This program focuses on repairing early attachment conditioning through a series of 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 3 years when it ventures away from the caregiver to explore and then goes back to seek safety, affection, and care from the ‘secure base’.

Attachment conditioning is foundational to our psychological health. When our foundational attachment conditioning is insecure then we experience developmental problems with our exploratory abilities, self-development, emotional self-regulation and relationships with others.

The retreat’s structure is set up such to help us heal common aspects of disordered attachment conditioning. There will be three guided meditation sessions in each of the two sessions (morning and evening) focused on the first five of Jeffery Young’s 18 schemas. These five schemas all relate back directly to 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”. We will work towards healing and dismantling them in this program!

Details about modalities

Research into Schema Therapy indicates it is effective at treating grave psychological disorders like complex PTSD, personality disorders, treatment resistant depression and anxiety, and substance abuse issues.

To this point, schema therapy was developed by Jeffrey Young in response to seeing how traditional Beckian Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) did not yield satisfactory results for patients with more serious disturbances like personality disorders.

Ideal Parent Figure Protocol, developed by Dan Brown, has been found to be effective for moving people with insecure attachment to secure attachment after repeated sessions.

Said differently, the techniques and frame works used in this program are very effective even for difficult cases.

Retreat Structures: Schemas, Psycho-Education and Guided Meditations

Schemas

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

• Defectiveness & Shame (dismissing schema)
• Social Isolation (dismissing schema)
• Emotional Deprivation (schema common to all types of insecure attachment)
• Abandonment & Instability (preoccupied schema)
• Mistrust & Abuse (disorganized schema)

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.

The program will be in two parts, a morning and an evening session. In the morning session we will cover the schemas of “Abandonment & Instability”, “Mistrust & Abuse”, and “Emotional Deprivation”. The second session will cover “Defectiveness & Shame”, “Social Isolation & Alienation” and “Emotional Deprivation”.

Psycho-Education

We will start with a brief lecture on attachment theory, attachment repair, and Schema Therapy. Then, before each Schema oriented meditation guidance, 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 uscorrective 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 (credit to Dan Brown) 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.