present, but the relationship contains reciprocity.

The client feels safe with the Ideal Partner, and the client supports the Ideal Partner in feeling safe. Both see and attune to each other, delight in each other, soothe each other, and encourage each other's exploration. Each adult in the relationship also has their own strong sense of self, and in addition to meeting each other's needs, each can also self-resource to meet their own needs. This models secure, healthy interdependence.

One thing worth noting: in Brown and Elliott's framework as described in Attachment Disturbances in Adults, the Secure Intimacy protocol works best after earned secure attachment has already been established. The positive descriptors that shaped the IPF work earlier in treatment are carried directly into the secure intimacy imagery, creating a through-line from the child's experience with the IPFs into the adult's vision of romantic partnership.

Best Self

This is a really exciting period to me, because we get to explore all the new possibilities of life that open up with a base of secure attachment, resilient sense of self, strong self esteem, and a deep inner knowing supported by the Ideal Parent Figures.

What is possible for you when you operate in the world in this way? Here, we don't need to focus only on intimate relationships. We can focus on all the areas of your life where you've found it difficult to express yourself freely and authentically.

Whatever your area of focus is, you imagine a scene of yourself expressing yourself authentically from your strong sense of self, feeling really good about yourself as you do so. However you express yourself, you imagine other people responding positively to your expression.

Why do we imagine people responding positively? Because most people are so used to limiting their expression to protect themselves from the judgement of others, they can't even imagine what their authentic expression would be. The expectation of rejection leads them to reject themselves before they've even put themselves out there.

By imagining the positive response of others, we subdue the automatic self-rejection and can start to explore what your authentic expression truly is. Once we've developed a strong sense of this, we can bring this strong sense of self into progressively more challenging environments, building resilience until the positive sense of self doesn't require others' validation to stay intact.

Self-Agency

Self-agency is the felt sense that you are capable of having a real impact on the world and on the people around you in the way that you actually intend. Not just going through the motions, but genuinely believing that what you do matters and that you can shape your experience.

For many people with insecure attachment, this sense is fragile or absent. So much energy has gone into managing other people's reactions, or bracing for rejection, that there's been very little room to ask "what do I actually want to create here?" The Best Self work starts to open that question up in a felt-sense way, not just conceptually.

In sessions, this might look like imagining yourself taking a meaningful action in your life and really feeling the impact of it landing. Feeling that you said what you meant to say, and that it was received. That you put something out in the world and it made a difference. With practice, this starts to build a genuine internal sense of efficacy that supports all the other changes happening in the work.

Self-Esteem

One of the quieter but genuinely significant threads running through all of this work is the development of self esteem. Not self esteem as a concept you adopt intellectually, but as something you can actually feel.

A big part of this is learning to take the warmth and support of the IPFs and really let it land. To notice that when the IPFs delight in you, something in you loosens. That loosening is what it feels like to actually believe, even a little bit, that you're worth caring about.

The goal, eventually, is to be able to carry a background feeling of basic okayness about yourself through most of your day, most days. That might sound modest, but for someone who has spent years feeling fundamentally not good enough, it's genuinely transformative.

This is not a process talked about in Attachment Disturbances in Adults, as far as I can recall. But Dan Brown did talk about this to a group of students, recorded in a transcript in Cloudless Mind: Conversations on Buddhahood.

First you embody yourself as the Ideal Parent for a young child, extending pure compassion and love to them just in the way your Ideal Parent Figures did for you. Then you imagine yourself extending this compassion to all the people in your life that you like, who naturally generate a positive feeling in you.

Then, slightly more challenging, you imagine yourself extending this compassion to the people in your life that you don't like so much, finding the common humanity within them. Then you extend this to all the people you feel neutral about, the background characters in your life, people you pass by in the street. Finally, you imagine yourself as the Ideal Parent extending this compassion to all beings on the planet.

