The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
Attachment Styles with Thais Gibson #76
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In this conversation, Jon Fogel and Thais Gibson delve into the complexities of attachment styles and their impact on relationships and parenting. Thais shares her personal journey from experiencing a fearful avoidant attachment style to understanding and teaching about attachment theory. They discuss the dynamics of different attachment styles, how they manifest in relationships, and the importance of self-awareness and emotional regulation. Thais provides practical tools for rewiring attachment wounds and emphasizes the significance of treating oneself well to foster healthier relationships. The conversation concludes with resources for further exploration and personal development.
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Why does one parent want to talk everything through while the other shuts down? Why does one parent panic when their child's upset, while the other feels overwhelmed and needs space? What if these things are not actually personality differences, but attachment strategies learned in childhood? I want to introduce you to Thais. She says that you're not broken, you're just a pattern. And she's going to help us understand attachment styles today. Welcome to the podcast, Thais Gibson.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much for having me, and I'm gonna have a fun chat because it's already been so nice to speak to you and just get to know you the past few minutes.
Jon @WholeParent:For those listening, I am out on the porch. I did heat up the porch before this, so my computer is working. Uh, if you've been wondering why the daily episodes have not been coming out, it is because my computer is not frozen in the technological sense, but frozen in the literal sense. It will not work when it's under 20 degrees. But even though I have my frozen drink with me here today, I'm excited to have a very warm personality with me. So uh I want to just ask you from the beginning. I think you've worked with so many people. Before you were known for attachment theory work, who were you in relationships?
SPEAKER_01:So a big part of why I got into this work is because I was a fearful, avoidant, aka disorganized attachment style in relationships. So I grew up with a lot of turbulence in the home, a lot of chaos, a lot of confusion. And at a really young age, I just remember thinking, like, why are relationships so hard? And why is it so confusing? Like I would always feel in a relationship as this sort of hot and cold partner that I wanted closeness. But then as soon as closeness was there, I would feel kind of threatened by it, quite honestly. Like, oh, the more I care and the more I love, the more hurt I will inevitably be. And so I would be the person that would, you know, as soon as somebody would get close, I would push them away. And I think I gave a lot of mixed signals and a lot of pain points. And that was actually a huge part of what led me into this work, is that I started digging deep into, well, what are my own patterns? Why are relationships so difficult for me? How did I end up here? And, you know, that then allowed me to really do a deep dive into a lot of this work to begin with. Um, and I spent about three, four years being very single and being like, I'm not gonna get into a relationship until I'm right, until I'm in a place where I feel like I can hold space for a really healthy relationship and inevitably did that work. And then the very next person I met, um, as soon as I decided, okay, I'm ready to date, end shipping my husband and fast forward 11 years, and and here we are. But um yeah, I was the person who was very hot and cold in relationships. And I think that was a big part of why I was so curious about this at a young age.
Jon @WholeParent:That's so interesting that the first person that you dated after working through your attachment wounds, do you think that that's more because what you were bringing to and I don't want to say, you know, obviously there's so much alchemy and in like and magic and unknown in love and and who we wind up with, but do you think that that was more of a function that you were more ready for that relationship, or that you knew what to look for in a partner at that point? Like, was it you who had changed, or or do you feel like you were just better at selecting because you had done your work?
SPEAKER_01:That's such an interesting question. Well, my my husband and I are super compatible, like from an MBTI perspective. Like we um everybody sort of has a golden pair from your Myers, Briggs, your 16 personalities, and that's us for each other. And we really like get along super well and we're really compatible, I think. For sure, I knew what to look for. Um, when I met him, I was still like dipping my toe in the dating pool. I was like, oh, I was actually working with clients and I was really like building my business and starting, and and um my business sort of happened by accident, to be quite honest. Like I started teaching workshops for free because I loved the work and I was still in school, and I wasn't actually really looking for a serious relationship. I was sort of looking to see what I was looking for, I think. Um, and I think two things happened. I think I knew a little bit more about myself to know what to look for. And I think a really big thing is that I was willing to work through things and explore in a way that I hadn't before. So when there was a problem in a relationship, instead of running or shutting down or doing things I would normally do, I was interested in talking things out and trying to practice vulnerability and trying to actually put into action things that I had deeply learned. Um, and I had done so much deep inner work, but not personal work, not like relational work just yet. And so it was like, okay, now I'm doing this out in the world in this kind of context. And I think it was just really rewarding to be honest, to see things like I remember having my first conversation where I felt hurt by something and I needed reassurance. And I would like, you wouldn't catch me dead asking for reassurance in a relationship prior to that. And I remember being like, hey, I need context about the situation. I need to know that like you're in this and you care too. And I just remember him speaking so like it just went so well and being like, oh my God, is this what healthy people do? This is this is how it's supposed to work. Okay, this is what's okay. And it was, you know, and it was just such a rewarding experience. And to be honest, he had some work to do too. And so we were kind of on this journey together. And I think that kind of binded, like bonded us a lot more closely. Um I think we both both felt a lot more rewarded by that kind of thing, having not really had those experiences for either of us growing up.
Jon @WholeParent:So, yeah, that's that's so interesting that like it was both. It was you you knew what to look for, but you mentioned the MM uh BI. I would love to kind of get into or the MBTI. Is that the Myers Briggs personality inventory?
SPEAKER_01:Exactly, yeah.
Jon @WholeParent:Okay, okay. So so you think that that so that was a big piece of it, but we're focusing sort of on attachment styles today. I think we could do an entire episode. I would I would love to bring you back and do an entire episode on Myers Briggs. I think it's so interesting and and how it how it plays out in relationships. Me and my wife are the same. Um uh we're only the same on our intuitive what's the N N and Yeah, introverted intuition or yeah. Yeah, so so we're so we're opposites on everything except for we're both N's.
SPEAKER_01:So what are you?
