← The Thais Gibson Podcast
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If you're fearful, avoidant attachment style, those times you need to pull away, to go missing and just fall off the face of the earth, it may not be for the reasons you think. In fact, you may be less afraid of love and connection and instead, a lot of the time actually exhausted and burned out from believing that love has to be earned. And in today's video, I'm going to break down the psychology of why this is a trap that you often fall into. We'll talk about the three underlying reasons why this tends to happen the most to fearful avoidance. And most importantly, we will talk about what to do and how to change this, because this is actually a really painful and lonely thing to experience in ways that you're not consciously aware of the vast majority of the time because you're so adapted to it. So let's really break this down and I want you to hear this out and hear if these three points relate and resonate to you so that you know that this is something you can break free from. Now, if you're new here. Hello and welcome. My name is Thais Gibson. I'm the founder of Gibson Integrated Attachment Theory, the proven method to help you leverage neuroplasticity to actually rewire your attachment cell and become secure in the shortest period of time possible. And I put out daily videos here for you to support you in your healing journey so that you can understand a little bit more about this and how to actually build the best relationships of your life, starting with the relationship you have to yourself. If you enjoyed today's video, I hope you subscribe and stick around. Let's dive in here. One of the first things that often happens for fearful avoidance and, you know, the, the attachment science tells us that our attachment style actually develops between ages 0 to 2 years old, which is extremely young. But neuroscience tells us that condition repetitioning is happening all the time. Okay? Whatever we are exposed to through repetition and emotion is actually firing and wiring our neural pathways. And so if we, you know, grow up in a household where maybe you're secure into the age of eight, but then at eight years old, God forbid you have a really traumatic experience in the home or you lose a parent, you know, those things are going to rewire your attachment cell. So I just want to really be clear that just because your attachment style develops in a certain way at a young age doesn't mean that that's going to be your attachment style for life, okay? However, for the vast majority of people who are fearful avo, they do have a fearful avoidant attachment cell from childhood. And that is the attachment style they carry into their adult lives. That is good news and bad news. Good news because if our attachment style is not fixed, we can leverage the same repetition and emotion and conditioning that gave us our attachment style to rewire it and become securely attached instead. And you know, I have a lot of really in depth tools and resources for how to help you achieve that and do that. But I first want to just get into what is the actual conditioning or set of conditions that is likely to cause somebody to be fearful avoidant and why does this make you feel like you have to earn love? So often what happens is in childhood you are dealing with pretty chaotic things. Let's say as an example, and these would be some common examples that would often cause somebody to develop a fearful avoidant attachment style are things like tremendous amounts of fighting and arguing in the home where it's very heated and children are caught in the middle. Children in the middle of a very painful divorce told so many intimate things about their parents. Marriage sort of pit against each other in different ways. Also things like having a parent who's an alcoholic or an active addiction, or both parents struggling with those things, having a parent who has a very difficult mental health issue or something like narcissistic personality disorder. And in all of these types of cases, and again, these are not the only conditions that would create a fearful avoidant. You can have a fearful avoidant attachment style because people grew up in war. I mean, there's lots of cases that would create a lot of these themes and patterns. But in these types of dynamics, what you see is that the fearful avoidant grows up in an environment where they have no idea what they're going to get. It's like they're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. They don't know if the parent or parents are going to be nice one day or in a good mood or in a bad mood mood and angry and taking out their anger and rage on the kids. They just don't understand. However, in all of these types of cases, a fearful avoidant adapts to this environment by a learning to be on high alert. It's so much of where that hyper vigilance comes from in childhood that they bring into their adult lives. But B they often end up in situations where if they forego their own needs to meet their own caregivers where they are at in their own childhood and try to support their caregivers at the expense of their needs, they at least avoid more drama or pain. So let's give a couple of examples. Let's pretend it's the mother who's the alcoholic. If mom comes home and she's drinking a whole bunch and she's kind of all over the place and unsteady, and you help mom to bed and you bring her water and you tuck her in and maybe you're six or seven years old, but you can tell that mom's not okay and you're used to seeing her like this. Well, maybe in those types of conditions, mom is loving to you. She's like, oh, thank