← The Thais Gibson Podcast
The Thais Gibson Podcast
Dismissive Avoidant & Fearful Avoidant Fights - THIS ONE THING Changes Everything
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If you are a fearful, avoidant or dismissive, avoidant attachment style or love one, really care about one, and you finally want to stop these blow ups or this distancing in these silent wars that are occurring in a relationship, then this 10 minute masterclass is a mini masterclass that is here to support you. Today we are going to cover one of the most important things that you can understand in the fearful, avoidant and dismissive avoidant relationship cycle. Specifically how their conflict starts to unfold, what these cycles and patterns are and what's driving them at the subconscious level. And I want to tell you, until you understand this and actually understand all of this, you are going to keep repeating these cycles. And these cycles are painful. They're very hard. Nobody should have to go through these things over and over again. But understanding them differently will help you truly see what's happening beneath the surface, both in yourself and what's causing your own hurt. And in your partner or loved one. You'll be like, oh my gosh, I did not understand that this was actually what was taking place beneath the surface. And I don't want that for you. I don't want you to keep going through these really painful cycles because they hurt and they are so confusing and they are such solvable problems when you just start to finally understand them. We are going to unpack a few things here today. First and foremost, what these cycles are, the core wounds that drive them from an integrated attachment theory point of view. Then we are going to talk, most importantly at the end about what you can start doing and what is happening beneath the surface, what each person is truly experiencing in a conflict. Now, if you're new here, my name is Thais GIBSON and after 1213 years of actually working in private practice with tens of thousands of clients, plus in our online group coaching programs and platform, I'm here to share with you the most powerful insights for deep inner healing from your childhood and how to actually fix your relationships so that you can truly thrive and that love and connection does not have to feel confusing and hard any longer. And if you don't want to miss any of the cool and exciting master classes that we have coming out through this month, we have many master classes coming out every day this month all about the different relationship dynamics between attachment styles. That is for the month of November. It's a special thing that we're doing. I'm really excited to share this masterclass with you. Here is the first thing that you want to understand about these two in a relationship together. Fearful avoidance. Are Individuals who tend to over give and over deliver in relationships, they put an enormous amount of pressure on themselves to try to show up and pour into somebody else. And they're very generous and they're quite hyper vigilant about knowing and understanding their partner's needs and trying to essentially be there for them in the best possible way. But fearful avoidance actually really struggle to share their own inner world with other people. And while they're great at getting other people to open up and be vulnerable, they're sort of emotional over functioners at the expense of themselves. They will emotionally over function to the point of exhaustion, burnout and resentment. Fearful avoidance also operate by something known as covert contracts in relationships. And a covert contract, originally coined by Melody Beatty, is literally when we go into relationships thinking that I have to give to you, and if I give to you enough, then it's safe or appropriate to ask you for something later without having to feel bad or like a burden. And so people are essentially buying their needs. It's like they're investing in giving, giving, giving so that at a future date they can get some kind of ROI in their needs. But all this leads to, or really all this is a symptom of is if you feel like you have to buy your needs, you don't feel comfortable just being vulnerable and communicating what your needs are to a partner. And in a healthy interdependent relationship, in a secure relationship, both parties in the relationship are able to show up and give to each other and support each other and ask openly for their needs to be met and lean on on each other. But healthy interdependence also requires the ability to show up for your own needs as well. So it means that I'm great at meeting my own needs and self soothing, but I'm also great at asking for my needs for my loved ones and receiving I feel comfortable actually doing that. When we get too imbalanced, then we have problems. When we get too imbalanced, we're no, I'm only going to meet my own needs, then we have our walls up and we're hyper independent or what's known as counter dependence. And if we're the opposite, if we are over rely on other people but don't know how to rely on ourselves and have not nurtured or built that relationship in our own capacity to self soothe, then we'll end up putting enormous amounts of pressure on a relationship. I have super exciting news to share with you and it is that we are giving a gift away specifically for Black Friday and this gift is that you get a free all access pass to the Personal Development school for seven days. And when you take it, you also get to keep for life our Somatic processing and nervous system regulation course. This is one of our most popular courses at the Personal Development School. It's short, it's easy, you're going to be able to really dive in and get some huge gains in terms of regulating your nervous system and learning to self soothe. And it is something that we are closing the doors on at the end of this promotion. So really excited to share it with you for a limited time. Regulating your nervous system is one of our six major pillars to healing your attachment style, to becoming secure and being able to really somatically process goes hand in hand with that. Happy Black Friday and I hope you enjoy. I'm gonna get into the five steps in just a moment, but I want you to understand first. Fearful avoidance. They run themselves into the ground. They over give, they under receive and then they feel frustrated. Particularly it's important to note, according to integrated attachment theory, fearful avoidance have specific core wounds. Okay, so this is based on research I've done for over a decade with with clients. The core wounds are around betrayal, around feeling unworthy. That's part of why they over give so much. But then they also feel very betrayed and taken advantage of when somebody's not giving back to them and when they're not trying to essentially mind read their needs and show up for them. So we have a dismissive avoidant who's bas basically opposite. Now we have a dismissive avoidant who they're like, if you have a need, you would literally tell me. They don't even operate by covert contracts at all. They do not even recognize that covert contracts are a part of many people's human behavior. Dismissive avoidance operate from a place of being a little bit more counter dependent like we just talked about. They're very independent. They don't think they should rely on other people. They like to receive. When somebody's giving to them, they appreciate it. They're, they're, they feel that it's a nice thing to do. But they assume that the person is just very, very