Jon @WholeParent:So I'm an I N F J.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's my husband.
Jon @WholeParent:Okay, or maybe I'm the P. I don't remember who's the P and who's the J, but we're opposites. That's what I remember.
SPEAKER_01:Are you more organized and diligent about planning, or are you more go with the neither of us are?
Jon @WholeParent:Neither of us are organized or diligent about planning. But but she but she's more, yeah. We like that's that's that's our that's our constant struggle.
SPEAKER_01:You strike me as an ENFP.
Jon @WholeParent:Um right.
SPEAKER_01:I think I'm a P. I think she's a J. Very, very disarming. ENFPs, when you first meet them, I think the first word is like they're just very likable and friendly and disarming. They make everybody feel comfortable immediately. ENFJs are like that too, but they're a little more structured and organized and and a little bit more, yeah. So you're probably I wouldn't be surprised if you were an ENJ.
Jon @WholeParent:That's but but also but also like likable immediately is not usual. Well, you know what I usually get, I usually get likable immediately, but then I get but then but then eventually people are like, I don't know about this.
SPEAKER_01:People probably feel very comfortable around you quite quickly.
Jon @WholeParent:I think it's uh well I think that I think that we and this is kind of an attachment thing, right? So I think one of the things that I struggle with in relationships, not with my wife, but just in general, kind of like um surface level relationships, is what what I wind up doing is being kind of radically honest, like that's erratically vulnerable. Not in like a like, hey, do I look good in this? No, you look terrible. Like, but like radically honest in like the if I if I harm somebody or if I like do something wrong, I'm just like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. I you know what? I I screwed that up and I need to fix this, and that's totally on me. And I just like take very like a I take a ton of accountability.
SPEAKER_01:Accountability.
Jon @WholeParent:Yeah, and and and I think that's disarming. People are like, they don't really believe that. They're like, oh, this feels manipulative. Like, like you, you apologize so quickly. This feels like you're trying to do something. And so I think I think that also has to do with my but I think that that has to do with my attachment style. So I'm I'm anxious attachment. Yeah, and uh I don't know, I don't know what my wife is, but but one of the things that I was re in researching for this episode is realizing that very rarely do two anxious attached people wind up together. Usually it's anxious and avoidant who get paired together or you know, a secure with somebody, and then disorganized, what you said, like that from what I understand, until until you work through the disorganized wound, you kind of it's hard to be with anybody, right? Because like the because you're kind of oscillating back and forth. So why do those pairings wind up attracting? And why do so many people listening to this right now who are parents, like why do you why do we tend to have a different attachment wound or attachment style to our partner? Like, and I think that that's an important piece.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so really good question. So, do you want me to give like a little highlight overview of the four attachment cells in case anybody's unfamiliar or does your partner? No, yeah. Okay, perfect. So we have 50% of the the population, they're securely attached, okay, according to data. Securely attached people often end up with other securely attached people. Securely attached people, what they actually get in their childhood is a lot of approach-oriented behaviors. Small thing goes a long way. I I know you probably know a lot about this, but um, basically what this means is that, you know, securely attached kids grew up in a household where there's a lot of attunement. Parents are very present. And when the child is feeling distressed in some way, the parents approach the child to try to um create this sense of connection. And so this leaves a kid feeling like, okay, well, I can trust people, I can let my guard down, I can rely on other people. I'm loved in my good moments and my challenging moments where I'm emotional and I'm worthy of love, just as I am as a human being, not because of something I'm doing. So you get a lot of this and you get a lot of open communication fostered throughout a child's upbringing. And so a lot of these things, then that individual has been conditioned to think this is how relationships go, and they model off those same behaviors in their relationships. Then we have three insecurely attached individuals. I think of them as being along a continuum in a sense. At one end of the continuum is the anxious attachment styles. This is what you said that you were anxiously attached individuals, they usually have quite loving families or households, but there's either real or perceived abandonment. Real abandonment is the obvious. So this is a parent, you know, passes away, God forbid, or they leave at a young age and don't come back to the child. And perceived abandonment is that you have very loving parents, but they're working all the time, for example. It's like love is there, love is taken away, love is there, love is taken away. And what that does is it conditions a child to always be bracing for love to be taken away. And so they end up fearing being abandoned and their biggest wounds. So we built this body of work on top of traditional attachment theory that dove into the core wounds of each attachment style. And we discovered that the core wounds of anxious attachment styles are the fear of being abandoned, alone, disliked, excluded, rejected, unloved, not good enough. Okay, so these are their big attachment wounds. And they have to feel really emotionally unsafe if somebody pulls away from them. At the other end of the continuum, and by the way, they cope with these things by generally trying to people please, put everybody first, put themselves last, they burn themselves out sometimes because they're overgiving to everybody. They're super attentive and thoughtful about others. But sometimes the sort of primary casualty in that dynamic is that you forget about the relationship to yourself, to your own needs, to your own boundaries, and end up kind of burning the candle at both ends, so to speak, is a very common theme there. At the other end of the continuum, in a sense, is the dismissive avoidance. Dismissive avoidance grows up with more childhood emotional neglect. Um, and I think people hear that and you think, oh, this overt neglect, like kids are alone all the time at three years old, parents don't come home for the evening. Like, of course, it can be that, but that's the vast minority of situations and cases. Childhood emotional neglect often looks like parents are at home, kids are at school on time, food's on the table on time, there's structure, order, it can be all those things, but there is a complete lack of attunement, okay, or a very large lack of attunement. And so, you know, children end up when they they feel distressed, they feel like they can't emotionally bond or connect to their parents around this attunement piece. So they're left feeling like, okay, this part of me isn't acceptable. It gets, it gets dismissed or ignored when I'm emotional. So they learn that, okay, well, you know, a child obviously can't sit there and go, oh, my parents are emotionally unavailable to me. So instead, a child goes, oh, there must be something wrong with me. This emotional, vulnerable part of me is wrong. It's defective. I need to just repress it into the recesses of my subconscious mind and not really exhibit these behaviors. And they cope by being super self-reliant. They're like, oh, I just need to not need anybody. And then I won't feel rejected. I just need to not really care about, you know, my own emotions and learn to repress them and compartmentalize them very well. And they grow up adapting to their childhood by doing that. And then as adults, they end up being the individuals