Trying an Attachment Repair Course
This post is from my ‘Showing My Workings’ section: More frequent extra bits and pieces that don't feel complete or meaty enough to post to main newsletter.
If this blog post contains only this sentence and a bullet list, or is otherwise weirdly half-finished, it’s because it was showtime and this was all I’d written.
signed up for Cedric Reeves Attachment Repair Course
Kaj reccomendation
What the course is. Combination of:
Psycho-education on stuff from attachment theory, memory reconsolidation, schema therapy
“Mediation” visualisations/exercises on creating imaginal (imaginary lol) ideal parents, identifying your existing negative schemas and then reconsolidating those negative schemas through corrective imaginal experiences with the imaginal parents
Started course four weeks late so had to catch up on first four sessions recordings
Hard to find imaginal parents that give me the right feeling
List ones i tried?
Have had some success with imagining a calming/secure PLACE
Schemas (Discovering the underlying implicit beliefs that ‘cause’ (?) your negative/problematic feelings/thoughts/behaviour)
They can be things that on some conscious explicit level you don’t believe, but some other part of you does believe on an implicit emotional level
These all felt more like I was ‘guessing’ than really nailing things down
A schema: “Other people dont see or care about my feelings”
Memory- mum tea thing?
Noticing how this plays out in my life
Thinking of counterexamples which disprove the schema: first girlfriend. then trying to think of ppl who didn’t know me super well. thought of honor and graham examples.
A schema: “I only get help and care if I stop functioning”
(See notebook for more)
Microhits parent comforting- Homework to, as you go about your week, when you’re noticed you’ve gotten emotionally disregulated imagine the imaginal parents comforting you
Not super successful but do feel some diff
Schema Modes
“schema modes are the moment-to-moment emotional states and coping responses”1 that we go into due to some given underlying schema (implicit belief)
Homework was to, as you go about your day, notice what ‘modes’ you go into at different time
List my most common modes I’ve observed so far?
“dependent child”
“detached self-soother”
6 sep-- doing 'noticing which mode im in', and it gave me some nice kind of distance and space from my reactivity, to kind of look at it without just getting angry at myself for being like this (for feeling overwhelmed and wanting to avoid, when trying to work out what i needed for vaccination and do the stuff i needed to do before leaving)
mention Cedric’s free weekly guided meditation
http://www.schematherapy.com/id61.htm