Attachment Theory & Repair
The Path to Earned Secure Attachment: A Deep Dive into Healing our Childhood Conditioning with Guided Visualization Meditation
8 Week Online Meditation Course- Date: 2nd Oct - 27th Nov 2023
- Instructor: Cedric Reeves
- Cost: Sliding scale $120 ~ $400
Join us for this course where we will do visualization practices that use "perfect nurturers" to reparent our inner child.
The intended outcome is to get you doing the meditation practice to move you along the path towards earned secure attachment.
This program is for people who have insecure attachment, in particular those who have tried other healing modalities, like psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation, with disappointing results.
Who is this for?
- For anyone who wants to go from insecure to secure attachment.
- Suitable for anyone new to attachment-work, or is already experienced.
- People with Insecure Attachment.
- For anyone who is willing to do the work to get results.
Format
- Program: One live 90 minute class per week
- Live Online Sessions: The live sessions will be hosted on Zoom. An email with the zoom links will be sent to you after you have registered.
- Q&A: There will be opportunity to ask questions during the Q&A section.
Attendance & Recordings
- Partial attendance is fine - however you get best results if you attend all sessions.
- Late Starts: You can join even after it has started.
- View at your own pace: The event will be recorded and sent out to registered participants for viewing on your own schedule.
Event Date & Time
This course will run twice in order to be accessible to people in different time zones. The content is exactly the same. You will get the access details for both after signing up.
There will be one live 90 minute class per week.
Option 1 Monday |
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+12h
|
Daylight Savings finishes in the US on Nov 5th, but in Europe on Oct 29th. As a result, participants in Europe should note that classes will start an hour earlier on Oct 30th.
Class Schedule
This is the approximate format of each class.
Duration | Activity |
---|---|
5 mins | Short meditation to settle the mind |
5 mins | Review of last week’s class (first class will be introductions instead) |
35 mins | Lecture on new material |
5 mins | Break |
40 mins | Guided meditation related to material just discussed |
30 mins | Depending on time, there can be an optional thirty minutes extra Q&A after the 90 minute class ends for those who want to stay on. |
We will be doing deep work. For that reason please feel free to take a break at any point.
course Overview
This program is suitable for beginners to meditation and healing work.
This program will cover:
- The basics of attachment theory
- How it forms much of the developmental foundation for adult mental health
- How attachment conditioning is made up of attachment schemas which together form an “internal working model of attachment” (Bowlby)
- We will re-pattern and work through these attachment schemas systematically
- How insecure attachment usually implies deficits in mentalization capacities (metacognitive, perspective taking abilities)
- Which we start correcting in the guided meditation
- How to heal our early attachment conditioning in order to have much improved well-being, better romantic and platonic relationships, and a stronger, healthy sense of self
This is a practice oriented course.
Doing the work (meditations in this case) is what brings about the results. The learning content of the course is intended to guide and encourage the meditation practice.
Why is focusing on attachment repair especially relevant to people who have struggled with other healing modalities?
- Attachment conditioning sets the foundation for much of psychological development thereafter. The foundation, optimally, should be healthy before further work is fruitful.
- Attachment conditioning happens between 6 and 20 months of age: before there is much narrative or cognitive functioning.
- For this reason doing work at a later developmental level (cognitive/narrative approaches to healing (CBT etc.)) is not as effective without a solid base. Healing attachment conditioning should come first. Then other healing modalities (talk therapy, mindfulness, meditation, etc) can more easily have their desired effects when built on the foundation of secure attachment conditioning.
- In order to fix attachment conditioning we must have lived, emotionally corrective experiences.
- This is the core focus on this course: Having emotionally corrective experiences that open up new possibilities for greater happiness and ease, better relationships, and more self-efficacy.
What is the primary practice/ healing modality in this course?
We’ll focus on ‘Schema Repatterning Meditation’ (SRM). SRM is a guided visualization in which we:
- First identify our problematic, negative schemas (emotional learnings/beliefs) and modes (problematic, symptom producing behaviors that result from the schemas/beliefs)
- Investigate these beliefs with interest and openness, bringing them fully into awareness using sentence stem completion exercises (based on Bruce Ecker’s work)
- Discover their origins in childhood, adolescence, and earlier adulthood seeing how these negative learnings were helpful and adaptive at the time, but now no longer adaptive to our adult life
- Have a calibrated and attuned emotionally corrective experience in the guided meditation that juxtaposes the old negative learning (consistent with Bruce Ecker’s Coherence Therapy)
- This juxtaposition experience creates a “prediction error” which then initiates the process of memory reconsolidation.
