436: Attachment Styles Explained: Why We Chase Unavailable People (and What To Do Instead) with Thais Gibson

The following podcast is a Dear Media production. This is Well, a podcast about wellness in all its forms. I'm Arielle Laurie, and each week I'm sharing unfiltered conversations with people shaping how we feel, live, and look. Come for the substance, stay for the honesty, and leave with the tools to be well inside and out. I am not often or easily blown away necessarily by conversations that I have on the podcast when it comes to being able to relate to them. But every now and then there's an episode where I am just like, oh my God, like I feel it in my core. I'm identifying. I can relate so much. And this episode was definitely one of those for me. And I think it's going to be for you as well, because we are talking about the four different attachment styles. So everybody listening is going to identify with at least one of these and what they mean, why we have them and so much more. So if you've ever wondered, why do we want the people who give us the least clarity, why situationships feel so intense, why sometimes secure relationships feel unfamiliar and how to know if it's real chemistry or a trauma bond, we are breaking it down today in this episode. So we're talking about attachment styles, what they actually are, how they shape who you're attracted to, why so many of us repeat the same relationship patterns, even when we know better. We talk anxious, avoidant, fearful avoidance, secure, why nervous system work alone is not enough and the real steps that it takes to move toward secure love, which everybody wants. So I am talking to Thais Gibson. She is a relationship and attachment theory expert. She is the founder of the Personal Development School. It's one of the most respected platforms for attachment healing and emotional reprogramming. She has helped millions understand their attachment style and build healthier, more secure relationships. and Thais is just so well-versed when it comes to relationships and attachment theory. She is so incredibly smart. She is passionate about her work. And the takeaway from this episode is that you can change. If you identify with anxious attachment or fearful avoidant, there are steps that you can take to overcome that and become more secure. So for me, and I do disclose a lot personally in this episode, I identified with anxious and fearful avoidant. And I was glad to know that there are things that I can do to overcome those tendencies when they come up. So if you want to go deeper, you can get 20% off Thais' Personal Development School 90-Day Attachment Healing Membership with the code PDS2026. That's PDS2026. I'll throw it in show notes as well. So please enjoy Thais Gibson. Thais Gibson, what makes you well? So for me, for sure, wellness has been so much about my internal world. I definitely did a lot of healing and a lot of self-work when I was much younger. And for me, I swear by a few things. I meditate every day. I try to do some kind of cardio exercise in the morning because I feel like it just gets my blood flowing and gets me amped and ready to go for the day. Even though I know it's better to weight train and all these things, it's just something that helps balance me a lot. So meditation, cardio, and I really believe in, for me, a connection to God. So I'll pray or do something spiritual in the evenings and it just helps me feel grounded and connected. And I swear by those three things. And that keeps me in a really good place. Amazing. Okay. I like to start with a little bit of lightning round just to get to know you. We can circle back to some of these because I know that there's a lot of nuance here conversation and the topic that we're going to be discussing. But why do we want the people who give us the least clarity the most? Because so much of our subconscious comfort zone. So I'll try to be lightning rod, but our conscious mind is three to five percent of all of our beliefs, thoughts, emotions, actions. Our subconscious is 95 to 97 percent. And it wants what's familiar because it equates familiarity to safety and survival. And so what happens is if we are in a position where what's most familiar to us is the way we treat ourselves. If we put ourselves last, people please a lot, don't honor our own boundaries or needs, then we're actually really attracted to people who will mirror that back to us. Yeah, we'll put a pin in that one and come back to it. But that's something that always kind of, it used to confuse me. You would think that like, especially if we're talking about attachment style and just what we seek in relationships, you would think that you would seek the opposite. You would seek out what you didn't have. And yet we repeat cycles over and over again in relationships. That makes sense. It's familiarity because unfamiliarity is like the unknown is so scary. Yeah. But we'll circle back to that one. What is the most predominant attachment style, if you could say? So the actual most predominant attachment style, according to the hard data, which I honestly have a hard time believing sometimes because my sample size is biased, but of who I work with and the work that I do, but it's actually securely attached people make up 50% of the population. Yeah. But securely attached people end up with other securely attached people. They settle down early. So we don't find them. Less likely to. And so, yeah, the data says that at least. What is the biggest lie we tell ourselves when we're attached to someone toxic? Great question. It kind of depends what your attachment style is. Anxiously attached people, the biggest lie they tell themselves is like, it's fine. It will be okay because they prioritize the fear, avoiding the fear of abandonment over the pain of somebody who's the wrong fit for them. So it's like if that fear of abandonment is a 10 out of 10 or that pain and the wrong fit person is a 7, they're like, let me take the 7 of pain of the wrong relationship. So anxious people are like that. Fearful avoidance. They tend to sort of tell themselves that they can do everything on their own and they tend to be hyper independent. And so that's their kind of lie because then they're not vulnerable. They don't let people in. And dismissive avoidance. They're like, I don't need people at all. And unfortunately, that ends up for a lonely existence, especially as they get later on into life. Okay, last one. Actually, maybe I have two more. are situationships basically attachment purgatory so situationships are definitely I think that's a really good way to describe it honestly I think that for some people if it's self-considered there can be a time and place for that like let's say somebody's in a position where they're really early in their dating life or they dated somebody for five years in high school and they're so young now and they're like okay I need to figure out who I want to be with and they need to explore maybe there's a time and a place where it's like conscious and intentional and thought through and that can be okay. But the vast majority of the time, it's just people who don't know what they want, not willing to commit and people really replaying out a lot of their wounds and toxic cycles. And one person inevitably wants more than the other person. Exactly. Okay. So last question, is chemistry sometimes a trauma response? Yes, a hundred percent. So