Unbalanced and distorted understanding of responsibility and blame is a hallmark of insecure attachment. People with dismissing avoidant attachment tend to overassign these nefative events to themselves and underassign responsibility to others. The opposite is true for people with anxious preoccupied attachment. We'll discuss how this distortion was a helpful adaptation in the past, yet is troublesome in the present, and then work through this in guided meditations.

We will first seek to understand what is ‘balance’ around assigning fault, blame, guilt, and responsibility and how to achieve it. We will also investigate and seek to understand the reasons for our own distortions around assigning responsibility. Then we’ll do a series of meditations where we investigate the extremes (total self blame/exoneration of other and total self-exoneration/blame of other) and have them come into balance. In these meditations we will reflect, integrate, and mentalize our own experience. Thereby, we’ll come into balance. This balance will help us be more responsive to our current live circumstances instead of reactive.

The intended outcome is a better understanding of why you either under or over assign responsibility to self/other, why it was helpful and strategic in the past, and start healing them. To heal these distortions means to come into balance and better see 'messy' multi-causal contributions to interpersonal problems

The main modality for this course is Schema Repatterning Meditation.

Ideal Parent Figure Protocol (Dan Brown et al.)
Schema Therapy (Jeff Young et al.)
Coherence Therapy (Bruce Ecker et al.)
Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation (Patricia Crittenden et al.)
Mentalization Based Treatment.