- All along the way, the meditation guidance helps us develop our metacognitive capacities, correcting executive function deficits that often accompany insecure attachment
This lived corrective experience opens up new possibilities freeing up the narrow, fixed views of our old way of seeing ourselves and the world (schemas) thereby making our ‘symptoms’ unnecessary. These changes are permanent without need for continuing maintenance work.
Drawing from the insights of modern neuroscience, SRM gets right to the root causes of unwanted behaviors by reconsolidating the emotional memories (Ecker et al., 2012).
This course and the guided SRM meditation draws from:
- Attachment Theory
- Jeffrey Young’s Schema Therapy
- Bruce Ecker’s Coherence Therapy
- The Work of Byron Katie
- Shirley Jean Schmidt’s Developmental Needs Meeting strategy
- Laurel Parnell’s Attachment-Focused EMDR
- Dan Brown and David Elliott’s Ideal Parent Figure Protocol (IPF) / Three Pillars Model
- Mentalization/Metacogntive therapies (Fonagy, DiMaggio, Liotti)
- Buddhist Visualization Meditation
- Buddhist Heart Practices:
- Loving Kindness
- Compassion
- Appreciative Joy
- Equanimity (Equanimous Love)
Measuring of progress (before and after)
You will have the option to take an in depth assessment before the 8 week course and then again after you’ve completed it. The purpose of this is to determine your baseline attachment security, schemas (limiting self-beliefs), sense of safety, anxiety and mood. Moreover this will help you monitor these qualities to assess your improvements over the course. The assessment is free and you will get the results within a few days of completing it.
This anonymized information will then help us complete a pilot study on this attachment repair meditation modality.
Course Curriculum
The course is broken up into 8 classes
Lecture Outline
- Introduction
- What is attachment theory
- How & when is attachment conditioning learned
- What is the Internal Working Model of Attachment
- How attachment conditioning is the core of your mental health
- The value of attachment
- Attachment repair:
- How long does it take?
- How much work is necessary?
- Is it worth it?
- Perfect Nurturer Reinforcement Meditation
- What it is
- How to use it
- How and why it heals
- Primer on the four major attachment styles
Meditation
- Guided meditation to establish the Perfect Nuturers
Homework Assignment
- In-class experiential self-assessment quiz to help you figure out your own attachment style.
- Listen to the guided meditation 30 mins between one and 6 times during the week, as you have time, and also doing “micro-hit” of the SRM meditation in stressful situations as a means of emotional regulation
Lecture Outline
- Review of first class & Q&A
- Schema Repatterning Meditation (SRM)
- Deepening our understanding of how and why it heals
- Emotionally corrective experiences (dis-confirming knowledge)
- Role of the ‘responsive other’ to dis-confirm toxic belief
- Compassion
- Attunement as dis-confirming of the negative schema
- Sympathetic joy
- Unconditional positive regard (equanimous love)
- Compassion
- Role of the ‘responsive other’ to dis-confirm toxic belief
- Difference between transformational change and counteractive change (Ecker et al)
- Emotional learnings or felt-beliefs (schemas)
- What are they
- How do they form
- How do the schemas and resultant schema-modes comprise our attachment style
- How to bring them into awareness them (sentence stems) (Ecker et al, 2012)
- How do we use Schema Repatterning Meditation to heal them by having an emotionally corrective experience that dis-confirms the old, negative schema
- How is adult attachment assessed?
- AAI
- Assessing attachment pre and post-treatment
- Dealing with ‘resistance’ and other difficulties:
- Resistance is our friend and guide not our enemy
- Resistance points us to the most fruitful schemas to focus on
Meditation
- Guided SRM Meditation on the Schema of Emotional Deprivation
Homework Assignment
- There will be an optional homework assignment
Lecture Outline
- Introduction to the “Early Maladaptive Schemas” and “Schema Modes” (self-parts)
- Overview of Mentalization (metacognition) (Liotti, DiMaggio) (Steele, Steele, Fonagy)
- Understanding your own and others mental states as mental states
- Proper discounting of indeterminacy of mental states
- Mental states as a ‘guesstimate’
- Understanding causal relationships between mental states
- Ability to take skillful postures towards mental states in order to bring about emotional regulation
- Meaning Making
- Recognition of developmental aspects like how past experiences present experiences
- How to make reasonable and accurate mental attributions to others
- Planning in the face of limited information
- Understanding the impact of context on decision making
- Foster the ability to view things from the other’s perspective
- Recognition of interdependence
- Developing a sense of purpose greater than self
- How Mentalization abilities correlate with attachment conditioning
Meditation
- Guided "Mentalizing the Modes" Meditation
Homework Assignment
- There will be an optional homework assignment
Lecture Outline
- Going Deeper with metacognition
- Further investigating the modes/parts from a schema therapy perspective like (Young et al., 2006):
- Demanding internalized parent voices
- Overcompensation modes like “workaholic mode”, or “self-aggrandizer mode”
- Avoidance detached modes like the “detached self-soother” and the “spaced out fantasy mode”
- Compliant surrender mode
- Vulnerable child mode (which we reparent with the SRM)
- Healthy Adult mode (which results out of the vulnerable child getting their needs met)
- How schemas (beliefs) and the schema modes (behaviors) feedback and interrelate with each other.