who go through life and they are sometimes, you know, slow to warm up, slow to open up. It takes them a while to let their guard down. They tend to struggle with long-term commitments, or they always keep people at arm's length. And they cope in relationships by basically always minimizing their attachment needs. They like to sometimes flaw find or convince themselves they don't need the person they're in a relationship with. And in doing that, it creates a sort of sense of control or safety for them. So that's our dismissive avoidance. And their big wounds or fears in relationships are the fear of being shamed or criticized, is seen as defective because of that emotional neglect they internalized, weak if they're vulnerable, um, fear of being trapped or engulfed in a relationship is a really big one. And then big fear of being helpless or powerless if they rely on people too much. Um, so those are some of the big ones. And they feel generally emotionally unsafe in a conflict, so they keep pulling away. Okay. Last attachment style is our fearful avoidant or disorganized attachment style. The disorganized attachment style grows up with a lot more historically what you would think of as like big T trauma, more chaos. It could be that a parent is an alcoholic or an active addiction, a parent has narcissistic personality disorder. It can be in these types of things, a bad divorce that kids are put in the middle of, and sort of, you know, the parents involve the kids too much and in big things. Um, in any of these cases, what you see is a child grows up having some good experiences with love and connection. Like if you think of a parent being a narcissist, sometimes that parent love bombs the child, and there's a golden child, and that child feels like, oh, love is a really good thing. I'm I'm getting deep connection and this is meaningful to me. And other times a parent is like tearing the child down a little bit and being really cruel and harsh and very critical. And in those cases, love is registered and conditioned to be believed as a cruel thing or a scary or threatening thing. And so what ends up happening is this child grows up and they really have a disorganized view about love and connection. They see it as a both good and bad thing. And that means that their attachment strategy becomes to be hyper-vigilant. So you have the anxious who's like, let me get close to people. That's my attachment strategy, let me people please. The dismissal one's like, let me keep distance and minimize my attachment needs. And that's my way of staying in relationships with people. Fearful avoidance or disorganized attachment cells, they are like, let me notice every little thing about your microexpressions, your body language, your tone of voice, how you move in the world. And let me try to predict your behavior and sort of stay three steps ahead so that I can know how you're going to behave. I remember a client of mine once said, I would be upstairs in my room after school. And I knew by the way my mom came home and shut the door whether I should leave my door open or go and close my door too. It's like these hyper-vigilance attachment strategies. Like, I need to predict you because you're unstable. And when I can predict you, I can then sort of figure out how to navigate the world. So fearful avoidance or disorganized, they grow up and they have this anxious side to them where they feel like they need that connection and they're afraid of abandonment. But then they have this avoidance side to them where they're also scared to get too close. And they feel like the more close they become to somebody, the more threatened they'll be. And so they end up having these fears of being trapped, fears of being helpless if they rely on people, wounds around feeling abandoned or rejected. But then they also have this huge wound of feeling betrayed. They're always waiting for the other shoe to drop, they're always kind of on high alert, and they don't really trust other people in the long run or the world around them. And so they become very hot and cold, pinball back and forth all the time, and give a lot of those mixed signals and relationships.
Jon @WholeParent:The first thing that sticks out to me is just when you're just kind of talking about those big T trauma things with disorganized attachment, the first thing that pops out to me is ACE score, right? Like adverse childhood experience. It seems like it seems like when we're getting to disorganized attachment, we're starting to count ace points and saying, okay, like how how how has this child experienced not just like ineffective attunement, but or or absence in the my parents work too much or or whatever, but but really problematic dynamics within. And as we as one of the things I talk about constantly on the podcast is kids really struggle with an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex to predict the future. And that's one of the things that like they're learning is how to predict the future and how to manage their time and how to have executive functioning and task or organization and things. And it sounds like when a kid is brought up in any of these environments, really what they're trying to do is control their environment, right? So when they're in a secure uh securely attached environment, then they feel like, okay, I don't need to control my environment because the love is going to be there and it's going to the attunement is going to be there and the emotional support is going to be there. But when they're in these other continuum of anxious attachment styles or um uh insecurely attached attachment styles, what they're actually getting into then is saying, okay, how can I control my environment? And for uh anxious, anxiously attached individuals like me, it's by trying to be everything to everybody and trying to make everybody happy and feel good, because then you secure your place, right? If I'm good enough, then my parents will love me and they will show up for me. And to me, you know, it's interesting you mentioned like parents who work a lot. To me, what I always have noticed in people with anxious or sometimes it's called ambivalent attachment is what they're looking for always in these relationships is a person who's gonna validate them. Right. They're like just looking for somebody who's gonna be like proud of them or impressed, or or who's gonna pay attention. And so they wind up like getting these high grades, or they wind up being, you know, excelling at whatever extracurricular because those are the times when they get attention. And that's that's what they're really looking for, is that attention and on an average day. And I think another piece of this too, and I would love to hear you speak to this, I want to get into why different people wind up with people in in these cross-attachment relationships. But the other thing that I I wanted to point out too is kind of as you as you were talking, uh one of the pieces here is not it's not always what happens, it's it's often, and this is a uh uh gibor mate idea, but it's not always what happens, it's it's also how you respond to what happens. So you might have a person who's more like a child who's more highly sensitive to and has more emotional needs, and it's like, well, I didn't know that I was being emotionally dismissive. It's like, but to that child, and and maybe you treat two kids the exact same way, but one of them interprets that as emotional distance, and the other one interprets That it's like, no, they're like emotionally there for me. That was fine. And so a lot of it, too, is not just what it's being responsive and attuned to that individual child, not just like, oh, this is a one size fits all. If you do X, Y, and Z, then you're gonna have a securely attached kid. But you know, I would love to hear more on that of just like, you know, how this affects different kids. But I don't want to miss this point on why different parents are are winding up together, because I know a huge percentage of my listeners are in uh cross-attachment relationships, and especially with an avoidant partner. So uh yeah, hit me with that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so