like big time. So a lot of times the people who end up in the longest lasting relationships aren't sitting there going, oh my gosh, I have all this limerence and intense infatuation. Intense infatuation that feels like this crazy spark where you can't stop thinking about it is usually somebody representing deeply unmet needs from your childhood. So if somebody feels like, oh my gosh, I'm so obsessed with this person. I just met them. There's intense, insane chemistry. Usually that's that like they made you feel really seen and you never really felt seen growing up as a kid. And so something meets something in us, it lights up our brain essentially, and then people seek it. But when they're motivated from that intense infatuation, they're more likely to self-abandon and turn a blind eye to a whole bunch of red flags that could pop up. Okay, so many things to circle back on. But let's start kind of at the foundation. So what are the four main attachment styles? Yeah, so four attachment styles. The first one is the secure attached style. The securely attached person makes up 50% of the population. And they actually report not just being in the longest lasting relationships, but I think this is important. they report being in the most fulfilling, long-lasting relationships. Securely attached kids grow up in households where they get a lot of approach-oriented behavior, which sounds funny, but it means a lot. And what this means is they get attunement. And when they're stressed, the parent knows what's going on for them and tries to come towards them and look out for them and have their back and see what's happening and soothe them. And it teaches a child that, okay, my emotions are worthy of being seen and heard. It's safe to rely on people. I can trust people. I'm worthy. And so they end up getting into relationships as adults where they're looking for those same things. It's their subconscious comfort zone of familiarity. So they invest in that and that's where they get a lot of that momentum. And so they end up having healthy ways of relying on people, of communicating through conflict. They've seen a lot of communication. They have healthy boundaries. They know their own needs. They know how to self-suit. They get all these really adaptive behaviors. Then we have three other attachment styles and they all are insecurely attached. So they all have different sort of trauma responses because of challenges they went through in their childhood. And I also think it's important to note that just because your attachment style develops in childhood doesn't mean it can't change. So sometimes you can be in a traumatic relationship for years and it can change your attachment style because we're always being conditioned through repetition and emotion. But it does start in childhood. So at one end of the continuum in a way is the anxious attachment style. Anxiously attached people grow up in a household where there's real or perceived abandonment. Real abandonment is the obvious. It's parent left, never came back or god forbid a parent passed away at a young age these types of things cause somebody to have this big abandonment wound and fear of it but perceived abandonment wires the brain if it's consistent enough in a very similar way as big t trauma so if you have a lot of repeated feelings of like my parents aren't there they're traveling all the time they're gone then a child grows up in this household and they're like constantly waiting for love to be taken away so they grow up and adapt to this in their relationships by deeply fearing being not good enough, being abandoned, being alone, excluded, disliked, rejected. These are like their big fears and relationships and the things that trigger them the most to spiral. And they cope with these fears by being like, okay, let me just people please my way through life. They become very generous, very sweet, very kind, very thoughtful and warm individuals, but they do all of this at the expense of themselves. And they usually don't have a really strong sense of self and identity and knowing who they are because they derive their sense of self through what other people think of them and the relationships around them, which unfortunately leads to them picking on available people because it's what's comfortable because they're unavailable to themselves. It also leads to them people pleasing in relationships to the point of feeling resentful and burnt out like, hey, I'm pouring everything into you. What about me? And they also end up in relationships feeling like they are put last. Nobody sees them. Nobody understands them. And unfortunately, they try so hard to not take up space that they end up in relationships that are just never really that fulfilling. And they also tend to cling a lot to people, which unfortunately often pushes them away. So that's your anxious. That's me to a T, by the way. Oh, that's you. No way. I'm like, whoa, but I've never heard it described that deeply. Yeah. Like so, so deep, although, and we can get into this later and I won't make this about myself. Don't worry, listeners. But I've been in a relationship for two years with like the most securely attached person ever in the world. And it's made me, I think, way more securely attached. Like I don't have anxious attachment in this relationship, really. It started to come up in the beginning. And then I was just, I kept being met with like consistency, consistency, consistency, and safety, safety, I guess, to your point, kind of conditioned me to be otherwise. But we'll come back to that. But just I can relate. And I'm sure so many listeners, I feel like so many people identify with anxious attachment, right? So many people. Yeah. It's roughly 20% of the population, which is, and the people who go through it, like you feel it, like you feel the panic in your body when somebody pulls away and you're not texted back. And even when a conflict is happening, anxious attachment cells, they want to like resolve it right now. It's hard to sit with your feelings. And most other attachment cells are like, no, we'll take some time. And it just, it's hard to be in these days. Okay. Well, I will ask you one more question about that. I mean, when I've thought about it in my own life, I believe that I was pretty securely attached growing up. And then I had a really, really volatile, really toxic, really traumatic relationship from when I was like 14, 15 until like my early 20s, kind of like off and on. And I feel like that was what really like changed it for me So we always being conditioned It why you hear these silly things like not silly but just interesting things Like you the sum of the five people you spend the most time around That because anything that you exposed to that creates a lot of repetition and emotion Repetition and emotion is what fires and wires neural pathways in our brain. So if you are repeatedly, like, that would be a classic example of what would create going from secure to anxious attachment style. It's like a formative relationship and behavioral development years, 14 to early 20s. and like the repetition of that person being volatile, unpredictable, confusing, that would all be things that you're like, wait, love is taken away, love is taken away. And it conditions you to then constantly fear that, which would in turn distort some of your attachment dynamics from secure into things in the future. That's