Image description: A cup of tea on a purple background, with flowers scattered around it. 
Text reads: 
Trust and Attachment: A six-week online course exploring how we engage with each other.
Starts April 23. sostarselfcare@gmail.com to register. tiffanysostar.com.
$150, sliding scale available, discount for Patreon members.
“Delectable tea or deadly poison?”* the question we ask in every encounter.
* Uncle Iroh, Avatar: The Last Airbender 2.2

An exciting thing happened in the Bridges and Boundaries: Social Self-Care course. Part-way through, as the participants engaged with the content and the course flexed to meet the needs that were brought forward, I realized that there was a whole other course that needed to happen. (Well, first I thought it was going to be a one-week extension. Then three weeks. Then, finally, I realized that it needed to be a whole course!)

What we found as we worked through the complexities of building bridges and setting boundaries in order to care for ourselves within our relationships, was that Trust and Attachment were there at every turn.

How do you decide whether to reach out, to build a bridge? Trust. Attachment.

How do you find the ability to set a boundary in a relationship that you want to maintain, and how do you know which boundaries to set? Trust! Attachment!

You need trust – in yourself, in your relationships, in the people you’re engaging with. And you need to feel connected – to have some sense of safe attachment.

Some of the questions that came up in Bridges and Boundaries were about navigating relationships after a foundation-rocking betrayal – when we feel like our ability to trust anyone at all has been eroded or fractured. Some were about how to navigate relationships when we are constantly anxious about being abandoned, when we are looking for rejection and finding it everywhere, when we don’t feel safe in our attachments. Some were about rebuilding trust in specific relationships. And others were about how to build trust internally – how to trust our own selves.

These are all questions I have grappled with in my own life, too.

So this, Trust and Attachment, is the course that grew out of those rich and meaningful questions in Bridges and Boundaries.

It is an extension of the ideas in that first social self-care course, but it’s been designed so that you can take this course whether you took the first course or not. That’s partly because these ideas are so huge that I could run ten courses on social self-care without running into repetitiveness, but it’s also because in between designing Bridges and Boundaries and designing this course, I completed the Advanced Narrative Practices teaching block in my Masters of Narrative Therapy and Community Work. That means I have new skills and new perspectives to bring into this course, and I’m so excited about it!

So, what can you expect?

Well, first of all, there’s going to be some Avatar trivia. Both The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra. (The movie doesn’t exist, don’t worry.) But you don’t need to be a big anime fan, and it won’t rely on you knowing the show. I just love the way that the two Avatar series both engage with topics of trust and attachment in fun but nuanced and complex ways. Plus, Uncle Iroh will help us get through. 😉

The course is six-weeks long. You do not need to have taken any of my previous courses. The cost is $150, with sliding scale available and a discount for Patreon supporters. The way sliding scale works in my business is that you do not have to explain or justify your need for it – our society does too much poverty-shaming already. I trust you to know your needs and to know your resources. You’re the expert in your own life, and if you feel that this course is something that would help you, I want to offer that!

Throughout the course, we will be intentionally challenging the idea of “trust issues” and “attachment issues” as problems that exist within us as “broken” or “damaged” people, and we’ll be talking about how these individualizing narratives can contribute to our sense of isolation, powerlessness, and hopelessness. And, importantly, we’ll talk about alternatives.

In Week One, we’ll work on identifying the problem and our responses to it. This will be different for everyone, and the course content will offer writing, art, and conversation prompts to get you thinking about the topics.

In Week Two, we’ll work on deepening our narratives about how we respond to situations that challenge us when it comes to trust or attachment. We’ll identify our specific skills, and trace their histories.

In Week Three, we’re going to tackle trust directly. What are the dominant discourses about trust? What stories do we tell in our media, our cultural expectations, our ideas about ideal relationships, ideal people, ideal behaviours? We’ll talk about our experience of trust, trustworthiness, being trusting, and losing, breaking, or damaging trust.

In Week Four, attachment gets a turn. What are the dominant discourses about attachment? We’ll talk about attachment theory, attachment styles, and our own personal, familial, and cultural narratives of attachment.

In Week Five, we’ll use a specific narrative practice called the Team of Life to identify the people in our lives that support our efforts to develop and sustain safe and fulfilling relationships. (And, as a special in-course bonus offer, if any course participants are interested in a re-membering conversation – a narrative practice that can help us process grief and loss and honour the contributions that people have made to our lives – I’ll be offering one-on-one sessions for that.)

In Week Six, we’ll use another narrative practice and work on “Migrations of Identity” – mapping pathways from the problem we identified in week one, to our preferred ways of being.

Does this sound exciting?

Do you want to explore trust and attachment in ways that are more nuanced and less blaming?

If so, send me a message and register!

The course starts April 23.