I'll speak to that first and then maybe I'll come back to that piece because I there's you said something really powerful that I want to touch on in a second. So, why do people end up in these cross-attachment relationships? Well, our conscious mind is responsible for roughly three to five percent of all of our beliefs, our thoughts, our emotions, and our actions. And our subconscious and unconscious collectively are 95 to 97%. Your conscious mind is your logical thinking self. It's of your desires, it's the it's the part of you that says, I want the emotionally available person, or I want, you know, X, Y, Z in a relationship. This is what I'm looking for. Your subconscious and unconscious, they are the warehouse of your conditioning. Okay. So what this means is that your conditioning is really dictating everything and running the show. Our subconscious is very survival-wired at the end of the day, in a sense. And so we want things that feel safe to us. We equate familiarity with safety and thus survival. And so, what this means is that we will go and we might say, we want the emotionally available person, but you're gonna end up with a person who feels most familiar to you. And what that is is the way you treat yourself. So, what ends up happening, what's very interesting, is that if you're anxiously attached, for example, because you're so externally focused on other people, how they're doing their feelings, their needs, and you kind of put your own feelings, needs, boundaries kind of last on the totem pole and fade into the background. Guess what feels most familiar to you? Often somebody who's going to do that to your feelings and needs too. Hence why anxious people often end up with more avoidant people, because the avoidant person treats the anxious person the way they treat themselves. On the flip side, if you look at a dismissive avoidant in a typical sense, they are very preoccupied in the relationship to themselves. They're always like, Do I have enough time for myself? Do I have enough time for my needs? Do I have enough time to do this thing that I that I often do? To, and it's because they don't co-regulate with people, they co-regulate through things. So a lot of times, you know, dismissive avoidance, even fearful avoidance can do this. They they haven't had a lot of positive reinforcement with like, oh, let me, when I feel anxious, go lean on people for support and and oh, I feel so much better once I do. So they often are like, okay, when I feel anxious, I need to go play video games for five hours. I need to go watch television and zone everybody out. I need to go and because they usually learn these strategies as ways to make themselves feel regulated in their childhood. And so they end up replaying out these types of themes in their adult lives. And so what ends up happening is they're more preoccupied about how much time do I have to myself and do I have enough space. And so they end up often in relationships with people who mirror that back to them. So at the end of the day, why we don't often end up with people of the same attachment style is it's kind of like the same end of a magnet. Like it polarizes each other instead. We often end up with like opposite ends of the magnet where we're drawn into people who are most familiar at a subconscious level, which means they're gonna mirror back to you the patterns that you have internally.
Jon @WholeParent:I love that. I love that. That's such a good way of thinking about it. That that you're looking for somebody who treats you like you treat you. Yes. And also, and also I think that we think about this in parenting, right? There's this quote, I don't even know who it comes from, but the the voice in which you talk to your child becomes their inner voice.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Absolutely.
Jon @WholeParent:So there's also this aspect of we're mirroring how the how we were treated. We're kind of looking for someone either to treat us like we were treated by our parents or treat us in a way that we weren't treated by our parents, right? We're we're looking for them to either fulfill that empty empty void within us that we were that we missed, or we're looking for them to treat us like our parents because that was what we anticip what that's what we experienced as love.
SPEAKER_01:So there's three things that drive attraction at the psychological level. Okay. So obviously there's like, you know, biological things um that people are attracted to, but then there's three things that actually drive attraction at the psychological level. Number one is um, and and the first two are in the earlier stages of relationship, like initial attraction when you're first starting to date somebody and get to know them. Number one is people who express your repressed traits. So if somebody's really assertive and somebody else is really passive, you're often gonna see them kind of match up with each other, be attracted to each other. And it's because the subconscious mind has an allostatic impulse. It wants homeostasis, wholeness. Um, and when we attach to other people, we experience that. So often what happens is if somebody presents, that's where you hear like opposites attract. At a very high level, in initial attraction, we're often drawn to people that that have different traits than we do. Later on in the power struggle straight stage of relationships, those usually become the very things that break the relationship apart. As an example, you might say, Oh my gosh, this my this person I'm dating, he's so assertive. And then a year later you're like, they never make compromises and you're frustrated by it, right? Or, or another awareness, somebody's like, oh my God, they're so easygoing. I love how they just go with the flow. And then a year later, you're like, they never plan anything. Like, what's going on? You know, so we tend to have this sort of dynamic, and it's very interesting how it unfolds. But the next part, the second thing is people who um meet your deeply unmet needs from childhood, which is the point you were just speaking to. So if you felt unseen as a child, for example, and then somebody comes into your life as an adult and they make you feel really seen and they're really present with you, people can, it's like fireworks go off in people's brains. Like the amount of like dopamine and oxytocin and all these things people experience from that is very big. But the third biggest part, and that's sort of going back to what we were talking about, is the thing that drives long-term attraction the most, is people who end up treating you the way you treat yourself. So we get pulled in sort of from this like polarity viewpoint in those early stages, but then we invest in the longest term, people who just mirror back with how we treat ourselves. And that's why I really believe it's so important to do the work internally to change our own patterns of attachment first. Because that's why you see, for example, secure people often end up with secure people. Because, you know, what do secure people do? They they honor their feelings, they honor their needs, they honor their boundaries. So they'll often end up in relationship with people who will mirror that back to them. And oftentimes I've I've seen so many people over the years who are like going through divorces or trying to, you know, reconnect in a relationship or a marriage or they're dating and they're trying to see, you know, is this person the right fit for me? We can say all of the things under the sun. We can say, Oh, I have my list, I'm intentional, I know what I'm looking for, I know what type of parent I want my partner or future spouse to be. We can say all of those things. At the end of the day, you are going to end up investing in people who treat you the way you treat you. And so we have to clean up that work. And so a lot of times people just end up in situations where they reinvest in those old patterns where they end up unhappy or unfulfilled. They say they want the emotionally available person, but they don't invest in that person and then they wonder why. And it's really because of your subconscious mind needing to be rewired.
