Clinical Approach
The Ideal Parent Figure Protocol
A structured, imagination-based approach to building secure attachment from the inside out — developed by Dr. Daniel P. Brown and Dr. David Elliott, and used by a small number of certified clinicians worldwide.
What It Is
Building security that was never built
The Ideal Parent Figure (IPF) protocol is a therapeutic approach developed within the Integrative Attachment Therapy (IAT) framework by Daniel P. Brown, Ph.D. and David Elliott, Ph.D. It works directly with the imagination to create new internal representations of secure attachment — experiences that many adults never had as children and have been carrying the absence of ever since.
The protocol is grounded in a fundamental insight from attachment research: the brain cannot easily distinguish between an imagined experience and a lived one at the level of implicit memory. The felt sense of being held, soothed, delighted in, and supported — if experienced vividly and repeatedly in a safe therapeutic context — begins to lay down new implicit memories. Over time, these memories change the internal working model: the largely unconscious set of expectations about relationships, safety, and self-worth that was formed in early life and has been organizing adult behavior ever since.
This is not visualization in the casual sense. It is a structured, carefully guided process that activates the same attachment systems that were active in childhood, creates conditions for the positive experiences those systems needed, and consolidates them across sessions into genuine change in how a person feels in relationship.
How It Works
The mechanism of change
Most therapy works at the level of explicit memory and conscious insight. The IPF protocol works primarily at the level of implicit memory — the procedural, body-based, relational knowing that forms before language and operates beneath awareness. This is where attachment patterns live, and it is why insight alone rarely changes them.
In a session, the client is guided into a relaxed, internally focused state and invited to imagine ideal parent figures — not their actual parents, but figures who would respond to them with exactly what they needed. The therapist guides specific qualities of experience: being fully seen without judgment, having distress met with calm soothing rather than anxiety, being held in a way that allows the body to release rather than brace.
The five conditions that structure this work — Safety, Attunement, Soothing, Expressed Delight, and Exploration — correspond directly to what attachment research identifies as the essential ingredients of a secure caregiving environment. Each condition targets a specific dimension of the internal working model and begins to fill in what was absent.
What makes the protocol distinct from other imagination-based therapies is its precision. The therapist is not simply offering positive imagery. They are tracking the client's real-time responses — the subtle signs of activation, resistance, or softening — and adjusting the guidance accordingly. The goal is not relaxation or reassurance but genuine reorganization of the attachment system.
What a Session Looks Like
Inside the work
Sessions begin with stabilization — developing the client's capacity for dual awareness, the ability to be simultaneously in an imagined experience and grounded in the present moment. This is not a dissociative state. It is closer to the focused presence of an actor who is fully in a scene while also aware of the stage. This dual awareness is what makes the work both safe and effective: the client can engage the attachment system without being overwhelmed by it.
From this grounded state, the therapist begins to introduce ideal parent figure imagery. The images are not scripted — they emerge from the client's own internal landscape, guided by the therapist's questions and attunement. The therapist might invite the client to notice what it feels like to be in the presence of a figure who is simply glad they're there, who has nowhere else to be, whose nervous system communicates safety without a word being spoken.
Clients often encounter unexpected resistance — a sense that the image doesn't feel real, or that they don't deserve it, or that allowing it in would be somehow dangerous. These responses are not obstacles to the work. They are the work. They reveal, precisely and usefully, the structure of the insecure attachment pattern that has been running the show. The therapist works with these responses rather than around them.
Over the course of treatment, which typically runs 20–40 sessions depending on developmental complexity, clients report a gradual shift not just in insight but in felt experience: greater ease in relationship, less reactivity, a new kind of groundedness that doesn't depend on external conditions being right.
Who It Helps
The right fit
The IPF protocol is particularly well suited for adults who recognize the signature of insecure attachment in their lives — patterns that don't yield to insight, behaviors in relationship that feel automatic and out of character, a persistent gap between what they understand intellectually and how they actually feel. These patterns often include chronic anxiety in close relationships, difficulty trusting others' care, a reflexive self-reliance that makes intimacy feel dangerous, or a sense of fundamental unworthiness that persists despite evidence to the contrary.
The protocol is also central to my work with parents — particularly parents who are trying to show up differently for their teenagers than their own parents showed up for them. The capacity to offer a child the five conditions — safety, attunement, soothing, delight, and support for exploration — depends heavily on whether those conditions exist, even partially, in the parent's own internal world. The IPF work builds that internal resource in the parent, which then becomes available to the child.
- —Adults with anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment patterns
- —Parents working to repair connection with a teenager
- —Adults who completed other trauma therapies but still feel something fundamental hasn't shifted
- —People who understand their patterns but can't seem to change them through insight alone
- —Adults who grew up with emotionally unavailable, neglectful, or inconsistent caregivers
Work With Me
Begin the work
I am one of six IAT-certified clinicians in the United States and trained directly with Dr. Daniel P. Brown and Dr. David Elliott. I work with adults and parents in private practice in Los Angeles.