Why Your Needs Are Running Your Life (And How to Reclaim Control)

Why is it that we often find ourselves acting in ways that contradict what we truly want in our relationships? In this episode of Dear Claire, we explore the powerful reality that our needs are the invisible architects of our behavior—governing how we show up for others and, more importantly, how we show up for ourselves. We are diving into the transformative power of the AHAI Framework (Adoptee Healing & Attachment Integration) to understand the "why" behind our internal conflicts.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Why the "Good Adoptee" or "Chameleon" persona is actually a survival defense mechanism—and how decades of suppressing your "No" can lead the immune system to say "No" for you through chronic illness.
• The Alignment Principle: Why self-sabotage is actually an "internal GPS" conflict between conscious goals and subconscious needs—and how to fix it.
• Attachment Style Deep Dive: The specific "flavor" of needs for Secure, Anxious, Dismissive-Avoidant, and Fearful-Avoidant styles.
• Coaching in Action: Claire responds to Mr. Kyung, a listener struggling with the "Dismissive-Avoidant" urge to push partners away during conflict. Learn the somatic tools for healthier connection and how to build a communication bridge instead of a wall.

Somatic Practice & Tools:

Learn to use the power of your breath to help balance out your nervous system, unblock suppressed emotions, and tap into your body's innate inner intelligence to find the areas that need clearing.

ACCESS THE SOMATIC PRACTICE HERE

The "Dear Claire" Segment

Healing happens in community when we find that empathetic witness to help us hold the weight of our stories. This space is a collective healing journey, and I want to walk this path with you. Do you have a question about a relationship trigger, a core wound, or a manifestation block?

SUBMIT YOUR QUESTION HERE

Connect with Claire:

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• Join the Empowered Adoptee Circle: https://www.skool.com/the-empowered-adoptee-7690/about
• Work With Me: Website and Email: claire@coachwithclaire.com 
• Share This Episode: Let's continue to empower and uplift our adoptee community by sharing this episode with another adoptee and on your socials. 
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• Support The Show: If today’s message or somatic tool brought you a moment of peace, or if our conversation helped you feel a little more seen in your journey, I invite you to join me in an energy exchange. This podcast is a labor of love and a completely independent production. If you’d like to help keep this space ad-free and sustainable, you can send a small donation via my Venmo. Your support allows me to keep showing up as an empathetic witness...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome back to the Dear Clear podcast, Healing Your Adopte Attachments. It's so good to be present with you today, and I'm excited. Last week we went way into the trenches. We are navigating your emotional mastery and also the heavy lifting of subconscious reprogramming. We were pulling up those core wounds. So if you're feeling a little bit tender or exposed right now, I just want you to take a deep breath and hear me. This is completely normal. And I want to pause and celebrate you for simply showing up for yourself in that discomfort. Alright, today we are diving deep into the world of needs. And I want to start by getting real with you. For a long time, I didn't think I had any needs. So growing up as a transracial adoptee, I somehow subconsciously learned that having needs was actually unsafe. I felt that if I was too much, if I asked for too much, or if I showed that I was lacking anything, I was risking that very connection that I needed to survive. And this may have happened, I'm not sure when exactly it happened, but it could have actually happened before I had words. Pre-verbal. I was adopted into my family when I was year and a half old. So my sister was the opposite. Somehow, I don't know how this happened, but she was adopted after me, and she's two years younger, and she's also an adoptee from Korea. She was a problem child. Like when we were growing up, she was always so needy. She needed everything, she needed all the attention. She was always unhappy, she was always crying, she was always whining, complaining, and scared of everything. So, like, I just remember my mom would cook two meals one for us and a separate meal for my sister. And she like hardly ate anything, so she just required so much extra attention. And for some reason, I just became the unseen child. I was quiet, I was um never a problem, I was just the easy child. And so I believe that this was my way to earn love and to remain attached and to never be abandoned. This was a lie. Just want to say, um, I was just a needs meeting machine, so I may have been running on survival software, and I definitely was trading away my authenticity just to protect my attachment. And so if you think about, you know, when babies are born, they are born exactly who they are. Okay, they have needs, they cry when they're hungry, they um they whine when they're cold or they're uncomfortable. Um, they definitely don't try to hide who they are, they're a baby and they ask for what they need. But somewhere along the way, and this happens to all of us, I think, not just adoptees. Somewhere along the way, that baby starts to learn not who they are as they grow older, but who the world expects them to be. So they learn it