The Power of Visualizing An Ideal Parent Figure

The late, Dr. Dan Brown, and his professional colleagues came up with a theory called the Ideal Parent Figure (IPF) method. Dr. Dan Brown is not to be confused with the popular author by the same name who penned The Da Vinci Code! Dr. Dan Brown taught at Harvard and while he did not write the Da Vinci Code, he did teach his own code, the Ideal Parent Figure protocol, which invites clients to imagine themselves as a young child and to visualize loving parents who are responsive to their needs. Dan Brown’s IPF theory also posits 5 principles of secure attachment.

Felt Safety: A child feels a sense of trust, security, and safety in the presence of their caregiver.

A Sense of Being Seen and Known: Caregivers are attuned to their child’s emotional feelings and needs. They are interested in their child’s inner life.

Felt Comfort: The caregiver comforts the child during times of stress and knows how to respond to the unique needs of their child.

Sense of Being Valued: The caregiver takes absolute delight and pride in their child’s being, achievements, and unique gifts. In turn, the child feels valued, seen, and known.

Felt Support for Fostering Self-Development: The caregiver encourages the child to explore the world, develop independence, and pursue their dreams and desires. This is the type of parent who will not tell their child what to do. This is a parent who allows their child to make mistakes.

Recently, I attended a weekend meditation retreat. Our primary teacher for the weekend was Dr. Gordan Peerman, an Episcopal priest, psychotherapist, and meditation teacher who studied with Dan Brown for many years. He led us in a meditation based on Dan Brown’s work and asked the weekend meditation participants to imagine our ideal parent figure. As I visualized my ideal parent figure, I pictured God, my loving grandmother, Bell, and I imagined compassionately self-parenting my self. During the meditation I also saw the faces of my parents as ideal parents, which somewhat surprised me because on paper my parents have made many mistakes. In particular, my dad struggled with alcoholism and anger issues during some of my more formative years and yet despite these struggles, for the most part; I felt safe, seen and known, comforted, valued, and supported during my childhood. In my youth my parents were really good at expressing their pride in me and encouraging me to be whoever I wanted to be. I think there is a temptation to either idealize or demonize parent(s), when often they get some things right and other pieces wrong.

When I think of my parents shortcomings, I realize they were doing the best they could in many ways. My mom’s dad left when she was only three years old and my dad’s father died of cancer when he was a young teen. Even though both my parents had their moms throughout their childhoods, I realize their respective mothers grief and work schedules left my parents feeling either emotionally or physically alone at times. So in many ways, I feel like my parents did well raising me and my brothers, especially when I consider the unique challenges they endured in their own respective childhoods.

During the meditation retreat we had an opportunity to reflect in community on our individual experiences meditating about our imagined ideal parent figure. One participant in our group shared the meditation brought up feelings of guilt and shame she had about not being the ideal parent during her children’s developmental years. I know, I too, occasionally feel guilt about my own parenting. Am I working too much? Am I providing enough structure? Am I parenting as mindfully as I could be? Are my responses too reactive towards my spirited daughter’s tantrums? All of these questions are important, and yet, what I am learning about parenting is the truth that I will continue to fall short, but there are many ways I am embodying healthy parenting. Grace-filled parenting invites us to look at our parenting and our parents’ parenting through the lens of compassion.

I often do a genogram with my clients. A genogram is a tool from the Bowen Family Systems theory and it is a graphic representation of a family tree that details the clients experience of individuals in the family, including the spiritual, physical, emotional, educational, relational, and psychological traits of each person in the family tree. Facilitating a genogram helps me to identify and understand various negative and positive patterns in my client’s family history that they might be consciously or unconsciously repeating. With only a few exceptions, most of the clients I have worked with identify that their parent(s) have gifted them with healthy qualities they are repeating, but also passed down negative traits that they have to be very intentional not to repeat.

My work with genograms has reminded me there really is not an ideal or perfect parent, and instead human parents whose own parenting is influenced by the generations before them. Even though there is not a perfect parent, I believe we all need to be seeking to practice the 5 principles of secure attachment by offering this ideal kind of parenting to ourselves and/or our children.

The Ideal Parent Figure theory also underscores the fact that the unconscious mind does not distinguish between our memories and our imagination. With a deliberate meditation practice, it is possible for individuals to feel safe, known, comforted, valued, and supported, even if this is not something they directly experienced in their childhood.

It is more efficacious to do the Ideal Parent Figure protocol with a trained therapist, but it is also possible to practice these meditations on your own. You can find Ideal Parent Figure (IPF) meditations by Dan Brown on YouTube. I also recommend reading Dr. Laurel Parnell’s books, Tapping In and Attachment-focused EMDR. Dr. Parnell is not an IPF therapist, but in these two books she helps readers envision an ideal mother, ideal father, nurturing figures, or protective figures they can identify in meditation and call on as resources. As we visualize either actual or imagined nurturing and protective figures, we will feel more safe, loved, and supported.

This article was originally written for The Lookout Mountain Mirror.