Meditation
- Guided Mentalizing the Modes Meditation
Homework Assignment
- There will be an optional homework assignment
Lecture Outline
- Further description of dismissing attachment in adults
- Causes of dismissing attachment
- Rejection of attachment needs
- Strengths and weaknesses and remedies of dismissing attachment
- Turning on the attachment mechanism
- Dealing with shame and rejection
- General Mentalization exercises
- Opening up to feelings
- Exploration behaviors they are 80% well developed – focus on collaborative sharing
- Importance of seeing ineffectively substituting exploration for attachment needs.
- How to treat dismissing attachment
- Encouraging to turn on the attachment mechanism
- Support for vulnerable expression through corrective emotional experiences that SHOW that it is ok to have needs
- Experience attentive attunement
- Schemas, coping modes, and schema modes associated with dismissing attachment.
Meditation
- Guided Schema Repatterning Meditation calibrated to Dismissing Attachment
Homework Assignment
- There will be an optional homework assignment
Lecture Outline
- Further description of preoccupied attachment in adults
- Origins of preoccupation
- Role-reversal – involvement in the mental states of the parent.
- Parental distractedness
- A form of rejection: your authentic, child presentation self wasn’t actually received. Instead you learned that you could get your needs met if you tended however you did learn the painful lesson that
- How to treat preoccupied attachment
- Building confidence in self and ability to explore
- Show how there is not reason to feel guilt about having needs
- Give permission to stop compulsive caretaking all for personal needs to be met
- Experience full, caling attention of the Perfect Nurturers
- Schemas, coping modes, and schema modes associated with preoccupied attachment.
- The false self and self-development
Meditation
- Guided Schema Repatterning Meditation calibrated to Dismissing Attachment
Homework Assignment
- There will be an optional homework assignment
Lecture Outline
- Further description of disorganized attachment in adults
- Origins of disorganized attachment
- Fearful experiences with the caregiver
- How to treat disorganized attachment
- Emphasize safety and trust
- Experience attunement and consoling
- Cannot Classify
- Guided Meditation on Fearful Self-Parts
Meditation
- Guided Meditation on Fearful Self-Parts
Homework Assignment
- There will be an optional homework assignment
Lecture Outline
- Review
- Detailed discussion of secure attachment
- Developing the Healthy Adult Mode
- Life purpose
- Self-Agency
- Self-Esteem
- Wrap Up
- Review
- Support for healing attachment conditioning
Meditation
- Schema Repatterning Meditation with Emphasis on Developing the Healthy Adult Mode & Positive Future Projection
Homework Assignment
- There will be an optional homework assignment
Miscellaneous Notes
The course is cohort-based and interactive. We have a slack group where you will be able to discuss, share experiences and consolidate what you are learning.
There will be time for Q&A and spot coaching during the live event. The Q&A recording will not be made available thereafter. If you do not attend live, you will not have access to the Q&A.
We will be doing deep work. For that reason please feel free to take a break at any point.
Measure your Progress With Before/After Assessments
Attachment Repair is offering this course that not only is entirely focused on healing the root of your attachment issues but also provides objective tools to measure and track your progress.
Attachment & Schema Assessment
Participation in this course will give you the option to enrol into our Attachment & Schema Assessment. This Assessment is designed to measure some of the most relevant markers of your attachment style and emotional health.
Before, After, and 3-month Follow-up
The Assessments are a valuable tool for measuring and tracking your progress in the course. By taking a Before measurement at the start of the course and an After measurement when the course ends, you will be able to see the effects of the course and the meditations on your attachment style and emotional health.
Additionally, there will be a Follow-up Assessment 3 months after the course ends to see if any changes have persisted or increased. These objective measures can increase confidence in your ability to direct your healing process and deepen the habit of doing inner work.
These assessments give you a ‘handle’ on your current psychology. This augments the capacity to self-reflect (conceptualize where you stand relative to the measure), and to measure progress which equips you with more self-agency around your self-driven pursuit of greater mental health.
