r/idealparentfigures

Or, in other words, can you fail the AAI if you are more dysregulated, distracted, or tired than usual?

I'm joking about failing, of course - but could you get a "worse" score than if you took the AAI on a good day? Is there an advantage (or possibly even a disadvantage) in trying to optimize your chances of remembering and relating yourself well, or does the test/scoring automatically take that into consideration? I understand the test not only asks for what happened but also takes into account things like correcting yourself if you realized you said something wrong or forgot something, and I'm pretty sure the likelihood of me remembering what I said 15 minutes earlier can change from day to day, attachment-related or not.

I ask because I'm genuinely curious about getting one done and scored professionally, but I would want to make sure that it's as accurate as possible, especially with the cost of scoring, and avoid "oops, all disorganized!" if that's not actually the case.

Thanks!

I have been feeling a lot of "one step forward, two steps back" lately. Some days I feel IPF has changed my life. Then my social anxiety returns, or I get rejected romantically for the millionth time and I wonder if it has really made a difference at all or if it's all just a big placebo and the "differences" I feel are due to other circumstances in my life changing.

I'm definitely better *at doing IPF* in that the visualizations are easier now, but in terms of life impact, just fuzzier and harder to say.

Has anyone else felt this? Like any examples of where you felt like you were making progress then had a setback? I mostly just want to feel that I'm not alone in feeling like progress is not linear and you sometimes lose faith in the process.

Hello, I’m interested as to other peoples experiences with facilitators.
My facilitator and I have done about a dozen sessions together now and we haven’t done any IPF, they’re just very emotionally attuned, present and validating. A couple of sessions left me feeling deeply regulated, relieved, engaged and confident in myself.

I’m just wondering does everyone else’s sessions typically revolve around IPF? Or are they like mine where they’re more about present-time attunement and deep care.

I’m really liking how our sessions are going so I’m not even sure when IPF will come in to be honest. I still do visualisations on my own but I’m finding that just being ‘met’ moment to moment by them in a deeply caring, present and attuned way has already had me feeling very self assured and engaging with others more confidently a couple of times already.

I got to a point in my healing process where continuing to constantly “work on myself” started feeling like the thing keeping the process going.

I no longer strongly identify with the old broken/self-protection narrative and most of my day is now just ordinary life rather than managing emotions, monitoring myself, or trying to fix something.

If activation comes up, I usually just let it pass or remind myself I don’t need to do anything.

What’s interesting is that after a long period of deep healing work, my nervous system now seems to be updating itself more in real life than during “healing work.” I notice spontaneous settling, shifts in perspective, reduced totalization, less emotional stickiness, etc., especially when I stop constantly focusing on symptoms.

At the same time, some hypervigilance/body reflexes still appear occasionally, which creates this weird in-between stage where:
- the old structures don’t fully convince me anymore,
- but some residual activation still exists.

Part of me wonders whether there’s “one last process” or body-based intervention missing, but another part feels like constantly searching for the final fix may itself be what keeps the system oriented around problems.

So I’m curious:
Has anyone else reached a stage where healing became less about active intervention and more about letting ordinary life continue while the nervous system gradually unwinds on its own?

Did the remaining reflexes reduce naturally over time, or did you find there really was another major piece missing?

I’m especially interested in perspectives from people who moved beyond constant symptom-monitoring and self-analysis, because a lot of healing spaces still seem heavily organized around identifying and managing “the problem.”

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!