Insecure attachment strategies (anxious-preoccupied and dismissing avoidant) are adaptation that the child makes to get their needs met in an environment of inadequate care.

When these insecure attachment strategies work well at managing threats and getting enough care the results are ‘normative insecure attachment’ or ‘mildly insecure attachment’. People will mildly insecure attachment generally don’t experience significant mental health problems and generally don’t seek psychotherapy.

However, for people whose insecure attachment strategies fail to elicit sufficient soothing, and protection from parents ‘clinically significant’ insecure attachment result. We’ll call these attachment strategies ‘fearful preoccupied’, ‘fearful avoidant’, and ‘disorganized'(mixed insecure attachment strategies).

The purpose of this course is to investigate and understand the origins of ‘failed’ attachment strategies and the resulting difficult and painful attempts by the child to get basics needs met; their impact on us in adulthood; and to start healing these unintegrated experiences of danger, rejection, etc that had caused fearful attachment.

Specifically we’ll discuss how it is that certain threatening childhood environments and experiences produce the higher risk attachment strategies.   Additionally, we will investigate how the preoccupied strategy’s failure to bring about safety result in fearful preoccupied attachment.

We’ll do the same with dismissing-avoidant, seeing how it turns into fearful-avoidant when the ‘normative’ dismissing-avoidant attachment strategy fails. Additionally, we’ll discuss and investigate how more endangered children also switch from a preoccupied strategy over to a dismissing strategy and vise versa creating ‘mixed’ or ‘disorganized’ insecure attachment.

We’ll do this in a series of guided meditations to first find these experiences in our past and then to start healing and integrating them.

Psycho-education Part (what to understand)

• What differentiated ‘normative’ from ‘clinical’ insecure attachment
• How ‘failed insecure attachment strategies’ produce fearful type attachment strategies

Guided Meditations (experiential)

• Brief Perfect Nurturer Reinforcement (Largely overlapping with a basic Ideal Parent Figure Protocol Meditation)
• A series of meditations for understanding, healing, and integrating the types of experiences (memories) of danger where more normative/mild insecure strategy failed and how, as a result, we developed clinical/fearful attachment as a means for coping

This course draws from:

• Attachment Theory generally
• Dynamic-Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (Crittenden et al.)
• Coherence Therapy (Bruce Ecker et al.)
• Mentalization Based Treatment (Fonage & Bateman et al.)
• Ideal Parent Figure Protocol (IPF) (Brown & Elliott et al)

This program is not psychotherapy or a substitute for it. It is a psycho-educational and meditation program. Additionally, it is helpful and recommended to do psychotherapy in parallel with this type of program.