encouraging though, because then you would assume that the repetition can take you from insecure to secure. Yes. Right. So that's like our whole body of work. That's like what we study is like, there's like traditional attachment theory, which is beautiful and amazing and is so, you know, cutting edge in the sense that it really opened up all this whole world. But unfortunately, traditional attachment theory was like, here's your attachment style. Good luck. You know, and what we started doing is being like, well, we know from a neuroscience perspective and neuroplasticity perspective, your brain changes. We know that your attachment style gets conditioned into you. You're not just like born with it coming out of the womb. So, well, how do we recondition those neural pathways? And a lot of my background was originally in a lot of like neuroplasticity, hypnotherapy kind of stuff. And so we have five main pillars and we can get into them, but how to actually recondition your attachment cell in as little as 90 days so that you don't have to go through life constantly going through those same cycles. Yeah. So we'll get to that, but let's go back to the other two. Yeah. So other end of the continuum, essentially kind of the opposite in a way from the dismissive avoidant or from the anxious attachment cell is the dismissive avoidant. Dismissive avoidance grow up with the overarching theme being childhood emotional neglect. And sometimes people think of this and they're like, oh, the child's home alone to the wee hours of the morning by themselves at four years old. Of course, it can be things like that where it's really intense neglect. But a lot of the time, it's more covert neglect. It's like foods on the table, structures there, stability's in the home, nobody fights. But also, nobody really talks through things. Nobody's attuned to each other. Nobody's really emotionally available. And because kids are wired for that attunement, we literally biologically need it. Children need to feel safe and seen and special, like biologically to form properly and to grow. If those things are missing, then a child can't understand yet or conceive of like, oh, my parents are emotionally unavailable. So instead the child goes, oh, it must be me. This emotional vulnerable part of me must be unworthy and just is always going to feel rejected. It must be broken or fundamentally flawed. And so dismissive always cope with that conditioning in childhood by being like, okay, I'm going to try to get close to people by being as little in terms of taking up space as possible by not really being vulnerable and not really having a lot of emotions. And also dismissive avoidance get a lot of this like children should be seen and not heard messaging or, oh, don't be a crybaby, like stiff upper lip, get it together, go cry in the other room and come back when you've figured it out. And so they have all of this messaging and conditioning that's like your emotions are not acceptable. And so they grow up and they're like, okay, my way of staying safe in relationships and not feeling like I did in childhood is to keep people at arm's length, to not need anybody, to be super self-reliant because coming through childhood and realizing that they could be self-reliant instead of feeling rejected all the time, it gave them some relief. So they're the type of people as individuals in their adult life who they're like, okay, I'm going to show up and I'm going to date you and I'm going to get to know you. But as soon as things get real, as soon as I have to be vulnerable, I now panic and I need to sort of dart away. And so they usually will date people for four to six months, then pull away all of a sudden, jet out of there. Or if they make it past the four to six month mark, then they really pull away around a year and a half in, in the power struggle stage of relationships. And it really feels like the rug is pulled out from underneath somebody and they struggle to resolve conflict. They struggle to be vulnerable. They speak a lot more in their thoughts and opinions rather than their feelings. They won't say like, I feel this way about something. They'll say, I think this, I think that. And they tend to connect a lot more intellectually than emotionally with people. And they have big fears in relationships. They deeply fear being seen as defective or broken fundamentally if they're vulnerable. They're scared to be seen as weak. They're scared to be trapped. That's why they fear commitment a lot or helpless or powerless. And they feel really unsafe in a conflict. And you won't know any of these things because they don't show it. They're very stoic. And so the moment that something hurts them, they just kind of pull away with their actions. They ignore people, stonewall, dismiss them. that's their way of coping. That's the only thing they really know how to do. And it was modeled to them. But obviously that's also really hard to be on the receiving end of, and it creates a lot of dysfunction in relationships. What is that year and a half power struggle that you mentioned? So every relationship has six stages. So we sort of built on a woman named Susan Johnson's work, and she talked about the five stages of relationship, but we have the first stage is the dating stage and zero to six months. Anxiously attached people try to move a little quicker, dismissive avoidance or sort of further along towards the six month mark. Then we have after the dating stage, if we make a commitment, we have the honeymoon stage, which lasts for another year to two years. Really interestingly, it mirrors our childhood conditions. So like as a little baby, you can't do any wrong the first year that you're alive, right? And then you start getting conditioned like good, bad, right, wrong. And so you're kind of loved more unconditionally your first year to year and a half. And that actually shows right back up in our adult relationships all this time later, which is so, so unique. But yeah, so after our honeymoon stage, then we have our power struggle stage. Every attachment cell goes through it. And it is the space in which we're used to somebody now. We've started to adapt. We get more comfortable and the mask comes off. We're not on our best behavior and trying so hard all the time. And securely attached people, they navigate that well because they know how to move through conflict more quickly. They are good at addressing things head on. Insecurely attached people tend to spiral more in that stage of the relationship and their fears come up the biggest and their wounds and their unmet needs show up. And so it's statistically where most people break up. But when you have the right tools, you can actually navigate it with grace and with ease. And after that, when you make it out of the power struggle, you've learned each other so much more deeply and you know how to communicate and hash things out. So then you move into the stability or rhythm stage where you've kind of found your footing. And then eventually the devotion stage where you're like making those big commitments. And then the bliss stage where you're committing long-term to somebody. The last attachment style is the fearful avoidant attachment style. And the fearful avoidant grows up with their overarching theme being intense chaos. So it can be things like you have parents who fight all the time and they're constantly in this terrible divorce