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The Thais Gibson Podcast
Dear Anxious Attachment, Do You Really Love Them Or Do You Just Want to Be Chosen?
00:10:10
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Why does their attention feel so powerful even when the relationship is unhealthy or even hurting you? And why does rejection hurt so much more from some people than from others? How can you tell the difference between loving someone and just needing their validation? And have you ever felt like you can't stop thinking about someone even when you know that they're not good for you? This is such a painful experience to go through and it can feel super confusing and as if you're completely losing yourself. You replay their texts, you analyze the tone over and over again, or wait for their attention like it determines your entire mood for the day. You may even let a single argument ruin your entire day, which by the way, is not normal or how it's supposed to be in a relationship and it feels like you are craving them. But what if what you're craving is not actually that person at all? What if what you're really addicted to is the feeling of finally being chosen? See, after working with thousands of people healing their anxious attachment patterns like yours in relationships, one of the most painful realizations people often have is this. Sometimes the person we believe that we love is actually just the person we hope will finally validate our worth. So today I want to answer all of these questions and personally help you figure out why you do this to yourself and how to finally be the one chased after instead of feeling like you are always doing the chasing. The first thing people with anxious attachment styles don't realize is that the intensity they feel towards somebody is not random. The brain is actually associating that person with something it believes has been missing for a very long time. And what this actually is is our deepest unmet needs from childhood. One of my favorite quotes by Dr. Gabor Mate says, trauma are the things that happen to us that shouldn't have happened. But trauma are also the things that didn't happen that should have happened. And what that means in this context is if you don't get access to needs that should have been met in your childhood in a healthy childh or upbringing, that in and of itself is traumatic. And we carry this void within ourselves of grief around things that we needed desperately in childhood but couldn't get consistent access to. These are things for anxious attachment kids, like not having that consistent validation, that consistent approval, that consistent sense of safety. And because that was missing, that void left behind causes you to seek that out in overdrive. In fact, your subconscious mind actually has something called a homeostatic impulse. We are literally driven for homeostasis not just biologically, but also Psychologically. And what this means is when you think something good is missing from your life and at a subconscious level, you're experiencing that void, of course you're going to go into overdrive to try to get that void filled. Of course you're going to feel like you keep chasing outside of you because you are trying to heal from. From that traumatic event of having the grief of something you needed so desperately that wasn't there for you consistently. And we're going to talk about how to actually do this. One of the first things I want you to take a look at is I want you to ask yourself, when I am chasing somebody and I am in a position where I keep pining after them, what are the needs that I'm secretly hoping that person will meet? For example, is it a sense of certainty? Is it a feeling of being chosen? Is it a feeling of being validated or approved of consistently? I want you to put those on paper or at least hold them in your mind. And then I want to ask you from 1 to 10, how good of a job do you do at meeting those needs in the relationship to yourself? And at face value, that can feel like a foreign or strange concept. What do you mean, meet these in the relationship to myself? Well, what I do mean is that literally, we heal the void within ourselves from childhood by learning to basically become our own parents to ourselves. As cliche as that sounds, it really makes a meaningful difference in a person's life. So how would you give yourself validation or approval, or how would you choose yourself? Well, you choose yourself by setting boundaries, by putting yourself as a higher priority. You choose yourself by speaking up for your needs or asserting your truth. You validate yourself by learning to be kinder and more compassionate in your internal dialogue rather than always beating yourself up. So what I want you to do is I want you to pick one thing that you can do here before I get into these next points that will help you actually meet your own needs so that you are not starving, because we are always going to accept breadcrumbs from other people, and we're starving for these things internally. This is where the next part here gets tricky, because the more inconsistent someone is with their attention, the more powerful that validation from them can start to feel. This is because of something known as intermittent reinforcement. This is literally what gamblers get addicted to. When somebody sits down and they try to pull a slot machine, hoping that intermittently, every 6th or 12th or 15th time, they're suddenly going to win something. It is very addictive. Your brain produces Enormous amounts of cortisol and dopamine because of intermittent reinforcement. And that can lock you into this love addiction cycle. When you're in a position where somebody's being inconsistent with you, the reason you still fall prey to it is exactly, exactly what we just talked about, which is that you are going to be praying and hoping and yearning for somebody to intermittently be there for you and meet your needs when you have no idea how to actually self soothe or meet those needs first within yourself. People who don't fall for intermittent reinforcement are people who literally have an abundance of what somebody else would offer to them coming from inside of themselves first. And when you don't have that coming from the inside out, of course you're going to keep seeking it desperately from the outside in. But one of the clearest signs that you're craving validation rather than connection is hidden in a very simple question that most people never stop to actually ask themselves. 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. This question for you that I have is do I even know who I am and what I actually want? You see, chasing somebody and chasing that validation and approval, that is something that is so blinding and often puts us into such an autopilot state of looking outside of ourselves, hoping that when somebody finally chooses us that everything's then going to feel okay. Once you're finally chosen, everything will work out for you then that is simply not how it works. What ends up happening is people who get chosen are the people who've learned to choose themselves first and consistently across time. And so what this means, in other words, is that you have to get to know who you are. You can't know how to choose yourself and what your truth is and what your boundaries are and uphold your standards in dating and relationships. You can't do any of that until you learn who you truly are. And that means taking time to sit with yourself and look at the seven areas of your life. Career, the financial area of your life, what are your goals or dreams or hopes, the mental area of your life, your hobbies, Your interests, things you love to learn about. The emotional area of life. Really getting to know yourself on an emotional and introspective level. And not just career, financial, mental, emotional, but also the spiritual, physical and relationship aspects of life. Who are you? What do you want? What are you truly looking for? And when you start to date yourself in these areas and know what you're actually looking for and need, that is when finally you can choose to bring that out into the world and take up space. For example, if you know that you want to be in a certain career path, then you can say no to things that are not of interest to you because you're focusing on the things that are. You will say yes to everything in your life, even if it's not right for you, if you don't know who you are, because you don't know what to actually say no to. And so this is a really important part of this journey, is for you to actually be able to know who you are so you can start choosing yourself. And the moment that you learn how to generate your own sense of self worth and emotional safety through these things, something surprising starts to happen to the people that you once felt addicted to. And this is that they start seeing you as you are. And in fact, a lot of the time, the people who were once chasing end up being the ones getting chased. Because people chase people with boundaries and an authentic sense of self. Not people who are missing it, not people without. So the truth is, there's nothing wrong with you for wanting reassurance, closeness, and emotional security. Those are very much basic human needs. But when your brain learns to believe that only one specific person can give you the validation, it can start to feel like your entire sense of self worth is tied to whether or not this person chooses you. And healing anxious attachment patterns is not about becoming cold or independent or pretending that you don't need love. It's about learning how to validate yourself so deeply that the people you choose to love become a bonus in your life rather than your single source of value or identity. Because the moment that you stop chasing validation, you finally create space for real love and space instead. So I'm curious, out of these points that we covered today, which of them resonates most with you? Are you addicted to the intermittent reinforcement? Are you struggling to know who you are or know what you actually want? Or do you find yourself not able to set boundaries because you don't even know how to meet your own needs? And I want you to get really clear and apply and plug in the principles of what you can do to move the needle and change this.