Seeing real change with an objective measure helps build up a real and palpable self-agency about knowing that you can change. Doing Before/After helps fortify this primary objective of self-agency around your own healing.
PDF Report
The results of your assessment will be delivered to you in a PDF report that gives you your scores for each of the measures as well as an explanation of what they mean.
You will get a new report for each stage of the Before/After/Follow-up, to easily compare the results and see how your measure changes over time.
Practice Pods
Participants in this course have the option to join a practice pod. This is an informal group of 3-5 students who meet, usually once a week, to listen to a guided meditation, discuss difficulties in practice, and share insights and progress. Connecting with peer learners in this way can keep you motivated, consolidate learning, and create a sense of community.
Who is this for?
This program is for those of us who...
- Have insecure attachment
- Are looking to improve our psychological health, especially if we have tried other healing modalities with disappointing results
- Have problems with emotional independence, exploration and sense of self (enmeshment)
- Have troubles with expressing vulnerability
- Difficulties with intimate relationships
- Want to optimize our psychological health
- Want to understand the early foundations of our psychological development
- Have had trouble consolidating gains in meditation practice in spite of lots of dedicated meditation practice
- Have difficulties with emotional regulation
Healing Together
Shared interest and social support can make meditation practice, study, and healing much easier. Make friends in the course on the slack channel and invite friends who you think could benefit to participate in the course.
Benefits
These are some of the benefits you will have by the end of the program
Theoretical Understanding
- A basic understanding of attachment theory
- Understanding the path to “earned secure attachment”
- The importance of your personal explorations as a source for meaning in your life and more clarity on how to proceed in life towards those explorations and goals
- Understanding of how attachment forms an important foundation of adult mental health
- Familiarity with Jeffrey Young’s 18 Schemas
- More understanding of the modes/parts from a schema therapy perspective like:
- Demanding internalized parent voices
- Overcompensation modes like “workaholic mode”, or “self-aggrandizer mode”
- Avoidance detached modes like the “detached self-soother” and the “spaced out fantasy mode”
- Compliant surrender mode
- Vulnerable child mode (which we reparent with the SRM)
- Healthy Adult mode (which results out of the vulnerable child getting its needs met)
Psychological
- A better ability to observe your mind with metacognitive awareness as a result of the mentalization exercises peppered through the guided meditations.
- Better able to do emotional regulation on the spot in your daily life with ‘micro-hits’ of meditation
- Less blame of self or others
- Greater understanding and compassion for psychological problems and vulnerabilities that affect you and others
- Less identification with your psychological maladies and quirks (ego-dystonia with your maladaptive schemas)
- A more coherent and realistic understanding of the role your childhood experiences had in producing your adult personality
For your relationships
- Understanding of how attachment conditioning unconsciously drives your relationship behaviors
- Greater valuing of attachment itself
- Better understanding of relationship dynamics
- Less social anxiety
- Greater ability and permission to be vulnerable and admit wanting closeness (dismissing/disorganized)
Support Structure
- Join a weekly practice pod
- A sense of camaraderie as a result of seeing how our psychological difficulties are rooted in common experiences that affect us all
- Weekly attachment repair meditation that will start moving you towards secure attachment conditioning
- Opportunities to find accountability partners to meditate with during the week
- A sense of camaraderie as a result of seeing how our psychological difficulties are rooted in common experiences that affect us all
- A Slack group to continue discussion during the week
- Extra guided meditation session on Friday mornings at 8am Eastern Time (bonus)
“The slack group enhanced the experience and learning for me, maybe quadrupled the benefits I got. Reading and learning about other people’s experiences and also how you spent the time answering questions to help people with their practice” — Michelle
Frequently Asked Questions
About Participation
Payment Questions
Technical Questions
If you are experiencing any technical issues relating to accessing the material or live sessions, please get in touch with us. We will get back to you as soon as possible.
We can be reached with our online contact form.
Testimonials
This is what participants of prior courses have to say:
Allyson
THANK YOU!! this is powerful for me, so thank you thank you for sharing your insight. I like how you really balance the “just do the work” attitude with sooo much compassion and empathy for how hard it is. Now I know how to use the immense power of my imagination to heal my most fundamental body-mind-soul mechanisms and have a more joyful, loving life.
Dani
Thank you for continuing to make these classes. When I am able to attend, they make a really positive contribution to my mental health :)
N.P.
Loved the course and loved this kind of emotional work. Look forward to doing more that you offer. Content was excellent. Meditation around Schema modes went quite deep and uncovered difficult emotions. Doing micro hits has improved some situations that would have gone worse.