you, honey. And she drinks the water and you feel the sense of connection to mom. Another example would be that you're in the middle of your parents divorce and they constantly talk poorly about each other to the child. And that child ends up going, oh, well, if I'm there and I hear them and I listen to them and I support them, then I actually get this moment of connection from them when they're very busy and consumed with how bad the marriage is. Okay, These are these times where I feel like I get this presence or connection or attunement from them, even if indirectly. Let's say instead you have a parent who's a narcissist and let's say the mother has narcissistic personality disorder. It's like one day that mother is going to be loving. If you achieve what they expect from you, if you earn the love that they expect, like if you do things right by the parent, you make the parent look good, which is a huge part of their ego and their ego needing that constant satiation of feeling good and grandiose and admired. Well, if you make the parent look good as a child, well, now you're in the good books of the parents and maybe that parent love bombs you as very kind or sweet. So all of these types of instances. And again, I could go on and on and talk about so many different instances that I've seen over the past decade and a half with so many different people. But the reality here is that all of these types of instances are things where a child gets conditioned to say, well, if I literally remove my ability to care for my own needs, to have boundaries, to have a sense of self, if instead I forego my own needs and prioritize what the people around me need most, it is my strategy to earn connection and love. I just wanted to pop in here and let you know we are doing a seven day free trial to the All Access membership pass at pds, which means you get access to literally everything inside of the school. And this includes the four live webinars I do with our students every single week. And on top of that, you get access to to all of our different courses. We have over 55 different courses on relationships, communication, boundaries, emotional mastery, guilt and shame, Learning your needs. So many different facets that are really important to master our lives and feel really good about our lives going forward. And last but not least, there's a daily community event. We have trained facilitators and coaches who are in there doing that work, showing up to support you on your journey every single day. Please join me on the other side. Thank you. Come check it out, see if it's a fit for you. I'd love to see you there. Go ahead and sign up by clicking the link in the description box below. This conditioning, if you're a fearful avoidant, runs deep. And this is something that you deeply tend to believe is a part of what love is, that it's earned, that it's something where you don't need to express your needs or take up too much space. You become what people need from you, and that's how you get love. And I have never seen a fearful avoidant that doesn't have this conditioning running very deep. If that person developed a fearful avoidant attachment style in childhood. And so what ends up happening is you constantly over give, under receive, over function, over explain, over accommodate. I mean, we could go through all the overs that you do, but that actually comes from two core wounds that are I am unworthy of love as I am. I have to achieve or earn love. And I am unlovable unless I am doing, earning, creating, providing on one hand of things. There are superpowers that come out of that most fearful avoidance. Unless they're in deep, deep, the depths of trauma. A lot of fearful avoidants are high functioning. They tend to be really high achievers. They tend to be really smart, resilient. They're great at operating outside of their comfort zone. In fact, they're most comfortable operating outside of their comfort comfort zone, which is a little bit contradictory and ironic, but it's true because they're used to chaos, right? And so fearful avoidance often make good entrepreneurs. They're good at rolling with the punches. They're very resilient, they're tough. They're good at thinking on their feet. But it is lonely to go through life thinking that the foundations of love are not built on growing with somebody and working through things and sharing your own inner world and learning to be vulnerable with somebody, but instead to believe that the foundations of love are about you earning it from every single person in your life all around you. That's painful. And I want you to. Before we go to the other two big things here, I would love for you to just take a moment and I want you to audit, I want you to look at the relationships in your life and I want you to ask yourself and really weigh it out. How much am I giving from a place place of fear versus a place of contribution? Because a lot of fearful ones actually like contributing. They like showing up for people and they care for people. But a lot of times it's not just about you contributing. Because true contribution comes from you pouring from a full cup, you overflowing. And so you want to give. Contribution that is more compulsive comes from the fear of not having love or earning it. And so you end up over delivering all the time and over contributing from this place of like, if I don't, love will be taken away or I'll lose connection or people won't think I'm worthy. And so you're overcompensating all the time. And look at your friendships, your family relationships, your romantic relationships, even look at your dating history, your relationship with your kids. Like