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If you grew up with divorced parents, you might still be living out the divorce in your relationships today and not even consciously realize it. So in today's video, I am going to take you through five major themes that happen when children go through a divorce, which we now know is upward of 50% of people who've experienced a divorced home. And I'm going to take you through five powerful shifts that you can make around these things to stop replaying those painful patterns. Now, if you're new here, hello and welcome. My name is Thais Gibson. I'm the founder of Gibson Integrated Attachment Attachment Theory, a much more in depth body of work on attachment styles and how to actually rewire your childhood relationship patterns as an adult in as little as 90 days. And I'm really excited to share today's topic with you. I got to be on FOX News's Good Day Philadelphia morning show today and was on Houston's show the Nightcap with Carolina Sanchez, which I recommend checking out. So traveling around, but it's been lots of fun. That's why I have this background. But we're going to get into it. We're going to talk a lot about major steps to heal and really how these themes come about. The first thing that's really important is that if you want to heal, you need to understand that if you went through a divorced home, because that is something, even though it's so common nowadays, it's something that's quite traumatic, especially for children, even teenagers, because you see the separation of a family unit that you love. And in many cases it's actually healthier for very unhappy parents, especially if there's tremendous volatility in a marriage. It's actually usually better and healthier for the kids if the parents do separate. So it doesn't mean that it's not a net positive. And in a relationship that absolutely was not working. But it's traumatic either way. It's traumatic to see parents go through a tremendous amount of volatility or pain. And it's traumatic to see your family unit break up. And so it's something so normalized and so consistent that people go through. But one of the first things that any type of trauma does, big T trauma, small T trauma, medium T trauma, is that it leaves a story. Okay, so the mind, when we go through change, the mind seeks certainty. And when we don't have it, the mind gets certainty by giving meaning to situations. For example, you might say love doesn't last. That might be your story. You might say people leave when it gets hard you might say, love equals pain. You might have taken on a lot of emotional responsibility when your parents went through a divorce. And you might say, okay, I'm responsible for other people's feelings or my needs create conflict. At the end of the day, you usually have a divorce story. And I want you in step one here to write your top one or two relationship beliefs from the divorce and note where they came from. I'll share some other ones. And it's interesting because we could technically have unlimited beliefs, but we only have a few major core wounds, which are sort of like the deepest pieces, the most painful pieces of meaning we give to things. And people who feel more anxious in relationships, a lot of their wounds are the sphere that I'll be abandoned or unloved or rejected or alone forever or disliked. And if somebody's more avoidant and they cope with the divorce by pushing away and putting their walls up, they often feel like, oh, I'm going to be trapped if I commit, or I'm going to be betrayed by somebody eventually, and I'm going to end up in a situation where I invest myself and then I get hurt, so what's the point? Or this fear of not being good enough or being shameful, like, they can't be that somebody, everything that somebody needs from them. Or this idea that love equals being disrespected or caught in this pain, or this idea that you'll be helpless if you rely on somebody. So I want you to hear in there, sometimes you'll have more than one, but try to notice in there which ones really deeply resonate with you. Because when you are able to see some of your own patterns here, you'll realize that that is usually a very deep running narrative that bleeds into everything that affects the way that you see relationships around you, that affects the way that you see other people, and absolutely usually affects your closest relationships, especially your romantic ones, and governs your decision making and your behaviors. So, for example, and this is really point number two is I want you to notice how you behave when you believe that story. So it's not something that's us conscious, something that's usually imprinted your subconscious mind. And the difference between the conscious and subconscious is the conscious mind is responsible for 3 to 5% of all of our beliefs and thoughts and choices and emotions, whereas your subconscious is 95 to 97% and your subconscious is your habituated self. It's this warehouse of all of your conditioning, all that you know, whereas your conscious mind is your logical, analytical, thinking self. And what's really interesting is that these stories that we absorb into our subconscious that imprint the subconscious mind and condition us, they drive our behavior. So, for example, if I believe that everybody's going to betray me in a relationship, then then I probably don't really let my guard down, right? That behavior of keeping my walls up is sponsored by that belief that lives in my subconscious mind