through socialization, through their culture, through their parents and the way they're um they're brought up and um parented. And I just think that that creates this um lack of authenticity, and it kind of um leads to people pleasing, it leads to masking, it leads to perfectionism and self-sabotage. So I definitely um want to say that this is a really big deal when it comes to our attachments and it comes to our attachment styles and the way that we view ourselves. And so, needs are a huge component of the AHAI framework, the adoptive healing and attachment integration. And so, today we're going to uncover how that trade-off, that tragic transaction, I call it, is still running your life, it's running your relationships, and it's impacting your health today. It's time to stop the self-sabotage and start realigning your conscious goals with your subconscious truth. Let's talk a little bit about the attachment versus authenticity. Dr. Gabor Mate teaches that as children we have two primary needs: the attachment, which is your connection, and also authenticity, the ability to be our true selves. Like I said before, a baby isn't worried about being themselves, they just are. But when we grow as children, we start to understand how the world starts to tell us who we should become. You should be a good girl. Don't show anger, don't show fear, don't be sad. And most of our fears are really learned throughout our lives. Strictly speaking, from a developmental biology standpoint, infants are born with only two innate fears that trigger an immediate unlearned physiological response. And the first fear is the fear of falling. This is often linked to the moral reflex or your startle reflect. So if a baby feels a sudden loss of support, they're gonna arch their back and throw their arms out, and this has evolved, um, this evolved as a survival mechanism to help an infant cling to their caregiver or their parent. The other fear is the fear of loud noises. And this is an immediate acoustic startle response, and it serves as an early warning system for potential danger in their environment. So those two fears are innate. We're born with them: the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises. Every other fear that we have, like fear of snakes, fear of spiders, fear of the dark, fear of public speaking, is technically learned through our experiences or social observations. I don't know about you, but I have had all of those fears at some point. And no one taught it to me. I just learned it. I don't know where, but um, I I I like almost my entire life, I've had this fear of public speaking, and I think it's linked to my fear of authenticity, um, not be willing to show up as my true self because I'm fearing abandonment or fearing rejection or feeling unworthy. So is the fear of abandonment also innate? Biologically, a baby doesn't have a concept of abandonment in their mind at birth. However, we've learned through the primal wound and you know that time of rupture when we are relinquished or we're separated from our birth or our biological mothers, that can create this wound and this fear of abandonment. However, Dr. Gabor Mate and other experts argue that the need for attachment is so vital that the threat of separation becomes your the infant's primary source of toxic stress. Like I said in the primal wound, that fear of abandonment might not be a reflex like the fear of falling. Um, the trauma of separation, though, the loss of a biological mother's scent, their voice, their heartbeat, is experienced by the infant's nervous system as a life-threatening crisis. So you can see how impactful this is on our attachments and our need for attachment. And it causes this wound, the primal wound. Because a human infant is a hundred percent dependent on a caregiver, their mother, for survival, the fear of being alone is really hardwired into our biology. So if that attachment is severed, the infant's body enters a state of high cortisol or survival mode. And I believe that's what many of us grew up experiencing, this survival mode. So let me just say that for us adoptees, this environment of safety was often built on a foundation of suppression. So we learned early on that if we were too loud or too angry or too Korean or too Asian, it might actually threaten our attachment to our new family, our adoptive family, our friends, our school, everyone who we were attached to and surrounded by. Okay, because attachment is a matter of literal survival, and we choose it every time. I think this goes way back, you know, as cavemen and hunters and gatherers, because we had our clan that we belong to, and our survival actually relied on being part of this clan. Without the clan, you wouldn't get food, you wouldn't get shelter, you wouldn't get water, all of the things because it operated as a community and a system. And so I feel like this is a big part of us when we feel like we're about to be rejected or excluded from a group, then we go into survival mode. And I know I felt it before that that um feeling that I don't belong is one of our biggest core wounds as an adoptee. I just remember having these intense feelings as a child growing up that I would literally die if I was not included, if I was excluded, and that happened over and over again because of the teasing, because of the um microaggressions, because of the racism I experienced. I felt always, always, always this big, huge fear of being excluded and being abandoned and being rejected and being unloved. So here is the biological paradox to save the relationship, we often