Hi!
I’m Miriam V. Brait, an attachment-focused, trauma-informed practitioner. I’m currently researching the Ideal Parent Figure Protocol, a novel attachment-based psychotherapy approach developed for the treatment of attachment wounding.
When I started studying what makes people unhappy, I stumbled upon a million tools: journaling, meditation, DBT, CBT, tactics in the here and now, but no coherent red line that truly follows what makes people confident, more likely to succeed, more likely to actually enjoy their own success, and more likely to be good partners and find good partners as well. I stumbled upon many pieces of the puzzle, but I was left with an incomplete picture.
Going through the research and learning about the history of psychology, what has historically worked and under what conditions it was developed, I realized that we do have a red string after all. But that red string can’t be packaged neatly into 12 steps toward this or 8 to 12 sessions to achieve that. Instead, the red string led me first to the psychology and then to the neuroscience of attachment.
I found that study after study points to how early caregiver relationships impact brain development, from accessing emotions, to regulating them, to self-esteem, to how safe or unsafe we feel in this world, leading to a series of endlessly repeating patterns that reinforce the same experiences and the same neural networks.
Some call it destiny. Freud would call it repetition compulsion.
It was in that moment that I realized that all the tools, some of which are very useful, collapse into the same purpose: interrupting patterns of insecure attachment to ourselves and others. This means learning, within a therapeutic relationship, how to trust, how to be seen, how to experience safety, how to place boundaries, and how to be ourselves. By doing so, little by little, experiences of safety and connection build up, completing developmental milestones and grieving what was not given to us.
Now I help my clients do just that: change their experience little by little by being seen, validated, and sometimes challenged in the way they relate to themselves and the world around them.