first. If instead I believe that I'm going to be trapped if I commit because eventually everything's going to end in turmoil anyways, then what ends up happening is I end up pushing people away and not committing and keeping distance and making excuses to push people away because I'm protecting myself from that belief, right? That I assume and I project onto my reality I assume will occur. And so, interestingly, when we go through these event, we give meaning to it. That meaning shapes our perception of ourselves and others. It becomes a part of our subconscious conditioning. It moves with us through all chapters and seasons of life until we learn to rewire it. And then it actually dictates our behaviors and our actions. If you believe that you're going to be abandoned, you may cling a lot. You may jump into relationships really quickly and try to hold on really tight and get certainty all the time as a means of soothing from that abandonment or preventing it from. But what I want you to see here in steps one and two are that these beliefs that you have acquired are shaping how you feel and they're shaping how you behave. And they're a fundamental part of your conditioning. Okay? So that's why we take things from the past into the present. We take them from the past. If you saw divorce happen when you were 12 years old, and now maybe you're sitting here watching this and you're 27 or you're 47 and you feel like you still have these wounds from it, it's because you do. It's because those wounds imprint your subconscious and then you carry them with you through life. And I spent a lot of time on this channel and in our programs talking about how to actually rewire them. There's a big tool I talk about called auto suggestion. I won't get too much into it in this video today because the video would last forever. And I know I'm here on YouTube and it's a shorter video, but I will link some other videos down below that do talk about how to rewire those things. But I want you to just start by noticing those two things. And then point number three is I want you to ask yourself, how do I want to behave instead. So if I push people away, maybe I want to actually practice letting people in a little bit. And here's a really important thing. This is not one of our most powerful rewiring tools from a neuroscience perspective, but it's a really good one and it's very easy. It's something called exposure work. And if we do exposure work, it has to qualify with a couple of things. It has to be repeated across time. For example, if you do exposure work on, let's say you're afraid of being trapped and you're like, you know what? I want to actually practice taking my walls down and letting people in. It doesn't mean that like tomorrow you go into your relationship and you bury your soul and you tell somebody you're in a relationship with for three months every trauma you've ever been through. No, it means exposure work means you do incremental steps towards that. But it has to be on a daily basis. And we have to really work to associate it positively after, because we store things by emotional association for. So for example, let's pretend I'm somebody who's fearing being trapped. So I don't let people, and I always push them away. Let's say instead I'm going to go, okay, I want to overcome this and start to rewire this. Well, step three is that how do I want to behave? Instead, I'm going to practice being more vulnerable. I'll practice sharing an emotion each day, or a need, or a boundary, or just a personal detail or a story about my past. I'm going to practice doing one thing a day. And what that allows me to do is titrate doing this. It's like you're stretching slowly outside of your comfort zone each day, which brings it eventually into your comfort zone. Because repetition and emotion actually refire and wire neural pathways, neural networks in our brain. And if we do this across a 21 day cycle, as a beginning point, we practice this, practice this, then it actually builds neural networks in our brain that are more likely to be strong enough to stick. And so as you do that through repetition and emotion, you practice a little more vulnerability. You're actually moving away and reconditioning this part of you that says, no, no, I'm going to be trapped and I need to push people away. We're undoing those behaviors. Now. You can go a lot deeper and you can actually rewire the core wound itself, the idea that you're even going to be trapped. But again, I'll save that for another time. Number four, if you saw dysfunctional relationships growing up. There is a very strong chance that you learned that either your needs were not okay because there was a lot of chaos or things like that going around, going on around you, or you assume that other people won't meet your needs anyways. So either you think your needs are too much, or you sort of have this why bother? Type of relationship to the idea of expressing your needs to others. And one thing that secure, healthy, lasting relationships do over and over again, and the research is very clear, is they have partnerships within them where both parties in relationship communicate their needs. They speak openly, they communicate about what they need in a relationship. They let each other in on their inner world. That's how we grow love. That's how love actually lasts. A lot of people are like, how do we know that love can last? Love that's lasting is grown, it's invested in on a daily basis. It's like if you, you know, plant a