and they're constantly putting the kids in the middle, for example. But it's often things like a parent's an active addiction or a parent's an alcoholic or a parent has narcissistic personality disorder. These types of things cause a young child to go through life and be like, I don't know what version of somebody I'm getting. Like if one day they'll say a parent is a narcissist, one day they love bomb you and they're so loving and so kind. And then another day they end up being cruel or mean and controlling and manipulative and guilt tripping you. You always have to be on edge. You're always bracing for the other shoe to drop. And so this child grows up essentially being like, okay, I constantly have to brace. And while the anxious attachment, their strategy to connect is to maintain proximity and closeness. And the dismissive avoidance is like, I need to create space and distance and minimize my attachment needs to other people, fearful avoidants are like, I need to predict everybody. I need to really read their micro expressions, body language, tone of voice. I need to see everything that could happen and go wrong to protect myself. And so they become extremely hypervigilant. They notice everything. I joke that fearful avoidants are like human lie detectors because they literally like, I was a fearful avoidant. That's part of why I do this work because I healed through this, but you notice everything and you can't help it. You're not trying to. And so when you've been conditioned to, I remember somebody saying to me years ago who was a client, she said, I could tell when I was upstairs in my room, by the way, my mom closed her door when she came home, if I should close my door or not and like protect myself or if she was in a good mood. And it's like those things you learn to tune so deeply into these little micro expressions and body language and tone of voice. And if you have a lot of triggers, a lot of core wounds, which come from these painful childhood experiences, then you're constantly jumping to those conclusions. If you felt betrayed a lot growing up, which is a big thing for fearful avoidance, you always assume betrayal. If you felt abandoned because they have an anxious side to them, you assume abandonment. If you felt trapped because you have this avoidance side to you, then you're assuming people are trying to control you. And so fearful avoidance as adults, they have both an anxious and avoidance side to their attachment style. They want closeness, but then when closeness is there, they feel threatened by it. So they're like, okay, come get close, come get close, somebody gets close and they're like, get back, like stay away. And they're really hot and cold. You'll spend so much time if you're fearful avoidant wondering like, should I stay or should I go? Is the right relationship or wrong? And they flip flop so much. And honestly, it's really hard to be on the receiving end of a fearful avoidant relationship because they're the roller coaster partner a little bit. They're the ups and downs. They give so many mixed signals and mixed messages. People kind of scrambles their brains if they're on the receiving end of that relationship. But the honest inside scoop is that if you are a fearful avoidant, your brain's already scrambled about relationships and your nervous system wants love, but fears it simultaneously. So you're just so hot and cold internally. And of course that then floods over into your partner and makes them feel that way too. Is there a crossover? Because I'm like, oh, that's me also. Like I'm hypervigilant. I'm taking temperature. I'm noticing everything shifts in energy, all of that. Can that be an anxious attachment as well? Or is that the anxious component of the fearful avoidant? Okay. So this is a really good question. So I'll tell you a couple of things. So anxious attachment thoughts are hypervigilant specific to abandonment, but not really everything else. Got it. Fearful avoidance are hypervigilant about everything. Like if you have a friend who told you one story three years ago and three years later, they told you like a slightly different variation of the story. They remember everything. They track everything. They don't mean to. And it's not intentional, but it's like, oh, there's an incongruency. You really notice it. And it's about all things. Fearful avoidance though, which is really interesting. A lot of people who are fearful avoidant originally think they're anxious when they learn about attachment theory because you really feel your anxious side. Like you're like, oh my gosh, the panic of the anxious side, it's so loud, right? Like you can't miss it when you feel panic. But what you don't often realize if you are a fearful avoidant is that you often push people away. You deactivate too. You shut down. Fearful avoidants usually have a history of kind of like testing people a lot. Like when I was fearful avoidant, and this is like 15 years ago, I did this work a long time ago, but I would be like, oh, I don't know if this is working. I'd say things like that when I didn't feel like somebody cared about me to kind of test the waters. Do they care? Are they going to try? Like a lot of these things that, you know, at face value are kind of like emotional immaturity in a way, but deep down it was because I was really wounded. And so you can sort of see both sides of that, but you would know if you had a history of like deactivating a good bit, shutting down, icing out, pushing people away sometimes when you felt hurt. Oh yeah. Okay. Do you do that sometimes? Yeah. Okay. Oh yeah. I'm like the queen of icing out. Okay. So that is very fearful avoidance. Okay. And so you probably feel your anxious side. And you can kind of have a little bit of a leaning one way where you might be fearful when leaning a little more anxious, but you'll definitely have the shutdown pull away kind of dynamic in there too. And you may have a history of feeling comfortable in chaos. And it's actually really interesting because when you said that about your 14 year old to 20 year old relationship and you said it was extremely volatile, I was like, yeah, that could create anxious attachments. But actually if it was really traumatic, it'd be more likely to create a fearful avoidant now. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense because I never knew what I was getting and I never knew when it was happening and why. And it was just always bracing. Yes. Yeah. Always. Yeah. So that's like textbook. What would create that? Interesting. So why do these different attachment styles? You kind of alluded to this earlier when I asked you, but like, why do they attract each other? Yeah. So we always attract how we treat ourselves, which is the craziest thing. So people say like, oh, you attract what your childhood was, which is true in the sense that a lot of times your childhood conditions how you treat yourself. As an example, I always say your internal dialogue, unless you're doing the work, is often your internalized dialogue. So if you grew up in an environment where people were so mean and cruel to each other, you have a very high chance of being mean and cruel to yourself and how you treat yourself, speak to yourself, judge yourself, your body, all these things. So we internalize a lot of that conditioning, but also we go through a whole adult life where things can recondition us and affect us and change us