r/idealparentfigures

Hey guys, I hope you're doing great. Here I am for my late—very late—six-month update on my journey with IPF. For context, I’ve been doing solo IPF visualization, along with other metalization exercises on the side, Qigong, and Yoga.

I also need to point out that for the last three months, I haven’t been doing therapy on the side because my EMDR therapist had some reservations about me practicing IPF on the side, since he thought that different parts of the psyche have different needs, and thus visualizations like that are dangerous and not recommended, according to him. I didn’t want to drop IPF, so I’m looking for another therapist currently.

My practice:

• IPF visualization, with some focus on attachment and ideal parent figures.
• IPF visualization before sleep—you can follow along with these visualizations or do them on your own.
• Mentalization exercises during the day.
• Co-regulation and trying to get into groups and join collaborative work.

Results:

• I’m feeling much more secure in my relationship with my ideal parents. I feel like they are here for me and that I can come back home anytime.
• I feel more empowered and motivated by this relationship to work on myself, get things done, explore the world, and be more assertive.
• I am starting to feel like I know what it feels like to be secure in my body, and I can recognize those sensations.
• I’m recognizing more quickly when relationships are not genuine and when I’m feeling off. So I can better identify signs of a lack of fulfillment of the 5 pillars in my relationships with other people.

Bonus:

I’ve done an ECR-RS test this month to compare with the first one. Keep in mind, this is not a totally reliable test of attachment, but it’s the best we have in terms of self-reporting ones. As you can see, there was a big difference in the results, especially the father one, which I feel like has been the biggest improvement after I started to believe he loved me (Projection from my real father)

First month

This month

I've been basically looking for a therapist in my country (Brazil) to work on my attachment alongside my IPF self-work. Still, it has been difficult to find someone, and also frustrating because some of them don't like IPF at all, even tho I'm not suggesting them to use it in the therapy, just informing that I'm doing it is sufficient to bring commentaries.

Most of them have been on guard but open, but today I had one that straight up said to me after I explained what the visualization entail that it sounded like I was using it to scape reality,  then she asked me how much time I spent visualizing, I replied about 15 minutes a day on focused time but I could "visualize it" in real time too, but that wasn't the focus of the method.

Then she said that it sounded like a kind of manifestation practice, like a positive vibrations practice where you wish for something and send it out there so the universe will actualize it, to which I replied the whole theory of the remapping of the attachment.

It was very frustrating, because she literally denied any positive change as "living an alternative reality", she was very concerned that I was using too much mental power to uphold the two realities in my head all the time, at some point I just gave up and let her have it, then just decided she's not a good fit.

I'm very frustrated right now, I'm thinking about giving up on trying to look for new therapists...

I wanted to share my progress as I remember how much it helped me in the beginning to read other people success with this. I’ll start by saying how eternally grateful I am for finding Dan Browns work, to think this wasn’t even available 10 years ago is crazy. I did the meditations by myself due to cost reasons, however, I will say I am also studying counselling and I already had a support network there to help. I would always advise getting facilitation if you can as this work can bring up a lot.

It’s been 10 months of doing IPF and I have also done some of Cedric’s Schema meditations which have helped massively in the last few months.

I believed I had disorganised attachment and I had a lot of traumas from childhood and abuse in my adult life.

Some of the symptoms that have healed (there have been so many so these are the ones I can remember)

·         I used to have chronic anxiety. I hid it well but every day I would get anxious and sometime have panic attacks. I would be so scared of saying the wrong thing or getting in trouble. I can’t remember the last time I had anxiety in my body. My nervous system is so calm, and I often have this warm feeling, especially after doing the meditations.

·         I am more confident now. I love meeting new people and making new friends. This was something I really struggled with, although everyone thought I was confident, I wasn’t inside.

·         I used to make up stories as to why people would hurt me or abandon me. I would replay every conversation, check the messages I sent and worry about the things I would say. I don’t do any of this anymore. I’m so much more relaxed and secure in my relationships.

·         I was so hypervigilant. I can’t even remember what that feels like, but I know it was exhausting. This took time to go and would reduce over the months of healing. I live in the present moment so much now and can actually enjoy my life.

