This program will focus on working through negative early attachment conditioning especially as it relates to exploration and self-development. We will approach this from attachment theory and attachment repair perspectives.

We’ll do this work primarily through guided meditations along with relevant psycho-education

Attachment Theory describes one of the earliest phases of our psychological development. It describes the behaviours of the infant from ages 6 months to three years of age when it ventures away from the caregiver to explore and then goes back to seek safety, affection, and care from the ‘secure base’.  These early experiences imprint on us forming emotional memories (schemas) that go on to condition many aspects of life thereafter.

When the ‘secure base’ isn’t entirely secure our exploratory capacities and self development are undermined. We’ll focus on fixing this conditioning through direct attachment repair work (guided meditations).

The structure is set up such to help us heal common aspects of disordered attachment conditioning (emphasis on anxious preoccupied attachment). There will be four guided meditation sessions focused the four Schemas of the “Schema Domain” of “Impaired Autonomy and Performance” These four Schemas all related back directly to the exploration end of attachment conditioning.

According to Jeffery Young “An early maladaptive schema is a pervasive self-defeating or dysfunctional theme or pattern of memories, emotions, and physical sensations, developed during childhood or adolescence and elaborated throughout one’s lifetime, that often has the form of a belief about the self or the world.” Jeffrey Young also calls the schemas “life traps”.

The form of meditation that we’ll use is the “Schema Repatterning Meditation”  This meditation uses the “Perfect Nurturers” to reparent our inner, vulnerable child and thereby bring about emotional memory reconsolidation and related positive change.

Details about modalities

The technique that we’ll be using, the “Schema Repatterning Meditation” is influenced by Jeffrey Young’s Schema Therapy approach, Dan Brown and David Elliot’s Ideal Parent Figure Protocol (IPF), and Bruce Ecker, Laurel Hulley, and Robin Ticic’s Coherence Therapy.

Schema therapy was developed by Jeffrey Young in response to seeing how traditional Beckian Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) was ineffective for patients with more serious disturbances like personality disorders.

IPF was developed particularly to treat insecure attachment.

Coherence therapy is a therapeutic modality that focuses on bringing “transformational change” through emotional memory reconsolidation.

Schemas, Psycho-Education and Guided Meditations

Schemas

We will do psycho-education and reparative meditations on each the following schemas:¹

• Dependence/Incompetence
• Vulnerability to Harm and Illness
• Enmeshment/Undeveloped Self
• Failure

Moreover we’ll investigate how each of these schemas manifest as behaviors (schema modes); particularly the coping modes of surrender, avoidance, and overcompensation.  Then we’ll regress back to the vulnerable child mode and feel into the schema, studying how it was brought about through difficult childhood experiences.  Then we’ll reparent the vulnerable child around those difficult experiences.

Psycho-Education

We will start with a brief lecture on attachment theory, attachment repair, the Schema Repatterning Meditation using Perfect Nurturers, and Schema Therapy.

Then, before each guided meditation on each schema listed above, we will do a brief psycho-education on that particular schema drawing both from Jeffrey Young’s Schema Theory and Attachment Theory.

Guided Meditations

Guided meditation will be the primary means for working through the schemas. We will be taking an attachment theory based re-parenting approach in the guided meditation. These meditations will give us corrective emotional experiences. The “perfect nurturers” will reparent our inner, vulnerable child in the meditation. These meditations will help us remap the ‘internal working model of attachment’.

We will apply each of these meditations to each the five schemas listed above:

• Schema Repatterning Meditation, a meditation in which our “perfect nurturers” reparent our inner, vulnerable child.
• Tong Len, a Tibetan Buddhist compassion meditation. This will help us cultivate compassion generally and also particularly around the schema in question. Moreover, by considering how others suffer with the same schemas we will see how we are not alone in our difficulties. This helps to normalize the painful experience of the schemas. Moreover, compassion around our shared difficulties further builds solidarity and a sense connection with others.
• Positive Opposite meditation will open up our imagination to see how we can move past our schema “life traps” and open up to the positive opposite of our schemas. Thereby we see new and better possibilities for our lives. That helps us actually change the behaviors towards the positive;
• Mentalization exercises. Mentalization, also known as metacognition is the ability to reflect on your own and others’ mental states. This helps us understand the motivations that drive behavior. Weak mentalization abilities are correlated with poorer functioning in life, and psychological disorders like personality disorders, depression, anxiety disorders, and substance abuse disorder. Strong mentalization is a hallmark of robust mental health. Understanding your own and others mental states helps to develop confidence in making sense out of the world and your experience of it. All the guided meditations will be peppered with instructions that encourage looking back at one’s own mind state and the mind states of others. This will improve our mentalization abilities.