abandon ourselves. I know I did this personality that we developed, the good adoptee, the helper, a lot of us are helpers or service, other um groups of people, the chameleon, that's a common one. We become a chameleon to fit in, we take on, like we shape shift. Um, this is actually a defense mechanism. And when you spend decades unable to say a physiological no because you're afraid of being left out, your immune system eventually says no for you. And this is a biological bridge to illness that I'd want to touch on, which is really important too. As adoptees, we're often needs-meeting machines. We all are, as human beings, we are needs-meeting machines, and we're running on this outdated software, and we've sacrificed our authenticity to ensure our attachment. And that trade-off, okay, that transaction is exactly what triggers that chronic stress that leads to autoimmune struggles or challenges like MS or Hashimoto's or ALS, Lu Garrick's disease, lupus, cancer, chronic pain, rheumatoid arthritis, skin rashness, and on and on and on. How many of you know someone in the adoptee community that suffers from one of or more of these illnesses? I know a lot, okay, and it's so sad, and I just like I uh it breaks my heart that this has manifested in our bodies this way. Personally, um, what I experienced because I was always um abandoning myself and I was unable to say no, this led to chronic stress in my body, which led to um skin rashes. I developed skin rashes as a baby, um as a toddler, and all through childhood, um, even into my adult years, I experienced a lot of skin rashes. They were come and go with stress, and nobody linked it. Nobody did. Um, my parents took me to the doctor so many times, and they give me like medicine, ointments, creams, and one of them actually burned my skin on my neck, and I have scars from it. And um, I just remember having to wear socks in my hands so that I wouldn't scratch myself, my skin raw, and it was so embarrassing, and it was so just painful. Yeah, I suffered a lot from them as an adult. I began to link my rashes to times of stress, and after I was in a very stressful period of my life, I would go through a couple months of intense stress, and you know, I would come out and then I'd be like, Phew, I survived that, and then I would break out in a skin rash, and it was like clockwork every time. So I definitely know that my body, I am the expert in my body, and I know that it is linked to my chronic stress, and I also developed type 2 diabetes um right before I turned 40 years old, and um you know, and I I was able to reverse it through lifestyle changes and better nutrition and um working out, but when I entered perimenopause, you know, my hormones were changing and I was under a lot more stress as a result. I saw my numbers, my A1C just shoot up, and my my doctors were like, What are you doing? What are you eating? And I was like, I'm not doing anything different, and so I know that it is linked, and I know plenty of people, close people, who really struggle with some autoimmune diseases. And then lastly, I just want to say rheumatoid arthritis. I suffered years and years and decades. Um, I I think ever since I was in college, you know, I've had back pain, and it kind of like manifested into my um my neck area in my vertebrae in my neck, and I went for um chiropractic help for years and years and years, and they took x-rays, and it shows that my I have this um arthritis in my neck, and I'm so like I and I was diagnosed like 10 years ago, I was so young. Like, how does a young person get rheumatoid arthritis at such a young age? And I do believe that was linked to my stress, and what I experienced when I started to see how much our bodies, my body was um holding on to stress, and I was introduced to somatic breath work. The very first time I experienced this, I I went into a somatic breath work session, and I did some really deep healing work, really deep, and I believe that I released this from my body. I no longer suffer from it like I did. I don't have the pain anymore. It comes and goes, um, definitely with stress, but that pain that that like crippling pain that I experienced that like kept me from working out, kept me from enjoying my life, it's gone. Okay, so these are just ways that I know that our bodies are so smart and our bodies can hold on to the stress, and unless we find ways to release it and to um find ways to say no, um, if you ask yourself, you know, where are you not able to say no in your life? And boom, I can rattle off like a whole list of areas that I was not saying no, I was not saying no in my relationships, I was unable to say no to my job, I was unable to say no to my own boundaries and my own self. I was unable to say no in so many different areas, and so this is often a very common personality trait with adoptees. Alright, so I want to just say that your needs are so important to look at, and your attachment style actually will identify the type of needs that you have. So think of your internal world as this really big water system that dictates every move that you make. At the heart of this system is this big river, and these are your six basic human needs. I learned from Tony Robbins. These are the universal drivers that every human being shares, but for us adoptees, the way we navigate this river is often shaped by the voids that we experienced early on. So our brains have a really powerful homeostatic impulse. It's constantly seeking balance and equilibrium. Because of this, we naturally prioritize the needs that have been less met over time