Jon @WholeParent:Yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, I'm thinking about all the I one of the things that you talk about is how do we do this kind of inner shadow work without the mysticism piece? And I have another upcoming episode on our shadow work, so I don't want to like go too far down that and because I have so many questions about that. But it does like, you know, I my original background and my academic background is in the Bible and in ministry and things like that. And and I almost never talk about it in the podcast, but what you're saying is like this is kind of a through line through every major world religion, is this idea that we have to like learn how to treat ourselves if we want to be able to treat others well. Like it's not, it's not like you know, the the golden rule is not like do unto others as like better than you would do to yourself. The golden rule is do to others what you would do to yourself. And so if we hate ourselves, like oftentimes that like we're gonna wind up being in relationships where we we're we're looking for somebody to to be kind of be in these destructive patterns. I have to say, just after this conversation, and I've always kind of felt this way, I tend to be a data person and like I trust the science and I trust the research. It's hard for me to imagine that that 50% of the population is securely attached. It's really hard for me to imagine because when I look at this, I go, man, I I can find attachment wounds in every single person that I work with and that I know. And I can see sure there are people who are more or less uh kind of expressive in that way. Not everybody is dismissive avoidant, like not everybody is dismissive fearful, like like there, there are like different aspects. I'm not saying everybody's the same, but is there an aspect to which a person can be securely attached, but they still maybe act out some of these attachment wounds? None of us have perfect childhoods, none of us are going to be perfect parents. And I do want to get to talking about how these different styles parent and what we can be looking for in ourselves. Because I think a lot of people, by the way, and that listen to my podcast at least, they they may not be willing to do the work for themselves. They may not even be willing to go into those dark places to do the work for their relationship. You know, hey, look, me and my husband or me and my wife, it works. We're coping. I'm not gonna do, you know, I'm not gonna unpack my my trauma bag here if it's if if my strategies are working. But then this stuff comes out in parenting and we wind up passing it down. So I want to get to that. I I want to make sure that we save time for that. But can you just speak to that? Even if you're listening and you're going, I have pretty good parents, maybe I'm securely attached. Do people still express some of those attachment wounds, even if they're quote unquote, like in the in the good group, in the group, in the group that has the 50% that are kind of Yeah, I agree with you.
SPEAKER_01:I'm interested in so like the official data is like 50%, it's trending slightly downward, but like, and I've actually grappled with this a lot over the years. I'm like, how do you not see 50% of them? I'm like, okay, well, what's my sample size? My sample size is people who come to me to work through their relationship challenges and work through these sorts of dynamics. So that's how I've always sort of, you know, um, I guess rationalized it in my mind. But yeah, I do not see 50% of people being securely attached. Um, but what's really interesting is, you know, securely attached people are not robots, right? Like I think sometimes people hear it and they're like, oh, securely attached people, they have, they're like enlightened, like they have no, you know, issues or challenges at all. They will feel different experiences, but they're overarching themes and relationships. Like, if you look at the neuroscience of conditioning and how conditioning actually works, it's repetition and emotion over time. So, you know, one of the big questions that people ask me all the time is like, oh my gosh, I'm trying to parent for secure kids and I'm normally so present with my child and I'm normally, but you know what? Last week I was going through a hard time and I didn't show up and I wasn't present and like have I ruined my child's attachment style. And it's like, no, like you're a human. It's gonna be about the ratio of things. If you're showing up 80, 85, 90% of the time present and attuned, if you're like not that way 10 or 15% of the time, that's not gonna change your child's attachment style. We see that when it's like, oh, 50, 60% of the time, you're attuned. And you know, we're really getting close to that cusp of how often you're not right. That's when we start to see attachment style dynamics. So, so what how that actually translates out is that securely attached individuals, they still can have core wounds, but those wounds or fears, they have less intensely. Okay. So, like if somebody felt really trapped their whole childhood and then they feel trapped as an adult, they're they may act a bit like a caged animal. Like they may really act out and really push somebody away. If you took a securely attached person, they had this sort of wounding experience of feeling trapped at some point, maybe in a situation and a family relationship dynamic for a couple of years in the background, it wasn't too big of a deal. They may have a little bit of a trigger around that as an adult, but it's gonna be less intense and it will come up into their life less frequently because it's less of a huge part of their conditioning. And how we actually form those neural pathways and neural networks is through the degree of repetition and emotion. So emotion encodes and imprints memories into the brain more deeply. And then if we have a lot of really emotional experiences very frequently, we're gonna have a big core wound around that. That's gonna show up a lot in our relationships. If instead that was something that kind of happened as a one-off or you had a situation around that, you could have a little wound there, but it's not gonna be a predominant part of your personality. And that's what's really sort of separating those things out. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that securely attached people, they have a lot more adaptive relational strategies. So, in other words, if they feel trapped, they're highly likely to go to their partner and say, Hey, I feel a little trapped in this situation. Yeah, I feel like there's a little too much on my plate. Can we carve out some time for my own freedom or my own space? And so they have much more adaptive strategies, meaning they're solving those problems a lot more efficiently and effectively. Whereas you would take somebody who's insecurely attached and they have much more maladaptive strategies. Let's say you have a dismissive avoidant and they feel trapped, they might leave a relationship. They might shut down and stonewall and ice people out because that's all that they seem to know how to do as children. That's all they were taught. So that's where you're seeing a lot of those things. And, you know, to your point, a lot of people have different wounds and relationships, but they're gonna be less intense, less frequent. Um, and most importantly, that person is gonna have very adaptive and healthy behaviors and how they deal with them if they're secure. Whereas all three insecure attachment cells tend to perpetuate the problems accidentally and the way that they try to cope with those wounds.