and our relationships over time will impact us And so a lot of the time people will shift and change And you always your major point of attraction is we invest the longest term in people who just mirror back to us how we treat ourselves. So so many people, especially anxious people will say things like, I want the emotionally available person and they'll say it and they'll write it down and they'll say, these are my standards. But then if you're not emotionally available to yourself, If you're not honoring your boundaries, speaking your needs, taking up space, being authentic, honoring your standards if somebody does wrong by you and saying like, hey, that's not okay with me and standing up for yourself. If you're not doing those things, unfortunately, you end up being in relationships with people who mirror that back to you and who end up being in that same space with you who also don't honor your needs and your boundaries and your feelings. And so we always attract ultimately how we treat ourselves, which is why it's so important to do the inner work to heal yourself so your point of attraction is coming from a place it's healthy and safe. I'm just thinking about like, how is it that I ended up with such a secure person? But I guess like when I got divorced, that was so contrary to how I've always been in relationships. That was the most kind of brave and like brazen thing that I've done. Not brazen because it was very thoughtful and like we went about it a very healthy way. But maybe that was kind of the start of conditioning myself. But how do people start to do the work themselves to change their attachment style. So you're actually, that would make a lot of sense. So we have five pillars. The first, one of the first pillars is to actually honor your needs and your truth. And so a lot of times you'll see people take that first big leap in their healing journey by just being like, this is no longer okay for me. This is no longer acceptable. I'm not happy. I'm going to do the heavy lifting of leaving situations that are not honoring me and good for me anymore. And that's you honoring your needs, right? That's you honoring your truth. So there's a really good quote. And I always think of this when I explain this is by Dr. Gabbermati. He says, trauma are the things. Yeah. Trauma are the things that happened that shouldn't have happened, like abuse, right? The obvious. But trauma are also the things that didn't happen that should have happened. So for example, if somebody grows up and nobody's, you know, making them feel attuned to, or they're being neglected, like in a perfect world, that wouldn't have happened. They would have felt seen and heard and cared for. and that void of that being there is traumatic. So one of our first pillars to actually heal is to go in and recognize like what are my deepest unmet needs from my own childhood experiences because we hold on to those. We store them and there's a void of grief left behind that we adapt to. We get used to it. We're like, okay, nobody's going to meet my needs for feeling seen or special or cared for. That's fine. And we adapt and we build a whole personality around it. But ultimately like your goal is to go back in and be like, well, these are the things that I do need and I'm going to start showing up for them myself. So as an example, anxious attachment styles, a lot of their needs are reassurance, validation, encouragement to be made a priority. And so much of their work becomes validating their own feelings, making themselves a priority, learning to sit with themselves and get to know themselves more deeply so they can self-soothe. They weren't soothed consistently. So they need to give to themselves what they couldn't get. And that happens in the same way with fearful avoidance, dismissive avoidance. They all have unique needs. I could spend like 25 minutes just talking about that. So I'll try to keep it on point. But each attachment cell has unmet needs from their childhood. And we actually a big part of our first pillar of healing is to go back in and meet those needs and fill those things up. And only when we do that, are we then capable of truly receiving them from other people. If we don't meet them ourselves, we'll accidentally block them or sabotage them from other people. And so that next pillar is once you've learned to understand your needs and go through and assess what your needs are as a person and meet them yourself, then our second pillar is to learn to communicate properly. So many people, and I was so like this, as you'll probably understand this in your history too, if you were also fearful avoidant, like so many people do not get taught how to communicate in healthy ways. And when I look back at how I would communicate, and this is very typical of fearful avoidance, this is also typical of anxious attachment styles, but kind of just a little bit less intense, is you hold things in, you don't speak your truth, you don't say your needs. And then you've had enough and you're like, I'm going to tell you everything now about how I really feel. And then you say the 17 things that the person's doing wrong all at once. And you're like, three days ago, you did this three months ago, you did this. And then we speak from criticism and criticism is not communication. So one of the biggest things we learn is like, and there's different tools for communication, but one of the big ones is just positive framing. The difference between saying, you don't care about me. You're not spending any time with me versus saying something like, Hey, I'm feeling disconnected. I really want to have more quality time together, let's plan a fun date on the weekend. And when we say what we want, instead of criticizing what's not happening, we finally get heard and we finally leave room for people to actually show up for us. So pillar one, learn your unmet needs, meet them yourself. Pillar two, communicate them in healthy ways. Pillar three is regulate your nervous system. It's a huge part of healing. And that comes through just daily actions and habits, things like meditation, breath work, mindfulness exercises, all these things, because insecure attachment cells, they all spend too much time in sympathetic nervous system, which is that fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode because they've had to be there a lot throughout their childhood or past relationship experiences. So those are our first three. And I'll give the last two at a high level, but the next one is we have to actually set boundaries. Each attachment cell has a dysfunctional relationship to their boundaries. So anxious attachment cells are boundaryless. Dismissive avoidance have two extreme of boundaries where their boundaries are like they're never compromising. Fearful avoidance are boundaryless until they get mad. Then they set boundaries from volatility or frustration. And then they feel guilty about it because they're empathetic. And then they go back to being boundaryless again. So I say there's sort of this fearful avoidance boundary cycle where you're like, gosh, I'm doing so much. It's not being reciprocated. You feel frustrated. You shut somebody down or you express your boundaries in a more volatile way. And then you're like, oh, I feel bad that I acted like that. Now I'm going to go back to people pleasing again and being boundaryless. And fearful avoidance can just go around and around