← The Thais Gibson Podcast
The Thais Gibson Podcast
5 Hard Truths For The Dismissive Avoidant | Dismissive Avoidant Attachment, Healing & Core Wounds
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Hi, my name is Thais Gibson and I'm the creator of the Personal Development School. In this video, I want to talk to you about five hard truths for dismissive, avoidant, attachment style individuals. These are things that can be really difficult and kind of challenging to hear. But once integrated and accepted as a part of your healing journey and once integrated sort of into the way that we live our lives can be massive tools for leveling up in life, for growing, for healing, for having healthy, thriving relationships, relationships around you, and for feeling like relationships don't have to be so difficult. So lesson number one, or hard truth number one, is your feelings are your friends. And what I mean by this is that your feelings are feedback loops. That is like the reason you have emotion. It's there to give you information about something that you're experiencing. And what I often find is that DAs try to like compartmentalize their feelings or repress their feelings and avoid. But sometimes by avoiding or repressing our feelings, we actually avoid or repress this, the potential for, for solving our problems. So when we're willing to look at our feelings and say, oh my gosh, this makes me uncomfortable, and we can really convert those feelings into words and develop emotional literacy skills, we can look at some of these challenges or problems we're facing and actually unpack them. So we can go, okay, I feel uncomfortable about a situation at work. Let's pretend. Okay, so then what's my need? What do I need to feel better? Oh, I need to have a conversation and set a boundary. Okay, when can I do that? Okay, I'll do that at 2 o'clock tomorrow. And now we have the potential to actually unpack, get the feedback from that uncomfortable emotion and then do something with it. So when we repress our feelings, we repress sometimes as a byproduct, our ability to actually solve for the things in our lives. And then over time, all these emotions build up and all these unsolved problems build up. And then we sort of have to numb everything out all the time and try to hide from our feelings because sometimes the overwhelm is so big we have to push down harder and harder rather than actually looking, actually using feelings as feedback. And it's such a powerful part of healing and growing. Number two, vulnerability is healthy and necessary. I know this is a scary one for DAs and I understand why. You know, I understand that as a child growing up as a dismissive, avoidant, oftentimes certain parts of your life were neglected, most likely the largest part being your feelings, and that your Feelings just became unsafe, and they felt uncomfortable to feel and especially uncomfortable to try to share with others, because when that's neglected in childhood, we assume that that's just being rejected. And so we assume rejection for our feelings and for sharing our feelings in our inner world with others. But it is so healthy. And I always find that when people have a really stable, healthy relationship in their lives or set of close relationships, including friends, family members, et cetera, this becomes like our landing base and our support system that we can sort of like, jump off into the world from. And oftentimes, when we're really willing to share and be vulnerable with people around us, we feel really seen, we feel really heard, we feel really known. And these create those, like, deep roots for what real connection feels like and can be. And so by robbing ourselves of vulnerability, then we rob ourselves of potentially developing those much deep connections and deeper relationships. And this brings me to number three, which is when in a relationship, leaning on somebody and being able to receive support from somebody else is not weak. It's healthy. And it's so valuable to be able to lean on others, because we're not always going to have all the answers. We need mentorship. We need help. We need different opinions, different points of view sometimes. And then other people can really help us see our blind spots. And it doesn't mean that everybody in our external world is always more right about ourselves than we are. But when we can take people's feedback and information that they're noticing or wanting to share with us into consideration and see how that fits into our lives just objectively, without, you know, personalizing it, sometimes we can get valuable insights that we might not have been able to find just on our own. And sometimes when we go through tough times, we can get further ahead in life by learning to reach out and ask for help, by learning to lean on others for periods of time, perhaps just for emotional insight, for intellectual advice, for mentorship in our career, for support in terms of how to budget our money. Like, there can be so many different ways that we can do this, but it's really a valuable asset to be able to do this and to be able to articulate that and to feel like it's safe to rely on other people and to have people rely on us. And this is part of what creates that framework for healthy interdependency. Because we can't always be in the perfect place in our lives. And so sometimes we'll need some support or to be able to ask somebody else for something, and that's perfectly fine and human and normal. If you really want to do some in depth healing around these things, we have a codependency and enmeshment course that you can check out fully for free and actually keep for life. It's valued at 250 doll. That course will really help you if you struggle with emotional over functioning, if you struggle with keeping your boundaries, honoring your truth, not self silencing. The course will really go into all of the reasons why this happens and what you can do instead. And I'll put the link for free for you below. Number four, when in a relationship, it's really important to make concessions at times in the form of compromises. So not sacrifices, not where like I need my needs to be met in the relationship to myself, but healthy compromises, healthy times where we're willing to take a step towards that person and do something that stretches us just ever so slightly outside of our comfort zone. And that's part of what growth is. So the more as a dismissive avoidant, you can see somebody else, hear them, where they're coming from, from their programming, from their perspective, and just take that into consideration and sort of move a little bit towards it in a healthy way, in a mindful way. Oftentimes what this does is produces deeper connection and also produces growth within you as an individual. And point number five, it's our hard truth number five, is that it is normal and human to have flaws and they do not make you defective. So recognizing that like somebody can give you criticism and you can be imperfect and you can do something that's flawed, often what I'll see is dismissive avoidance. When they hear that they are flawed or they receive critical feedback, they make it mean at a subconscious level that they are like defective at their core. Whereas you may see somebody who's anxious, preoccupied, receive feedback and they take it as like, oh, I made a mistake. Like my behavior made a mistake. I'm a human. I had an imperfect moment as a human in my behavior, but it doesn't make me at my core a defective person or a flawed, abnormal human being. And so they're not shaming themselves so much at the subconscious level. Whereas dismissive avoidance tends to be so hard on themselves because when there's neglect, it sort of creates a shame wound from childhood. And what often happens for a dismissive avoidant as a byproduct of that is that they take criticism as meaning, like, oh, I am shaming you. You are shameful at your core. And that's not true. It is normal and human to make mistakes. Your mistakes do not make you a shameful person, a shameful human. They make you normal. They make you an imperfect, just like everybody else. And how we respond to those mistakes and how we take accountability and honor them and have compassion for ourselves when we make mistakes and grow from them and choose to see how we can take the next steps forward from them. This is what really counts for everything.