Jon @WholeParent:That's super helpful to understand. And so maybe it's it's really that, and and I'm not speaking just for myself, but maybe it's that many of us, when we see ourselves exhibiting these insecurely attached behaviors, what we really need to ask is is this a consistent, constant thing? Maybe I exhibit this, maybe the way that I deal with my, you know, most depleted self when I'm exhausted, which by the way most parents are, when I'm financially insecure, which by the way most parents these days are, when I'm uh emotionally wrecked, when work isn't going well, when I'm looking at the news and wondering if we're at the brink of a civil war or like what like, you know, like when all of those things go badly and I'm in a really unhealthy place, then those attachment wounds might come out, even though I'm not, it's not that I'm insecurely attached all the time. It's that under certain conditions, I will have I will experience that. And if when I do, it's still to a lesser degree of intensity and it happens more infrequently.
SPEAKER_01:Does that sound like Yes and no? Sort of right. Yeah. So so basically it's like this. Um, we have something, see you can think of attachment cells as being along a continuum. People who have like a tremendous amount of attachment wounding, they're gonna be really rooted in their attachment style. So, like if somebody had a lot of real and perceived abandonment growing up, they're gonna be highly anxiously attached. And like, no amount of perfect conditions is really going to change that. You often hear people say, Oh, just date somebody secure. It usually doesn't work like that. We're not often attracted to people who don't mirror that subconscious comfort zone. So you're you're unlikely to see somebody stay in that relationship dynamic on either side. Um, so somebody with a lot of that, it's actually about doing a rewiring work. And we can rewire those wounds. We can change them. You're not born with them. You can leverage repetition and emotion across time in a very specific way. I'm happy to share a tool, but we can actually rewire and change those wounds. Okay, that's the first and really important thing. But to your point, if we're looking at somebody who, you know, maybe has a because it's a continuum, maybe they're rooted in being securely attached, but they have a little bit of anxiety to their attachment stuff. They're a little bit, they have anxious edges to their attachment style. Or somebody who's, you know, fairly secure, but they do lean a little bit dismissive, avoidant at times those types of scenarios, then we will be much more affected by something called the overload principle in psychology, which is that if we have um a lot of distress, we're sleeping less, all those types of things, because we have this negativity bias where we hang on to negative things more than positive things as a means for survival. Like if you're chased by a bear, you don't remember how pretty the flowers were next to the bear that was chasing you. You were like the bear's teeth, right? So because we are wired to hang on to those negative things slightly more, then what ends up taking place is that when we are overloaded in our lives, yes, we are more likely to project and break into those wounds that may be there and they become more predominant. And that's part of why I really believe that good parenting also means self-care, also means like showing up, getting a proper night's sleep, being the best version of yourself, caretaking for your needs. And so we we talk about um six pillars of how to actually rewire your attachment style. It's rewiring those wounds and triggers so they're not dominating your life and so that they're less likely to come up when you're overloaded. Learning to actually meet your own needs, learning to regulate your nervous system, learning to communicate those needs, and then setting healthy boundaries and changing your attachment behaviors. Like you can actually rewire and change all of those things at the subconscious level in a pretty easy way. Um, and that's ideally the best case scenario. Um, but if you don't have time to get to rewiring and doing deep inner work, then making sure you're caring for yourself so that you're less likely to be overloaded, so those wounds become less dominant or predominant in your life, and obviously then less likely to be projected onto your partner, your spouse, your kids, um, that's really important to do.
Jon @WholeParent:So I wanna I want to hit you with this one. And as as I want to hear about the practical tool for rewiring and how people can connect with you more and get to know you more and get to through your tools and and to do that practical rewiring work, I think that's really essential. But just so that parents can be aware, I think most people who are listening are thinking about this in terms of their parenting. How, you know, not just in terms of my partnership. A lot of this seems like it can come out, but what are the different ways, like when you think specifically of we'll we'll set disorganized attachment aside for a moment. When you think about these anxious strategies and avoidant strategies, like what are the ways in which those manifest in our parenting that we can maybe be able to identify and say, either, hey, this is what we're doing, I'm I'm being anxious, and I'm my anxious attachment is showing here and with the way that I'm dealing with my kids, and maybe my partner's avoidant attachment or or my partner's anxious attachment and my avoidant attachment, how do those show up in parenting so that we can kind of be aware of that? So we know whether we need to be just lowering the temperature and working on our psychological overload, or if this is really a problem of I need to get, I need to get in the gym, I need to rewire, right? I need to, I need to go back to the basics.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, great question. So generally what you'll see is that um anxious attachment cells, wounds always sponsor behaviors. So wounds drive our behaviors at a deeper level. And so you'll see, for example, that that wound, that fear of being not good enough, um, often causes anxiously attached parents to have a lot more parental guilt. So they can really put a lot of pressure on themselves. If they make a mistake, they tend to really guilt themselves far too frequently and far too deeply, almost in a maladaptive way, where it's like, hey, give yourself some grace. Like, you know, it's gonna be okay. You don't have to be perfect all the time. So they can really struggle with parental guilt around feeling not good enough. Sometimes they can become a little bit comparative with other parents, like, oh, okay, you know, they did this, I should be doing this. And they can put sort of this indirect pressure on themselves. Um, they also can struggle a little bit with being a permissive parent because anxiously attached individuals, they really take on the emotions quite frequently and enmesh with other people's emotions around them. And what that means is that sometimes it'll be the parent who leans a little bit too often if they're not consciously aware of it, until like, oh, my child's. Crying. I need to change my child from crying by giving them the candy or just giving whatever they're they're demanding because I want to change their feelings because I don't like how their feelings make me feel. And sometimes they haven't actually separated out those two things. So they're sort of taking on those feelings and trying to control their own emotions by