to bring our system back into balance. These are the six basic human needs. We have the need for love and connection, and this is the fundamental desire to feel and express closeness or bonding. We have a need for significance. It's the drive to feel recognized, meaningful, and important. This often shows up for us as a deep hunger or need for approval, validation, or even power just to be seen. We have the need for certainty and it's the desire to feel safe and secure. So for many adoptees like me, this is a high priority bucket because our lives early on felt so uncertain. And there's another need, which is the opposite: the need for uncertainty and you might call it novelty. And this is the counterbalance to certainty, our need for change, exploration, and new challenges. There's a need for growth, and this is the desire to expand and improve in any area of our lives. Then there's the need for contribution, and this is the desire to give back or serve others. And I see a lot of adoptees where the need for contribution is so high, and they are often showing up in the world as helpers and caretakers and givers, and just the need to give is really high, I've noticed, in the adoptee community. So the larger streams are called your personality needs. And if the six basic human needs are the river, your personality needs are the larger streams that just feed into it. These are your authentic self-coordinates. They're the specific forms of meeting those six basic human needs that your subconscious has tagged with the most positive associations. So for example, while everyone needs love and connection, I might get that need through friends and social circles, while another person might meet it through romantic relationships, or someone else might meet it through family or even coworkers. So we all kind of have our own individual personality needs that feed into that bigger basic need. And we tend to rank our basic needs based on what we're what we think is most important, that is usually the need that we didn't get growing up. And we're always striving to get that need met, either consciously or subconsciously. So your personality needs impact your focus and memory. So you retain information better and find flow more easily when your personality needs are being engaged, you feel more aligned, if that makes any sense. Now, your relationships, we give and receive love through the structure of these needs, and we connect with others in proportion to how well they speak the language of our personality needs. And your emotions impact your needs because we are deeply identified with our personality needs. Anything that poses a threat to them, it can elicit like a negative emotional response, and we can even learn to self-sabotage our needs because of this, because of the emotions. Alright, so finally, I'm gonna talk a little bit about tertiary needs, and these are the tiny streams, and these are your moment-to-moment strategies to get your needs met. So I just want to say, as adoptees, we often operate on outdated software, and every decision we make is a subconscious strategy to get our personal personality needs met in the fastest way possible. But the fastest way isn't always the healthiest way. So we might use something like I don't know, binge eating as a tertiary strategy to find. Comfort, which is our personality need, which is actually an attempt to feel certainty, which is a basic human need. So we often feel like we have no needs because we've disconnected the wires to our authentic self just to stay safe. But your reticular activating system is still working behind the scenes and it's directing you towards things that meet these subconscious needs while filtering out everything else. If you find yourself procrastinating or self-sabotaging, um, this is so common, and I think I would be um I'd be safe to say that everyone at some point in their life has done this. It's really not a lack of willpower, it's more of an alignment problem. Okay, so our behavior will always redirect us back to meeting our personality needs. That's just the way we are. And if you have this conscious goal to go to the gym for growth, okay, because you want to get better and stronger and healthier this year, um, but then you have this conflicting subconscious personality need for comfort. Your brain perceives the gym as a threat to your need for comfort, and your internal GPS is gonna redirect you back to the couch to find balance, and you might find yourself having a really hard time if you set a goal to hit the gym three days a week, um, eat healthy food, you know, maybe do meal prepping, um, get 10,000 steps in every day. Um, you know, these are things that will get you healthier if you keep consistent with it. But I've actually experienced this before where I had this great plan, this New Year's resolution to get in the best shape of my life, and I found myself again after work, again and again, just you know, getting into my comfy clothes, snuggling under the the covers and turning on my favorite TV show while I was like binge eating my favorite snack foods and drinking wine. Maybe you can relate, but it's not your fault, okay? It's not because you lack willpower, it's not because you lack motivation. So, what do we do with this information? We have to stop allowing the subconscious to meet our needs through unhealthy past associations. We have to create these conscious intentional strategies to fill our buckets directly, fill our needs buckets directly. What you want to do is define your personality needs. So let's look at your