there. So we have to learn to actually rewire our relationship to boundaries. And then the last pillar, and I can go into this one a little bit more if you want, but all of those triggers, the fears of abandonment, being alone, disliked, or for fearful avoidance, being betrayed, abandoned, unworthy, bad, this fear that people see you as bad and you have to over-explain yourself all the time, the fear of being trapped, and dismissive avoidance who fear being trapped or helpless or powerless or weak or shameful. all of those things that wreak so much havoc on your relationship you're not born with them they get conditioned into you and there's actually a really easy three-step solution people can use it takes a little bit of consistency across 21 days to actually recondition those fears so that they're not popping up everywhere in your life you can dive into that one okay i'm sure everybody is like okay what is it tell me how to do it so there's three steps i feel like this is a really good starting exercise for people just in terms of their wounds so the first thing is that you have to find these big wounds and they're opposite. So let's say that the big wound is I'm going to be abandoned. Okay. And what's the opposite? I'm worthy of connection. So I'm not a believer in affirmations. Affirmations are not, I just don't think they're, I think they're a little bit of a waste of time from a neuroscience point of view because your conscious mind is responsible for three to 5% of everything. Your conscious mind is your logical thinking self. Your subconscious mind is responsible for 95 to 97% of everything. And your subconscious mind, is a giant warehouse of information. It stores all of the memories you've ever had, and it consolidates them a little bit over time, but it stores everything. And it's your habituated self. Nobody ever wakes up and is like, oh, I'm going to tell myself all day long that everybody that I love is going to abandon me and I'm not worthy of love and see how I feel. Nobody's consciously choosing that. So what happens is we have these subconscious wounds. I always give the analogy that for people, it's like a bear in the woods. If you go into the woods and you see a bear and you run away. But the next day you go into the woods again, you're constantly bracing for the bear. You're looking for it everywhere because our mind is wired to hang on to painful things and reproject them back out to try to keep us safe. So if you felt abandoned as a kid or in a past relationship, then you're constantly holding on to that, projecting it out. And the moment somebody doesn't text us back or it doesn't get back to us in a timely manner, we jump to that conclusion again. That's a protective measure of our subconscious mind. But that's helpful when it's a bear and it's not helpful when it's the fear of abandonment as an adult, right? Step one is find the wound and its opposite. Step two is we cannot just speak language because our conscious mind speaks language and our subconscious mind speaks in emotions and images. It doesn't even really hear language. If I say to you, okay, whatever you do, do not think of a chocolate chip cookie, you think of a chocolate chip cookie. And so we don't consciously, do not is the language. Your conscious mind registers like, oh yeah, she said not to do it, but it's too late. You flashed it, right? You see the image of it. So we have to speak to our subconscious mind because that's the warehouse or the home of our core wounds or triggers. So step one, I am going to be abandoned. I'm worthy of love and connection. The opposite. Step two, we need to come up with 10 memories of times that we actually felt we were worthy of love and connection or how people did show up for us in our life and we did feel connected and loved and supported. And the reason we pick memories is because every memory ever is a container of emotions and imagery. So if you think of your favorite childhood memory and you're with your parents at Disney World and you're on the rides, like you see the images of the Disney World rides and we've seen people when they recall old memories, they laugh or they smile or they, you know, because we actually have the emotion still intact with every memory that's stored in that warehouse of our subconscious. So step one, I am not gonna be abandoned. I'm worthy of love and connection. Step two, 10 times, 10 memories of times I did feel supported. I did feel worthy of love and connection. I did feel like I showed up in ways that made me worthy of that. Maybe I was a good friend. Maybe I showed up really well. And I feel worthy of that. And step three, we record it down. Like ideally, we write it down. We record ourselves saying it out loud. And we listen back for 21 days. It takes two to three minutes a day. And we ideally do it in the first hour that we wake up or the last hour before we go to sleep because our brain is producing more alpha and theta brain waves during that time, which means we're super suggestible. In other words, our subconscious as mine absorbs lots of information and material. And the repetition and emotion across 21 days is what's firing and wiring those neural pathways. And 21 days of repetition and emotion in an alpha brainwave state is what really helps those neural pathways become strong enough to stick and to actually last. And people who do this, so people who actually, we've had 60,000 people go through our programs to do this. And people who completed the 21 days uninterrupted had a 99.7% score of actually healing and overcoming those big wounds. So it's really easy, a really good place to start in people's healing journey, really effective. And it's actually changing your brain. That's amazing because I think that especially with social media, like attachment styles are, you know, hot topics and I'm sure there's so much misinformation around them. I would love to have you do some myth busting maybe. But I think that people, you know, like I did too, like see this information out there and then they just attach to one of the styles and that's their identity. And you don't think that you can change it. It's just kind of like something that you're going to be stuck with. Which is the worst thing ever. Honestly, it makes me so upset because I'm like the whole point of knowing your attachment cells so that you know these are the patterns I have to work on healing and changing. And that's why like so we publish this whole body of work and it's like the neuroscience of how to change your attachment cells called Gibson Integrated Attachment Theory. And like the whole point is to know, hey, these are my themes, but then these are the five levers I pull to heal because without it, then we do exactly what you said. I'm so glad that you said that just for anybody listening. That's the goal is to be like, okay, this is, these are my patterns. But if you just identify with that as like your character or your personality, then you keep playing out those patterns and then justifying them, which is a trap. And you're like, oh, I call a lot because I'm anxiously attached. And it's like, no, no, no. That's going to keep sabotaging your relationships. You want to be able to heal the thing that's causing you to call a lot at the room. So you get relief. Your relationship's going to work better. And that's the whole point of this work. Well, and there's confirmation bias, right? So if you're