controlling their child's behavior. And sometimes that actually doesn't allow the child to learn to self-soothe properly themselves. So that can be a theme. You'll also see that sometimes anxiously attached parents, um, they fear abandonment. So, you know, they they sometimes, you know, expect a lot of connection from their child. As the child grows up, they may be really sensitive to that child developing their own sense of self or identity or leaning a little bit too much on the other parent. They can be a little bit sensitive to those things and they may try to bridge that gap by almost people pleasing their child at times, um, and trying to make sure that they've won their child over and that they're liked and all of these things. And they sometimes can be even a little bit sensitive to rejection there. So those are a few patterns. We could, you know, go really deep into them, but the high level, those are some of the themes that you would see first. Um, and also struggling with boundaries, I have to say, is a big one. It's just, you know, sometimes not having boundaries with the child, not having boundaries with themselves, and burning out as a parent quite frequently as a result. So that's some some high-level anxious themes. Um, high-level avoidant themes. Um, you're gonna see dismissal avoidant parents being a lot more of like the tough love parent. Like, hey, let them figure it out, let them self-soothe. They may not actually be tough in their love, but they truly believe in like fostering healthy independence. And so they're often gonna be the parent that's like, okay, just give them space to figure it out, let them do their own thing. Um, and they'll often really try to respect their child's freedom and their need for you know, independence and autonomy. But sometimes they can actually struggle to be present more. So they often didn't have a lot of presence from their, their and presence with a C E, not presence like gifts. Um, but they often didn't quite have a lot of attunement, you could say, from their parents consistently. And because they often struggle to attune to themselves, they don't have a ton of bandwidth for attunement. And so they may be a little bit frustrated when their child's not emotionally regulating. They may struggle to show up consistently and be very present with their child across time. Um, they may also very much struggle to um communicate openly and work to hash out problems with the child and to help the child articulate their feelings or their needs. Like a lot of those things are sort of off the table because they're out of their own awareness. And so you may see, you know, a more uninvolved parent at times as the actual parenting style. Not that the parent themselves is necessarily not involved in the child's life, but they're uninvolved in the emotional side of the child's experience sometimes, and they have a little bit of a harder time really putting themselves in the child's shoes and being like, you know, the, you know, the parent might go, why are they crying about it? It's just ice cream, like it's not a big deal. Get over it. But for the child, their relationship to the ice cream might be, you know, they their whole world. Like they want what they want, and this is a need for them, and they want to feel like their need is validated. So they have a hard time kind of working around that and understanding that at times. And last but not least, very high level, um, fearful avoidant, aka disorganized attachment style, what you'll often see is that um they deeply attune to their child. Like they're very deep in terms of attunement, they're very deep in terms of like trying to um guess what their child is thinking and feeling and experiencing. However, that can be very touch-and-go in the sense that when the fearful avoidant themselves is dysregulated, unless they're doing some deep inner work and healing, they can often struggle more with taking their anger out on their kids sometimes because they don't know how to process their own hurt and anger and emotions. They may be very hot with their child, very all in, very present, very there. And then when they're going through their own things that may not have to do with the child causing them to feel dysregulated, um, they may retreat because they're really fixated on other problems in their lives or relationships. And so they really sort of pull back into themselves. And so they can give still, you know, some of those mixed signals to their own children and relationships. And they very much struggle with boundaries, similar to our anxious attachment styles. They very much burn themselves out at both ends, put a lot of pressure, expectation on themselves, have a hard time saying no. And then when they feel overwhelmed, that's where they either become a little bit flustered or frustrated or a little bit um, you know, feisty at times. And so that can obviously cause their child to take in and internalize some of those emotions and develop some of those core wounds accordingly.
Jon @WholeParent:Man, I've I have so many follow-up questions. I want to give be conscious of our time. We're already kind of at our time, but I want to hear about one tool, the tool that you're most excited about, how people can connect with you to help them actually rewire their attachment styles, because this is not stuck, right? We can have earned secure attachment. Those of us who find ourselves going, okay, I'm I'm hearing this. Man, what you described with anxious attachment is totally how I experience my kids, or what you described with dismissive avoidant or dismissive fearful attachment, like it's exactly I see this in myself. How do I get better? Because I don't want to pass this on to my kids.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, such a good question. And such an important topic. And so I'll just give a high-level tool. There's we usually target a tool for each of our six pillars. Here's a really good one for rewiring your core wounds. Okay. So these wounds that drive these behaviors, okay. Um, let's say, for example, that the core wound is not good enough. First thing we want to understand is that that's not a conscious idea. That's a subconscious belief system. Okay. So we usually adopted that from some experience in childhood. And so what happens is our conscious, we don't wake up consciously and say, I'm gonna tell myself I'm not good enough all day and see how I feel. Like it's not something we consciously choose, okay? It's something in our subconscious programming, which means when we want to rewire, we actually have to rewire that at these subconscious levels. So we have three steps, okay? Step one, find the wound that's really plaguing you and it's opposite. We covered the wounds by attachment style. That should be pretty easy to do. If it's I'm not good enough, I am good enough. I am unloved, I am loved. You know, I am uh gonna be abandoned, I'm worthy of connection, right? So we have just these opposites, very simple. Step two is I'm not really a big believer in things like affirmations because affirmations speak to the conscious mind. Your conscious mind understands language, your subconscious mind does not understand language. If I say to you, whatever you do, do not think of a pink elephant. Like, yeah, you think of a pink elephant because your conscious mind understands you not, your subconscious flashes out a pink elephant before you can even get there. So, what we have to do is we have to recognize our subconscious mind speaks in emotions and in images. And if we want to rewire a core