The Real Parent Figure Protocol

One of the fresh new things on the therapy block is the Ideal Parent Figure Protocol.

The idea is that you do guided meditations in which you imagine parent figures who are perfectly attuned to you. Over time, so the theory, this will rewrite your attachment wounds and turn you into a happy psychologically healthy person.

While I keep meeting people who profit from it, I am deeply uncomfortable with IPFP.

Because it ignores lineage.

Instead of helping us make peace with and sense of where we come from, IPFP assumes that who we are can be isolated from our actual parents and peers. The fact that IPFP is even thinkable in the first place bears witness to and perpetuates the atomization, isolation, alienation of 21st century Westerners.

As the old feminist slogan goes: “The private is political.”

And so is our decision to treat ourselves as islands.

What I suggest, instead, is the Real Parent Figure Protocol. Grieving our attachment wounds not as a result of our parents’ individual failings, but as a shared burden that they have carried before us, just as their parents and their parents and their parents have.

In RPFP, we start with feeling all that teenage rage of “How could you do this to me?”, and progress through the stages of grief all the way towards a more differentiated view of our ancestors. We learn to see their strong and weak moments side by side. And, we learn to see that we are no better or wiser than those who hurt us. That they did the best they could. In the end, we arrive at an equilibrium where there’s no demons to exorcise, no scapegoats to exile. We earn the mature view of “we’re all in this together”. We become responsible adults capable to take care of our kin and the world we live in.

But why should we do this, when the IPFP is right there, easy, straightforward, and promises healing without the awkwardness of becoming intimate with flawed humans?

Because our individual suffering has a systemic, collective dimension. When we heal our own wounds, we heal the larger systems we are part of. And when we heal our relationships to family, community, and the world, we heal ourselves. Same thing.

The nested model of attachment and trauma. From Jessica Fern’s “Polysecure”. It visualizes all the different layers which play into our perceived attachment security. As you can see, it breaks with mainstream attachment theory’s myopic view that ignores all but parental and love relationships.

Hurt people hurt people, and healed people heal people.

Therefore, we might want to do the courageous thing and make peace with our lineages. Instead of retroactively giving ourselves up for adoption, we might want to grieve the wounds we actually suffered and forgive the ancestors we actually have.

If we do real attachment healing, if we accept our woundedness and its historicity rather than try to simulate the wounds away - who knows? Maybe that constant familiar feeling of emptiness, of alienation, of drifting around in a hostile world, can finally leave us. Maybe, we can experience ourselves, once again, as a cell in the body of Gaia.