behavior. And I'm willing to bet they're already showing up there. If you look at your habits, what are your habits? Then we want to create rituals. So we're gonna build the daily habits that actually meet these needs on a regular basis. So the habits are, you know, I'm going to wake up every morning and maybe set an intention for what I'm going to do. Um, so you're gonna go right to the source. So when you feel that pull of distraction or procrastination, ask yourself, what need am I trying to meet right now? Then meet it effectively and directly. Looking at your behaviors and your habits because they're showing up already. Um, we're gonna look at how you spend your days, and this is how you spend your life. So if you don't create stability inwardly, your subconscious will cling to this pleasure seeking, like the junk food or the scrolling on social media or any other coping mechanisms or bad habits that you formed that doesn't actually fulfill you. It's like you want to get this bucket filled with your need, but it's like you're turning the faucet on to a slow drip that's not going to get the job done. You want to turn the faucet on full force to get that bucket filled, so then you can feel aligned, you can feel fulfilled, you can feel like your needs are met without without having to go and get it met in an unhealthy way and self-sabotaging. Hopefully, this is making sense to you. I want to give you some framework so that you can really start to put this into play and you can start getting your needs met. So, what we're gonna do is start with the morning ritual. And I like the morning because that's when you're in alpha and theta brainwave state and you're really like more susceptible to learning new habits and more subconscious programming. So, we're gonna start with a meditation, and you want to develop the capacity to just watch your thoughts instead of identifying with them. And you can meditate from five minutes to 20 minutes, whatever it is that fits your schedule, and maybe start with five minutes and then you can work your way up. So it's not about trying to control your thoughts, it's really just watching them and noticing them without identifying with them. Like if you are noticing that you're very anxious and you have a lot of anxious thoughts, and you're really um feeling overwhelmed and maybe a little depressed today, you're not gonna become your thoughts, okay? Think of them as like clouds just rolling by in the sky. You notice them, oh look, there's a cloud. Oh, there's another cloud without becoming the cloud. Alright, the next one we're gonna try is visualization. So, what we want to do is link your conscious intentions to your subconscious values. And if something feels really scary, I want you to visualize yourself doing it while feeling deeply safe and comfortable. Um, you can also visualize a time when you've actually done something. Like, think of a time when you showed up for yourself, even though it was really hard, really scary. And I want you to really picture it, like bring it up like you're doing, like you're daydreaming. And I want you to really anchor into the emotions that you felt. Like, how good did it feel when you showed up for yourself or you showed up for somebody else, and you did the thing that was really hard for you. So you're gonna use visualization and go through different scenarios in your mind and really anchor into those emotions. Okay, then we're going to set intentions for the day. So I want you to ask yourself these four questions. What do I get to do today? How do I want to show up today? How do I intend to feel today? How do I want to give today? Okay, this is gonna be your framework for your day-to-day, whichever form suits your needs the best. So you can either do this in like a to-do list or you can journal around it. Um, you could schedule times, you know, that when you lay out your task for your intentions. You really get to set your intentions for the day and feel good about them. So you get to decide how you show up, you get to decide how you feel, you get to decide how you give to the world, okay, and maybe what your boundaries are gonna be. First of all, you're gonna rank all of your um six basic needs in in importance, okay, in order of importance. So we all have the needs and we rank them in different orders, and they're not right or wrong, they're not good or bad. Um, they're simply what you feel are the most important. So I want you to write down like your top two human basic needs, and then you're going to identify your top personality needs, okay? And then I want you to pick one to two strategies to get each of those needs met today. I want you to go directly to the source and find a healthy strategy. Alright, so I want to take you through a framework for helping you get your needs met and also communicating your needs, okay? Because it's really important to communicate our needs before we blow up as someone and they don't even know why. So, what we're gonna do is use this script when you start to feel triggered and there's an unmet need that you feel like you're maybe you're self-sabotaging, but you don't know why. This is gonna help you move towards a secure attachment. The first step is you're going to say, I feel blank. Whatever you're feeling, is it anxious, is it invisible, whatever it is, you're gonna say what you feel. And then you're going to state your need. I have a need for significance, an emotional connection. And it might not sound like that, it might just be something you can put in your own words, um, but then you're going