This sequence might sound familiar to practitioners of Tibetan Buddhist loving-kindness meditation (metta), and that's not accidental. Brown's work bridges attachment theory and deep contemplative traditions in ways that are, in my opinion, some of the most interesting territory in all of this. The movement from receiving care to extending care universally is a shift that has real implications for how a person moves through the world.

The grief that comes up in this process isn't only about childhood. Often it's much more immediate. Someone has lost a loved one. A relationship has ended. A friendship has shifted in a way that can't be undone. There's a conversation that really needs to happen with someone, and for one reason or another, it just isn't possible. That's where grief tends to live most acutely, in the space between what needed to be said and what never got to be expressed.

Grief can also surface in relation to childhood experiences, and that thread is real too. Sometimes it's sadness that arises quietly in sessions when the IPFs offer something the actual parents never could. Sometimes anger. Sometimes a kind of relief that finally dissolves into tears. The grief is real precisely because the need was real.

The IPF work creates a container that is safe enough to actually feel this grief rather than defend against it.

Expressing What Was Never Said

Dan Brown described a specific approach to grief work in a podcast interview that I've found genuinely useful, both in my own experience and in my work with clients.

His view was that grief is often unexpressed emotion. Something that really needed to be said, that never got said. And the imaginal space we cultivate through IPF work turns out to be a remarkably good container for finally saying it.

The process looks something like this. First, you settle into a safe, supported place, usually imagining yourself held by the Ideal Parent Figures. From that grounded place, you imagine yourself in a room with the person who is the object of your grief. This might be a romantic partner you lost. Someone who passed away. Someone you're still in contact with but can't have an honest resolving conversation with for whatever reason.

The key is that the version of this person you're imagining isn't necessarily how they are in real life. It's the best version of them. Who they are deep down, the version that can really hear you and really understand. You're not working with the defended, limited version of them. You're working with their essential self.

From there, you say whatever is in your heart to say. Whatever you've been carrying that never got expressed. You say it fully, until the expression feels complete, imagining that they can truly take it in. And then this version of the person responds. They share something back. Something you really needed to hear from them. And you let yourself receive it.

I've found this can create a genuine sense of resolution, even when the real-world conversation could never happen that way. That said, I don't think this is a complete solution for all grief. If the relationship is particularly complicated, or if it's just too hard to imagine that resolving quality with this particular person, the process may not quite land. And grief doesn't always come in words. Sometimes it lives in the body. Sometimes it lives in parts that need a different kind of attention. Somatic work and parts work both catch a lot of what a more conversational approach like this one doesn't. In my experience, all of these approaches are worth drawing on, because grief tends to be layered.

Parts Work & Internal Family Systems

Parts Work and Internal Family Systems (IFS) fit naturally into the second pillar of the Three Pillars model: metacognition, self-awareness, and self-parenting.

In my view, developing a secure relationship with the Ideal Parent Figures first actually saves a significant amount of time in IFS work, because the IPF process models the exact quality of presence that Self Energy brings to parts. When you've already had many hours of experience of what it feels like to be truly seen and cared for without judgment, accessing that quality toward your own parts becomes much more natural.

For clients who find IFS resonant, I find the two approaches integrate very smoothly. The IPFs model the secure relating. Parts work then applies that same quality of relating internally.

Somatics

Somatic approaches complement every stage of this work. The body is where the attachment patterns actually live. Every contraction, every shutdown, every hyperarousal is the nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do.

One approach I find valuable is turning towards the sensation itself, meeting it with that Ideal Parent energy, and letting it know: "I see you, I feel you, I've got you." Then simply witnessing what unfolds. Sometimes the sensation softens. Sometimes an emotion surfaces. Sometimes a memory arises. The point isn't to force an outcome but to offer the body the same quality of presence the IPFs offer the child self.

Somatic Experiencing, developed by Peter Levine, and the work of Pat Ogden in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy both offer robust frameworks for this kind of body-based work, and both are, in my view, highly compatible with the IPF approach.