Johnny
I love your offerings. Keep them coming. You have a good capacity to make people feel seen – and also show great respect for us as individuals – in itself that is an healing factor in being in courses of yours! Your humbleness and humour – make every call a killer. Rock on. I like learning about these subjects! Feels very helpful in understanding my problems/reason to part of my suffering. I feel I have grown during the course so far – and or moving in a better direction.
Allison
I am enjoying the Healing Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment course so much! It's blowing my mind, and that's after decades of amazing therapy, EMDR, attachment couples therapy, neurofeedback, inner child nurturing, self-compassion, and many other profound growth experiences. I’m so delighted by how much I'm getting out of the course. Feels like it's a missing piece for me that is so healing. Thank you !
Anon
I’m sure this will seem out of the blue to you, but I was just thinking of things I am thankful for and thought of you and the two Attachment Repair courses of yours I had the pleasure to participate in. I just wanted to say a very heartfelt thank you. I want you to know I really appreciated the kindness and effort you put into that work, and into responding to all of our questions. My exposure to your teaching has been immensely helpful for me.
Christine
Cedric is an amazing meditation teacher, and this course really changed a lot for me. I really liked his authentic, refreshing approach and the way he combines scientific research with A LOT of practical exercises to reprogram the mind. Over the time of the course, I could literally watch my self esteem and my motivation to get things done grow. The course really motivated me to get going with my business and get things done, because I started to believe that I can actually do it.
Chelsea
I gained an ability to self soothe, meet my needs for validation and feeling seen/heard (which were often unmet in childhood), an overall feeling like I am less alone in my work of healing my attachment. I realize I benefit greatly from an 8 week course with a weekly meeting, I am able to do daily meditations on my own and feel supported in this routine with the weekly meetings. I feel I am actively and consistently working on my attachment repair by being part of a longer course (as opposed to a weekend workshop).
Antoine
I’m very happy about the Embodying Secure Attachment Course. It’s good to have a course for people who are well on the way of healing their wounds. Comes at the perfect time for me.
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This Post Has 10 Comments
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Please note: What is on offer here is meditation coaching, not psychotherapy or counseling.
Hello Cedric. We met at one of Shannon’s retreats at The Hermitage. I am currently working with Lori Curry and have registered for this course on her recommendation.
Hey John, Yeah I remember you. Will be great to have you on the course!!!
Can we sign up as a couple?
Hi Andrea, you certainly can. You’ll be able to attend the live classes together from the same laptop. However if you want to both be able to take the Attachment and Schema Assessment, you’ll need to make two separate registrations.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Hi! I’m trying to sign up at the pay what you can rate but the total amount at checkout remains at $300. Can someone assist?
Hi Levi, when you choose the Pay What You Can rate the minimum is set at $120. If you’re not in a position to pay that then please email us at moc.r1728061131iaper1728061131tnemh1728061131catta1728061131@ofni1728061131 letting us know whatever contribution you’d like to make and we can arrange access there.
Hello,
I just earned about this course today. I would like to try it out. However, in the past I have been putting similar courses/commitments because as a main caretaker of my 3 young children my schedule is VERY unpredictable and I almost always have to skip the classes. Can this be done at my own pace for the most part? If these are recorded classes/sessions perhaps? I’m with my kids all day and homeschool them so it is tough to carve out specific time to attend live/zoom classes. Thanks so much for your time!☺️
Hi Violetta, yes you’ll receive recordings of both sessions each week along with downloadable mp3’s of the guided meditations. It’s up to you if you want to attend the live classes or not, and you’ll have access to the full course materials for 3 months after they finish.
It would be great to have you along for the course. If you have any other questions feel free to email us at moc.r1728061131iaper1728061131tnemh1728061131catta1728061131@ofni1728061131.
Hi,
I just found out about this course but missed the first two sessions. Does it still make sense for me to sign up? I’d work through the first two sessions on my own, but would it be too much before the next session, since these things require time & reflection?
Also, I am currently working through the aftermath of a break-up, which was due to his attachment style, not mine. Is this a bad time in my life to work through my own attachment issues?
How often do you offer this course?
Best regards
Hi Juliane, you can definitely still benefit from this course by catching up / taking it at your own speed. You’ll also have access to the materials for 3 months after the last class.
It’s up to you whether it feels like the right time to pursue this kind of work. It may help you to make sense of your ex’s behaviors, but its focus is on understanding and transforming your own attachment conditioning and how it play out.
This course runs 1-2 times per year. If you have any further questions you can reach us at moc.r1728061131iaper1728061131tnemh1728061131catta1728061131@ofni1728061131.