like, I'm anxiously attached, like that's what I identified with for so many years. And then anytime something would come up in my relationship or I'd feel a certain way or whatever, I was like, oh, I'm anxiously attached. Like I'm seeking out things to reinforce my belief about myself which then further reinforces it and you experience it more and everything And it just like an endless cycle I curious like in all of the research that you did and everything you mentioned one thing that was kind of mind blowing which was like the phases of the relationships kind of mirror the first few years of your life. Was there anything else that was just like shocking to you that really stood out? I would say the biggest thing, I mean, the first thing forever that will forever shock me, because it was so personal for me, is that your conscious mind isn't running the show. Like unless people and this is unpopular opinion in like the mainstream medical community, but I'm just going to be really honest. Like if people are trying to do the work through talk therapy and go and keep talking about things over and over again, but don't actually have new patterns that they're trying to build, new behaviors are taking part in daily across 21 day cycles, rewiring that they're doing at the subconscious level of mind. unfortunately like and this is what was most mind-blowing to me talking about things over and over again is often just reinforcing those same patterns and belief systems in your brain that in turn just keeps those patterns alive and there's some great things coming up in talk therapy and some more cutting-edge techniques that are happening like emdr things like that that are effective but truly unless you're dealing with your subconscious mind then you're going to keep going through those same cycles and that's like where true healing happens and a lot of people i would say the second thing is that there's this huge trend right now, which is like the nervous system, the nervous system. It's one of our five pillars of healing. Your nervous system matters so much. However, I know far too many people who only do the nervous system work. The nervous system is not the root cause. So if you imagine that analogy of the bear in the woods, we're reprojecting first the threat of the bear. Okay. There was a bear yesterday. Oh my God, the bear's coming. Or, oh my gosh, I was abandoned my whole childhood or in that past relationship. I'm going to be abandon again because they're not texting back. And when we project that subconsciously stored belief onto our reality, it in turn causes us to have all these thoughts that are like, oh, it could be this. It could be that. Do they like me? Did I do something wrong? Is it my fault? And when we think and believe those thoughts, then we feel negative emotions. Those emotions are made up of neurochemicals like cortisol, norepinephrine, adrenaline that is then in turn signaling to our body and nervous system to brace. So a lot of people, unfortunately, are being like, heal your nervous system, regulate your nervous system. And that's important. That's very helpful. But if you're only doing that work and you're not rewiring your subconscious core wounds, then you're going to keep causing yourself to panic and then being able to regulate through nervous system work. And then the next day or three hours later, you go back through those same cycles. And so we have to be doing both in terms of regulating ourselves. And that was another thing that A, was just so mind blowing learning about, but B, I hope people can start to come across and understand too. Yeah. Why do we tend to romanticize like the bad boys and the people that don't treat us well and the fuck boys and all of that? Is that just because that volatility and I don't know, stimulation feels familiar for some people or is it just because it provides some kind of excitement or something? And conversely, there's like, you know, the stereotype about like the boring guy and everyone's like, marry the boring guy. You know, is that just, does that come down to like nervous system or what is it? So absolutely. That's one of the big things. Okay. So that's like the first thing is that for sure there's a nervous system part. Okay. Exactly. We talked about, we were attracted to what feels familiar often for fearful avoidance or used to chaos. They're like somebody who's super secure, unless you do some work beforehand can feel a little bit boring. We're like, it's a little too consistent. I don't know what to expect here. But anxious attachment styles are the same way. Like we tend to very much be attracted to what's most familiar to us in terms of how it makes us feel. But second to that, which is super interesting, is we are attracted to our repressed traits. Okay. So these two things drive attraction. And sometimes they feel like they're different from each other, which they are, but one we get attracted to early on and one we invest in longer term. So your repressed traits. And so to go to like the bad boy thing, the people who get attracted to bad boys are the people who suppress their own ability to seem like they are bad. So they're the good girls, the people pleasers. And so what's actually happening is we all have something called homeostatic or allostatic impulse at the subconscious level of mind. And what that means is we want wholeness. And so if one person, if I meet Bob and Bob is this sort of daredevil, risk taker, spontaneous bad boy, and I grew up being like, I didn't grow up this way at all, But in theory, as an analogy, if I grew up being like, stay inside the box, color inside the lines, have everything be just right, people please, be the good girl. If that was how I grew up, then literally my subconscious mind is like so attracted to it because I'm trying to integrate with it and create a sense of wholeness. And so that's one of the other big reasons. And like clockwork, the people who are most attracted to those things are the people who haven't learned to just stand up for themselves, take up space, show up, not always have to be so good and so people pleasing. And so that's why they're so drawn to it and other people. It's almost like if you can imagine like in chemistry class where you have these chemical reactions and then, you know, the bonds form. It's kind of like that, right? Like we're drawn to it. We bond. And then there's this brief sense of stability. But the craziest part of all of it, and it's another like myth-busting thing, is you hear so much stuff on the internet and people are like, oh, if you want attraction, you need like one person to be in their extreme feminine and one person to be their extreme masculine needs to be complete opposites. that is very attractive because of this in the dating and honeymoon stages of relationship, in the power struggle stage, unless we healthily take on those traits, it's the exact thing that comes to sabotage the relationship later. Okay. So for example, the amount of people I've had conversations with who are like, oh my God, I love this guy. He's so easygoing. I just love that. He's so like on his own time, does his own thing, get to the power struggle stage. They're like, he never makes plans with me. There's no structure. What's going on? So we are so attracted to these things. And later on, they drive us nuts. And it's actually because, and I'll use myself as an example. When I met my