I want you to look at those things and ask yourself, how much am I earning love from this place of fear versus where is the actual line of contribution where I'm just giving from a place of abundance? Either emotionally I feel so great all the time I'm giving from, from that space, or you know, physically I've got lots of life energy so I can run around and support other people and how of it is actually and burning myself out to try to give so that I don't lose this worthiness. Okay? And I want you to really take a look at that. Now, number two is often you'll end up in positions where you tolerate breadcrumbs because they feel familiar. Okay? There's this deep hidden pain for fearful avoidance of feeling like it is familiar and safe to be with people who can't fully embrace you. And that's because if you grew up in a childhood where there's so much chaos, even if you had parents who did very much love you and were very loving to you in certain moments when they were outside of their own dramas, a lot of the time when people around you are in chaos, they can't love you and receive you and be present with you and make you feel safe to be fully yourself around them in the way that you need. And so love being inconsistent you being sort of on the periphery of receiving love rather than actually feeling like you were truly receiving presence and support and attunement consistently and healthily. That's something that feels unfamiliar, right? Like it feels unfamiliar to be in that healthy space. And so you'll often end up investing in people who don't fully embrace you and don't fully show up for you. And on the flip side of that, you also have conditioned out of your reality the capacity to communicate your needs to other people. It's almost like an unknown. You don't even realize that you should be communicating your needs. And in fact, that is what securely attached people do in relationships. So as a secondary part of this audit here, I want you to look at. And again, you can pause this video as you need to, but I want you to look at. In relationships around you, how much do you feel like you're actually communicating your needs? Again, look at your friendships, your family relationships, your romantic relationships. Do you even know what they are from other people? Or are you just used to meeting your own needs and then meeting other people's needs? Whereas in healthy reciprocal relationships, you can still meet your own needs as a person. That's a healthy thing. But then you also are able to enter into reciprocal relationships where you meet one another's needs quite equally. Right. Obviously, it's not going to be 50, 50 all the time. There will be ebbs and flows of relationships, but there's a sense of, like, you being able to derive your needs being met from other people. Okay? So I want you to really take a peek at that number three, what ends up happening is when you end up in a situation because you feel unworthy, unlovable, because you've learned to make your needs small and basically make sure that you are in a position where you have low needs so that you stay lovable because of those major wounds and the suppression of your needs in relationship to other people. You also, because of a history of betrayal, also have big wounds around believing that people will betray you again. Okay? And it doesn't always have to be like these overt betrayals where somebody lies to you. It could be that there's a lot of broken promises. It could be that just the chaos of childhood and hoping for something from people who can't give it to you can make you feel betrayed as a kid. So these types of themes or situations end up making you feel like betrayal is going to happen or the other shoe's always going to drop in your relationships with other people. And things like this idea that if you truly do rely on other people, you'll be relying on people who are unstable and can't be there for you. And so you're scared of feeling helpless. If you do let your guard down and you do feel truly chosen by somebody when that happens, you probably feel your nervous system panic and it's because you project that subconsciously stored core wound. Oh my God, if I do rely on people, I'll be helpless. That core wound in turn triggers all these stressful thoughts, which in turn triggers cortisol and norepinephrine and noradrenaline. And in turn those things then signal to your nervous system to move from parasympathetic AKA rest and digest into sympathetic fight, flight, freeze or fawn. And you, you feel like you move into high alert. So we can really go through and actually do nervous system exercises like breath work or meditation or completion cycles to improve your window of tolerance. A lot of the polyvagal theory work is at your fingertips and it's something you can do and things that we talk a lot about. I actually did a full length webinar about that on this channel not too long ago that I shared if you want to look it up. But if you truly want to rewire, rewire things at the root, you also have to address those core wounds, those belief systems that you project that in turn cause your nervous system to become dysregulated. And I hope this is a really helpful start into you seeing some of your deeper patterns and being able to really take those meaningful steps towards healing. If you enjoyed today's video, please subscribe to this channel. Like this video, share it with somebody that might need it. And you can always hit the notification bell because I put a daily video out here to help you just understand yourself more deeply and these subconscious themes so that you can truly take strides towards healing. Thanks for watching.