giving. So they are not sitting there thinking this person is giving to me and that I give back and then I should be looking out for their needs as well. They're like no, no, this person's giving to me. It's because they're very generous and if they needed something from me, of course they would ask. That seems like common sense. Dismissive avoidance. Expect Needs to be talked about in a relationship. Literally they're like, if you, you would literally say I need ABC from you. And a lot of times I think one of the things that, that people don't often recognize is that dismissive avoidance, quite frequently, if somebody does communicate their needs healthily and literally, they will show up for them. But if you're not communicating your needs, the dismissible wouldn't. It's like not on, not even on their periphery of understanding. They do not even think that this could be something that's taking place. Okay, we have this dynamic where the fearful avoidance starts to over give. They under receive because they're not opening up about their needs. They're really showing up. They start burning themselves out and feel taken advantage of. Dismissive avoidance have no idea any of this is really going on beneath the surface. And then fearful avoidance start to feel resentful. They feel like, I'm giving so much to you. Why are you not giving in return? Do you even care? And they'll start to tell stories based on their own core wounds. Core wounds and attachment theory is like our biggest body of work that we've published over the past decade or so. And what you'll see here in particular is that the core wounds of the dismiss the fearful avoidant here are like, okay, I feel betrayed. And they start becoming critical when they're frustrated. Often fearful avoidance will communicate through what we call negative framing. Negative framing is the difference between saying you don't care, you're not doing enough, you know, for me or showing up for me at all, versus, hey, I feel like I need to rely on you too. Can you show up in X, y, z way? Right. So positive framing is saying what we do want, what we do need. Negative frame framing is saying what we don't want. One of the biggest core wounds of a dismissive avoidant attachment style is the core wound that I am defective or shameful. Okay, really big core wound that we've discovered about the dismissive avoidant and dismissive avoidance in this particular dynamic. When this core wound is triggered, they feel very hurt and frustrated. They start literally thinking like, you're being so critical. Why are you even with me? Like why are we even bothered? Why am I even trying to be in this relationship if everything I do you're just going to criticize. Because they have no context for the fact that the fearful avoidant is over giving, not communicating their needs. Playing this sort of COVID contract game beneath the surface where they're trying to give so that they can also feel safe. To receive. And then the dismissive avoidant has no idea. And they're like, oh, you're just generous, and then you're just mad at me. I don't understand. And as soon as the dismissible one gets criticized, they are not just making it mean what a defectiveness core wound actually means is that when they receive criticism, it's not like they're taking criticism at a high level. They. They are literally taking criticism to mean, this is about me at my core. Okay, you think I'm this way at my core. You literally think at my core I'm a bad person, I'm broken, I'm defective. Like, something is deeply, inherently broken within me. And it's this big core fear that they have from their own childhood experiences. Now we have this dynamic where the dismissive avoidance feeling this way, they start to feel hurt and shut down, and they shut down and pull away even further. And now the fearful one's like, hello, I was trying to tell you that I needed something, and now you're shutting down. And they feel like I was trying to bring something up. The fearful avoidant has no idea that they're communicating in such an unhealthy way and how badly it's being received. Because dismissive avoidants are also very stoic. They don't show a lot of their emotions. So they're deeply hurt, but they won't show it. They're, like, not vulnerable about it. So we have these two inner worlds that are actually showing up together. We're in these two inner worlds. They are containers for a lot of deeper hurt, a lot of deeper things that are happening beneath the surface. The inner world of the fearful avoidant being all about, you know, feeling burnt out and hurt and a little bit bitter or resentful that they're trying so hard and are not feeling like they're receiving in reciprocity in the relationship. And the dismissive avoidant in this dynamic actually sitting here feeling like, wait, why are you being so cruel to me and volatile in your expression? Why am I trying? Why am I bothering? You don't feel safe to be around. And so they start to pull away. And as they start to pull away, the fearful avoidant feels like, I tried to bring something up. You're not even trying to listen to me. You really don't care. You really just want to take advantage of me. And now we have this fearful, avoidant, dismissive avoidant cycle that has begun. Until we learn to actually break out of this fearful, avoidant, dismissive avoidance cycle, you are going to see that there's tremendous amounts of frustration, misunderstanding. Because the fearful avoidant will feel like I'm literally trying to tell you what I need, remembering. Remembering. Because it is so important here that I the fearful avoidant tries to tell what they need, but when they don't know how to communicate it in a healthy way, it never gets heard. This is one of the most important things the fearful avoidant can start to understand, is that if you don't know how to communicate in a healthy way, your words, your grievances, they will always fall on deaf ears. People will not understand you. They will not hear you. They will only hear that you're raising your voice or you're using harsh words or that you're criticizing them. And so this leaves the fearful avoidant feeling even more lonely and isolated. The fearful avoidant is left sitting there thinking, I'm trying so hard. Now I'm trying to bring it to you and just ask for something and now you're just shutting down and pulling away. What an injustice. And they end up feeling like I'm just not worthy. Then this must be really what's happening. And they feel such a deep sense of the betrayal core wound from Integrated Attachment Theory. And now all of a sudden we have this really painful cycle. And we are going to talk in the next video here about five major ways, five actual steps you can take to truly break out of the cycle, put an end to this pattern. This is part of our series for this week where we are going to be going through all of the relationship pairing mini masterclasses so that you can start understanding how this all works and what you can do differently. So we do have really in depth fearful avoidant courses. Fearful avoidant with dismissive avoidant courses. If you just don't want to wait and you want to go deeper right away, we have courses with workbooks, exactly what you need to do to heal all the different stages and challenges that are going to show up in this relationship. Stay tuned and I hope you like, share and subscribe to this channel so you don't miss any of what we have coming for you throughout this month with all the different relationship style dynamics. And I'll see you in the next one.