husband almost 11 years ago, he was super assertive. And I had done a lot of inner work already. I was actually already working with people for a couple of years. And he had done some work too, but I was still a little fearful avoidant. He was still a little dismissive avoidant at the time. And I really admired in him that he was so assertive. I remember he would just tell people like, no, not doing that. Just like very like driven, just on his own time, doing things in his own way without any care of like how, you know, trying to people please. And I was like, wow, he's like so good at that. And then we got into our power struggle stage and I was like, he never freaking compromises. Like, hello, like I need some compromise. And I realized because I'd been in this work already that like, oh, I compromise too much. I don't speak my needs enough. and what I need to do is I need to take up more space, communicate that I need him to be more flexible, ask for it, see it through, make that more repeated. And if he does that, that's great, it's gonna work. If he doesn't, then maybe it's not the relationship for me. And I showed up that way. And in turn, he actually really showed up too. So he became super flexible and more mindful and much more considerate of me and the relationship. And I became a little more assertive, learned to take up space. And it's funny because the things that trigger us often provide us some of the greatest opportunities for healing in these sort of hidden ways we don't often realize. And it's actually called our shadow. And so there's a really beautiful quote by Rumi and he says, if I'm irritated by every rub, how will I ever be polished? And it's this idea that like the things that trigger us can actually provide a steep insight into ourselves. And that's a really big version of it. And so I always say to people, yeah, you're really attracted to these things early on, but like you have to look for them and usually have to intentionally bring them into your own healing journey and integrate with them truly. Otherwise, you'll really like them at the beginning and be attracted to them and then they'll drive you nuts later. I always say because I started dating my boyfriend very shortly after I got divorced, but I had been separated. Then we got back together and then we were separated again and then we got divorced. So it was like a very long process. But I've said to people like I've healed so much more in my relationship because it kind of held up a mirror to a lot of things that I had to work on and made me feel safe in ways that I didn't feel safe. So they're like just I healed so much more in love than I healed isolated on my own talking to a therapist. And I'm a proponent of therapy. I think there's a time and a place. But it's like when these things are in practice, you really have to confront them. And I confronted things that I wasn't even aware of when I was on my own that came up when I was in a healthy relationship. Like, I just think it's so interesting how, you know, a relationship is such an opportunity for learning about yourself. 100%. And you also chose that. So like there are people who are like, I'm going to blame, blame, blame when somebody holds up a mirror and I'm not going to look in the mirror and I'm going to avoid the mirror altogether. So I also think that that's like two things you said that are really important. It's like, yeah, you have somebody secure with you. And obviously that's super helpful, but also you are obviously doing the work to look into your patterns and try to do things differently and show up and change and like reflect and introspect. And that's part of what drives that moving towards security and healthier relationships. So that's ideally anybody listening doing the same thing, but sometimes that's the first thing that's so hard for people at the beginning. Yeah. If you can answer this, is there one attachment style that is the most difficult to overcome? Probably the fearful avoidance. Oh, sorry. Great. I need 42 days, It's not 21. So the core wound stuff works the same. You get the 21 days. The only reason is everything I feel like has benefits and drawbacks. So if I broke it down, I would say fearful wounds have the most core wounds and they have the most dysregulation from a nervous system perspective. So they have a little bit longer of a journey because you do 21 days and you do a couple wounds at a time. You have to kind of go through your eight or nine major core wounds and it take and, you know, regular nervous system on a regular basis a little bit longer. There's more unmet needs from childhood or past relationships. And so there's a little bit more work to do, but fearful avoidance are also the type of people who are like, they make good entrepreneurs and they are great outside of their comfort zone because they like go deep. They don't like surface stuff. When they commit to something, they go all in, they're kind of all or nothing. So they'll go like really into stuff. And I would always kind of like when I was working in private practice, I liked fearful avoidance clients the most sometimes not to, I loved all my clients, but because they would show up to the nth degree. So you kind of have that, that hidden benefit that they're going to really dig in and plug into the work in there. very insightful because they've had to be. And so they're good at like figuring things out and making connections and understanding deep material really quickly. So they do really well there. Dismissive avoidance, they are really good when they get started, but they're the least likely to want to do the work. So they're the ones that like, they're just statistically the least likely to be in online programs or therapy or things like that. But once they do it, they're committed and consistent. They're just slower moving. Anxious attachment styles, they're usually pretty easy to work with or to do the work. They just need a little more handholding and ongoing support. So they're not going to like take the work home and do it. They want you to tee it up for them. They want that extra community support in different situations. So everybody has kind of their benefits and drawbacks, but that's how they each tend to operate. Amazing. Tell everybody where they can find you and find your work and all of that. Yeah. I'd always love to come back. And I'm at www.personaldevelopmentschool.com. People can go in there and they can actually take a free attachment quiz that tells them like their whole in-depth profile, not just traditional attachment theory, but the wounds and the needs and your boundary challenges and your nervous system function. It really goes in detail. And then I put daily content on YouTube, which is Thais Gibson-PersonalDevelopmentSchool and on Instagram at The Personal Development School. And we'll link it all in show notes. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun. So fun. I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you liked the episode and if you like the show in general, please take a second to rate, review, and subscribe. It goes such a long way in supporting the show. Follow the show over on Instagram at well.pod. You can also follow my personal Instagram at Arielle Laurie. I'm always sharing great clips from the episodes and we also have full episodes on YouTube as well if you want to watch in entirety. Thanks for listening. Thank you.