·         My intrusive thoughts have gone, although sometimes they can come back when I’m stress or haven’t had enough sleep. But I can quickly go back to my baseline of security.

·         I’m starting to believe I am lovable. This is something I really struggled with. I didn’t understand why anyone would love me, in fact I thought people just wanted to use me and there was always a catch.

·         I no longer feel shame. I used to have these shame spirals that would come out of nowhere. I can’t remember the last time this happened and even if I say the wrong thing or make a mistake, it doesn’t bother me.

·         I’m starting to trust, although I would say this was one of the last things to resolve for me and I’m not fully there yet.

·         My emotions have calmed down a lot. At one point I thought I had borderline, as my emotions were so overwhelming and I used to split a lot. I still have emotions, and a lot of grief came up throughout this process, but I feel safe enough to let them pass through me. I also no longer split, which is huge for me as this was painful and something I felt I had no control over. This would create extreme highs and lows that were exhausting. I have so much more energy now this has settled.

·         I would get triggered on a daily basis; I was constantly in a victim mindset. When I look back at the things that used to trigger me, they make no sense. I can feel how different my energy is now, I don’t expect to be triggered by things, and I don’t expect people to hurt me.

·         I’m more open and excited for the future. I’ve had a lot of things happened to me throughout this process, some amazing and some hard. However, having this helped me get through it all and have hope that my future will be better.

·         There are so many other symptoms that have healed, I had a lot of toxic behaviours that I didn’t even realise. Most of them are gone now. I still have days where old pattens come in, usually when I’m under a lot of stress but every time this happens, I seem to be even calmer when it settles.

Other things that have helped me. Schema meditations have been amazing. They helped when I couldn’t get myself out of a certain fear, like people leaving me. I also got a book by a Reddit user called Fearful Avoidant by antheri0n. This book was incredible and helped me understand what I was going through more. I also led me to reading more about neuroscience and how our brains work. This helps you stop thinking there is something wrong with you, the brain is just doing what it’s designed to do. Things happened to you to create that. Unlocking the Emotional Brain goes into this a lot too and also explains implicit memory and memory reconsolidation, which is fascinating,

I will end on this; I have tried every modality under the sun. I got into psychology at a very young age as I knew how I felt and my symptoms weren’t normal. No doctor or therapist knew what was going on with me. I even had to ask to be diagnosed with CPTSD (however, on my medical records it’s PTSD as CPTSD wasn’t even a recognised diagnosis back then) and they had no idea what that was. Even doing so much EMDR, IFS, polyvagal theory, CBT, CAT therapy and a lot of trying to reprogram my mind with affirmations did nothing. So for 20 plus years I have been so treatment resistant (to the point my EMDR therapist fired me) and this is the first modality that actually worked. I never thought I could heal and I’m nearly there and it’s only been 10 months. I used to do so much self-help everyday just to try and stay calm, now all I do is one IPF meditation a day (and a schema one once a week if I feel like I need it) and the rest of the day I’m just living my life. I no longer need to watch YouTube videos, read a million self-help books, journal, affirm or any nervous system regulation tools and it feels so freeing.

It wasn’t always an easy ride, like I said I had months where a lot of grief came up for me and I would have a lot of setbacks, new triggers and moments where I wanted to give up. It’s all part of the journey so please keep going if that’s you. Because what is on the other side is worth it.

I might already know the answer to this already, but I'm asking just in case:

I'm currently somatically processing my C-PTSD and it can cause me to have an excessive amount of thoughts, some of them being frightening and intrusive. When I started non-facilitated IPF around the same time, I hadn't unearthed as much relational material yet and had quite an easy time imagining at least one figure and had a couple of deeply impactful sessions that were very regulating. At present, however, I've noticed that some of the time I will start imagining (not on purpose) things like morphing faces or scary touch. This happens with metta practice as well. Usually when this happens I will "rewind" and reimagine something different, but I obviously worry that imagining bad things happening with the ideal parents one too many times is going to poison the well of the technique.

I understand that working with a facilitator would help me navigate these occurrences better, however, would it be better to let the somatic processing run its course before attempting even facilitated IPF, just so I don't have to deal with constantly fixing the visualizations? (And possibly, as a bonus, I wouldn't have to do as many sessions once the underlying trauma is addressed?)

Many thanks!