wound, it has to be done through that language. So step two becomes well, if I'm trying to get my subconscious mind to understand and invest in the idea that I am good enough, I need 10 memories of times I actually did feel good enough. And memory, what memory actually is, is all memories is just a container of emotions and images. If you think of your favorite childhood memory and you're playing by the beach with your family, you see the images of the ocean and maybe the red bucket as you're building a sand castle. And, you know, so we've got that emotion, and we've all seen people when they recall old memories, they smile or they laugh or they cry. So we've got the the emotion and the imagery, and that's the language of the subconscious mind. Repetition is what fires and wires neural pathways and allows them to deepen and solidify over time. So step one, I'm not good enough, I am good enough, okay, or the opposite of the wound. Step two, 10 times we actually felt good enough in our memories. Steps three is our neuroscience research into this tells us that we need at least 21 days, specifically when we are in a suggestible state, that we are likely to be able to actually give new information to our subconscious mind and have it stick. And so what we do is we take those 10 memories of times we did feel good enough and we record ourselves saying them into our phone or somewhere we can listen back. And in the first hour that we wake up, or the last hour before we go to bed, we're in a very suggestible state, meaning our subconscious mind is like a sponge. It's sponging in this information. And what we do is we listen back to those memories. Okay, those 10 memories. It takes like two minutes. And when we're listening back, we focus on the feeling or the emotion and the images. And what we're doing is across a 21-day cycle, we're building neural networks in our brain that are actually going to counteract those original ideas that we got conditioned with. And so we're listening to those 10 memories of times we actually did feel good enough. We're visualizing about it, we're feeling about it, we're doing it first thing when we wake up. So our brain's producing more alpha brain waves, it's absorbing this information better at a subconscious level. And that's actually how we rewire rewire. It takes two to three minutes a day. It's so life-changing for people. People who stick to it for a 21-day period in full and they don't miss a day. You have to be consistent with it. Um, actually report, we have over 60,000 people we surveyed. Um, they report a 99.7% NPS score, success score in actually overcoming these core wounds. So these things that drive all of this chaos in our life and our relationships and our parenting, those are solvable problems by just doing a little bit of this work consistently across 21 days.
Jon @WholeParent:I love that so much. There's so much there. Thais, I have to get you back. This is such a good, such a good conversation. I love this. I'm sure you have a million more tools. How can people connect with you outside of listening to this episode of the whole parent podcast?
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. So I'm at personaldevelopmentschool.com. Um, people can get a free attachment report. It talks all about their attachment styles, their patterns, their wounds, their needs, their nervous system patterns. Like it goes into everything. And of course, we focus on our programs, how to rewire, and I work with people to do that. And then I put daily content on YouTube, which is um taiisgibbson-personal development school, and I'm on Instagram at the Personal Development School. And thank you so much for having me. You're so lovely, and I can't wait to have you on too and and chat and just have you share all of your wisdom with our audience as well.
Jon @WholeParent:No, I'm I'm just I'm I am just taking all of this in. I'm thinking about what my core attachment wound is and and what what stories I need to be thinking about. And for the next hour, I'm just gonna be uh consumed with that and not doing the work that I should be doing. So if you're like that, if you're listening to this episode, make sure that you connect with Thais at all of those places. And thank you one more time just for being on here and giving us such amazing wisdom.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much for having me. This was so fun to chat with you.
Jon @WholeParent:Thank you for your time listening to the whole parent podcast today. I hope you got something out of it. I have a couple quick favors to ask of you as we end the episode. The first one is to jump over on whatever podcast platform that you are listening to right now and rate this show five stars. You'll notice there are a lot of five-star ratings on this show, whether that's on Spotify or Apple Music or Apple Podcasts. We have a ton of five-star ratings, and it helps our podcast get out to more people than almost any other parenting podcast out there. And so it's a really quick thing that you can do if you have 15 or 20 seconds, and if you have an additional 30 seconds, I'd love to read a review from you. I read all the reviews that come through. If some if you particularly like one part of the podcast, or you like when I talk about something or whatever, imagine that you're writing that review directly to me. The second thing that you can do is go and send this episode to somebody in your life who you think could use it. Think about all the parents in your life. Think about your friends, your family members who could use a little bit of help parenting. It's vulnerable to share an episode of a parenting podcast with them. I get it. But imagine how much better your life is as a result of listening to this podcast, following me on social media, getting the emails that I send out. You can share that with someone else too. And so I encourage you, just go over, shoot them a quick text, share this episode with them, or share another episode that you feel like is particularly relevant to them. The last thing you can do is go down to the link show notes at the bottom, and like I said in the mid-roll, you can subscribe on Substack. It's$5 a month or$50 a year. Uh I don't have that many people doing it, and yet the people who are doing it have made this possible. And so if you like this episode, if you like all of the episodes, if you want them to continue, the only way that I can keep making them is through donor support, free will donations to the podcast. Please, please, please, please, as you're thinking about the end of this year, as you're thinking about your charitable giving, I know I'm not a 501c3, you can't write it off on your taxes, but if you'd like to give me a little gift to just say thank you for what you've done this year, the best way to do that is over on Substack. Again,$5 a month,$50 a year. It's not gonna break the bank. It's probably less than you spend on coffee every week. Definitely less than you spend on coffee every week. Maybe uh less than you spend on almost anything, right? Five bucks a month is very, very small, but it goes a long way when it's multiplied by all of the different people who listen to the podcast, it's sending that over to me. I get all of that money. It's just my way of being able to produce the podcast, spend money on equipment, spend money on subscription fees, hosting fees for the podcast, all of that stuff. Email server fees, all that. So if you're willing to do that, I would love it. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and I'll see you next time.