to say, This is important because, and you're gonna say what you make it mean about you. It might trigger your deep fear of being forgotten. Okay, so if somebody is not really validating your feelings and make you feel like you're seen and heard, then it triggers this core wound of being forgotten, and you could be really vulnerable, and actually that might really help. Um, and then lastly, you're going to say your strategy to meet this need looks like. So you're gonna say, What am I needing in this moment to get my need met? And you're gonna come up with a healthy strategy and you're gonna communicate that. So it could be like, could we take 15 minutes tonight just to talk, or can you just, you know, listen for 15 minutes and validate my emotions and feelings without trying to fix me or therapise me. So this is going to really help with getting your needs met, and and it will help because you're communicating this to your partner while you're doing the work independently, you can also do it with your partner because sometimes I think we feel like either we have to do it alone or we're gonna become codependent on our partner or a friend to do the work for us or to be responsible for our emotions, and it's not true, okay. You can do this work and also communicate it to your loved ones so that they know that um you want to uh involve them in the process, and that's going to bring you closer because you're using vulnerability and you're telling them exactly what you want from them to help get your needs met because sometimes they have no freaking clue um about what they can do. If you just say, like, I need I need more emotional connection or I need to feel more seen and heard, that could mean like a million different things to different people. So help them out, help a girl out and just say what you are needing, a specific strategy. All right, I want to move into our dear Claire portion of the podcast. Woo! Yay! I'm so excited! All right, we have a really, really awesome listener, uh, Mr. Kyung, who wrote in and has this relationship challenge. He wrote, at times when we have an argument about the most useless topics, my mind starts telling me that I can live and do without her. And he's referring to his partner. I can take care of myself, that I do not need anyone next to me or taking care of me. I already start picturing how life without my partner by my side would be perfectly fine. From time to time, it seems that I have to test this relationship on its strength and her willingness to stick with me. To be honest, she is a great support at the moment now that we have discovered and understood the reasons of my relinquishment. So when this challenge arises, what do you feel in your body? And Mr. Kyung writes, I can physically feel the walls rising. I don't hear her arguments anymore and only repeat her most hurtful comments. The heart is racing and feeling like a cooking pan that is about to spill over. This is impossible to maintain a conversation at a normal tone and only looking for arguments that will hurt her the most. Now, what is the story that your mind tells you in these moments, and what do you make it mean about yourself? So he writes, the story that keeps going through my mind is that nobody can be trusted. I have to take care of myself as others will hurt and disappoint me and eventually leave me. I have to be strong for myself. Feel that. And lastly, Mr. Kyung, if you could feel 100% safe and secure in this situation, what would that look like for you? What are you really needing in this moment? When this happens, he writes, the only thing I need is time and some hugs. Good strong hugs feel relaxing and connecting, although I might not want to be hugged initially. Mr. Kyong, first I just want to thank you so much for your vulnerability and that feeling of I can do this alone, I don't need anybody, is a powerful shield that so many of us adoptees carry in our bones, including me. So let's look at your attachment style first. I do believe that you are dismissive avoidant. When you picture your life alone, this is your dismissive avoidant attachment style stepping in to just protect you. And because your brain is seeking balance, you subconsciously prioritize autonomy and independence just to feel safe. So your core wounds might be a deep belief that is not safe to rely on others, or I am broken if I have needs. And your relinquishment taught your subconscious that the people you depend on can disappear so that you leave psychologically before anyone can leave you. Your emotional patterns. So when an argument happens, you enter this deactivating state, and your mind tells you that you don't need her as a strategy to meet your basic need for the certainty. And you tend to get love through these acts of service or quiet connection, like hugs and touch. So, as you noted, like a strong hug is often more effective than words because it provides a certainty of connection without this threat of a heavy emotional conversation, which might seem really, really scary. So you mentioned let's let's look at the somatic response. Um, you mentioned that your heart feels like a coking pan about to spill over. This is a classic fight or flight response, and your nervous system has really hijacked your logical brain, and you aren't arguing about these useless topics, your body feels like it's fighting for his life. And the walls you feel rising are your biological boundaries because you had to suppress your authenticity as a child to ensure attachment, like so many of us did, your body now slams the door shut to