garden, you go out, you water it, you nourish it, you take care of it, and as you do, your garden thrives. And so, you know, the idea is that we, we nourish our relationships through talking about our needs, through learning what one and supporting each other in them. And the better we get at that, the more connected we feel. Needs are truly like the lifeblood of relationships. Just like human beings can't survive without food and water, relationships need an exchange of needs as their oxygen. And so when we have relationships that end, marriages that end, a lot of times it's because both or one or both parties deeply felt like their needs weren't being met. But they didn't know how to communicate. They didn't know how to get across to each other. And they often unfortunately, communicated with what I called negative framing. So they said, you don't care about me, you don't want to spend any time time with me. And all the communication in the relationship became negative framing, which means that their partner or loved one couldn't hear. We can't hear somebody when they're negative framing. We just hear that they're criticizing us instead. Positive framing is saying something like, hey, I feel a little disconnected. You know, I'd love to spend more quality time together. Can we plan a fun date night this weekend? And when we positively say what we need and we frame it that way, we give each other access to our inner worlds. And chances are, if you come from a divorced home, you probably didn't see a lot of that. In fact, you probably saw a lot more negative framing and poor communication. And in life, we pick up our programming through what we see repeatedly or what's modeled to us. We pick it up through what we hear repeatedly. If you constantly hear people say, I don't have enough money, we don't have enough money, you'll absorb that through repetition into your own subconscious mind and condition. You'll believe you don't have enough money, but also what your firsthand experiences are. And chances are if you came from a divorced home, you ended up in situations where you truly saw people negative framing and not communicating well. You probably heard people not communicating well and you probably had firsthand experiences of people unfortunately not communicating well to you. And so you probably don't have excellent communication skills, not for any fault of your own, but because that's how we get conditioned and we don't have a lot of resources teaching us this growing up. So another really powerful thing to do is really dive into practicing positive framing, practicing communicating, and practicing sharing your needs. 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 valid at 250. 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. Last but not least, one of the most important things, and this is a broad topic, but I'm gonna share it at a high level. One of the most important things you'll probably have to relearn because you were this once, but you've probably forgot it as a way of coping is how to be vulnerable when you see love and in pain. Even if it was an amicable, amicable divorce, even if you know your parents were on pretty good terms, as a child you learn that love hurts. As a child you learn, at least in one form or another, that love can be very painful. And there's a part of each person when they go through this that generally shuts down and says, I'm going to put up my walls, I'm going to put up my boundari, I'm going to not need anybody or I'm not going to show my true self. I'm going to, you know, try to get really connected to people and be what they want from me and not share my truth so that I don't get abandoned and either way, whether you're doing more of the anxious stuff where you cling and you pretend to sometimes be somebody or not because you're people pleasing, because you're trying to avoid being hurt and abandoned, or whether you are like, I'm not being vulnerable to anybody because I went through pain around it, when you put your walls up like that, that causes you to not be able to be authentic in relationships. And the harder we struggle with vulnerability, the more distance there is between ourselves and the people we love. And honestly, the more distance there is between you and yourself as well, because vulnerability connects you to yourself and your emotions and your own experiences. And so it is profoundly healing and profoundly important to practice vulnerability slowly but surely over time. Again, that's a big topic of conversation, how to do that. But it starts with being like, hey, who am I? And really dating yourself, getting to know yourself. What are my needs? What's important to me in a relationship? What are my standards? What are my non negotiables? Am I sharing those things? Am I being open and authentic about those things? Am I sharing my true yeses and my true no's? In a relationship, sometimes we only say yes to things. But your nose and telling somebody when something's a no for you is a part of your whole self, right? Your authentic self. So being able to tap into that is absolutely massive and a really important part of rebounding and healing and growing post being an adult that comes from a divorced home. So I hope this is a helpful video for you today. We could go so much deeper into the topic. You can subscribe to this channel and hit the notification bell. I put literally daily content out here to share with you and I really appreciate you watching and stopping by. I'll see you next time.