keep you from feeling hurt again. So, let's talk about your alignment and the whole paradox of getting your needs met. Okay, so your outdated software is choosing isolation to meet your need for certainty. But the tragedy is that the very behavior that you use to test her withdrawing or being hurtful, it threatens the love and connection that you're actually craving. All right, Mr. Kyo, I want to take you through a framework for healing, your dismissive avoidant attachment style, and move towards a securely attached style. And we're gonna do this through awareness first. So the next time that you feel like your cooking pan is about to boil it, I want you to name it. Just say, my walls are rising because I feel unsafe. This is my survival brain, it's not my truth. And you're just be uh being aware, you're pulling the rope up to see what the emotions are coming up, okay? And next you're going to use this communication bridge to set a boundary and protect the connection. So you're gonna tell your partner, I feel my walls rising, I'm feeling like I want to disconnect. I really need just a 20-minute break to regulate. So I don't say things that I don't mean, but I will be back for a strong hug in 20 minutes. Now, this is important because it meets her need for certainty and it need it meets your need for space. Okay, you're you're telling her the healthy strategy to get this need met, and then you're coming back for that hug because that is so important that you have that for for repair. Okay, it's all about like rupture and repair. If you can do the repair work after the rupture, then it really brings you closer together and it builds that trust. Okay, so the last thing I want you to work on is your subconscious reprogramming, and in your morning ritual, I want you to visualize a conflict where you stay present. You're gonna see yourself asking for that hug instead of building the wall, and this is gonna train your RAS, your reticular activating system, to see your partner as a source of safety rather than a threat. Okay, you're gonna look for as many pieces of evidence that they are a source of safety. You're gonna look for as many pieces of evidence and examples of those times when you stayed present, you didn't abandon yourself, um, you didn't just check out and you didn't like lose your shit. Okay, so you're um you're just through repetition and emotion, you are doing the work of subconscious reprogramming, okay, so that your core wounds, your triggers don't feel as big. And I just want to leave you with this message, Mr. Kyung. You don't have to be strong all by yourself anymore. You are chosen and you are loved, and it's finally safe to stay. Okay, listeners, we've come to the end of our dear Claire podcast episode. I um hope that you enjoyed this and it brought a lot of value to you, and that you are going to start working on some of these tools and frameworks that I that I share with you because they work, okay? Believe me, um trust me now, believe me later. And I just want to say to everyone listening, um, thank you so much. And I also want to say, you are not broken. I want you to think of the Japanese art of Kinsigi, where shattered pottery is mended with gold, and it makes a piece stronger and so beautiful for having been broken in the first place. And as an adoptee, your history isn't something to hide, you are not broken, but it's the gold that mends the broken pieces of us that makes you whole. This marks your resilience and is so beautiful when this happens. So you're a masterpiece in progress, you're learning to align your heart with your history and your adoptee story, and just remember that healing is an active choice. So this week I really invite you to stop this tragic transaction of trading your truth for attachment. And when you feel a trigger rising, okay, when you for feel those core wounds causing this big emotional charge, don't build a wall, build a bridge, and ask yourself what is the need that I'm trying to feel right now? And then I want you to go through the steps to find a healthy strategy to get those needs met. Next week, I'm so excited, we're gonna dive into even more empowering tools to keep in your toolkit, and we're going to learn more about your attachment styles and how to become more securely attached. I'm gonna close out and leave you with a centering and alignment meditation to help get you out of your fight flight into your rest and digest mode because when you're able to keep your nervous system regulated and be in this place of alignment, you can do so much more healing. So I hope you enjoy it. It's been so wonderful to spend this time with you, and thank you so much for showing up for yourself doing this work, and I will see you next time. To play the meditation, just go to the show notes in this episode and click the link. I hope you enjoy. Before we close out today's episode, I want to take a moment to acknowledge you. Thank you for showing up for yourself today and for having the courage to do this work. Remember, healing isn't just a concept, it's a practice of reclamation. And to make sure that you never miss a step on this journey, please hit subscribe to the Dear Care Podcast. This ensures that you'll be the first to know the moment a new episode drops. It's also a sign of a commitment to yourself and for committing to doing the work on your journey. I would also be so grateful if you could just take 60 seconds to read and review the show. In the world of podcasting, your review acts like a lighthouse. It helps us reach more adoptees who are looking for this.