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The Thais Gibson Podcast
How I (Fearful Avoidant) & My Husband (Dismissive Avoidant) Became Secure Together - 7 Steps
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So when I first met my husband, I was still a little bit of a fearful avoidant attachment style. And he was definitely a dismissive avoidant. And we both grew up in our own really difficult, painful cycles. One thing, however, that was different is that I had done a little bit of work for a few years and was already working with people prior to meeting him, at least for a short period of time. And I knew a little bit about relationships. But for anybody who knows my backstory, I actually was really just working with people in the first couple of years of my practice on rewiring their core wounds, on understanding their needs, and on regulating their nervous system. And it was actually through meeting my husband, who I've been with for the last 12 years, that I then revisited attachment theory. So in today's video, I am going to break down for you seven major things that I, as a fearful avoidant, did with him, who was dismissive avoidant when we met, when we started noticing our attachment patterns play out. And I want to be really clear about something. He was a dismissive avoidant who showed up and did the work. And honestly, in my client practice, when I was running it for years and years, a lot of dismissive avoidance do if the work is positioned in the right way. But this doesn't necessarily mean it will be everybody's experience and that everybody's avoidant partner will show up and do the work, or even then every fearful avoidant will do the work. So I'm gonna break this down for you as sort of a roadmap of what worked extremely well for me so that you can take this work home and understand this yourself too. Sometimes I feel funny saying this, but I am like profoundly fulfilled in my relationship. I honestly, if you ask me as a teenager, if I ever thought that I could be as fulfilled as I am in a marriage, in a long term relationship, I would have said absolutely not. In fact, as a teenager when I was super fearful avoidant, I was like, I am never getting married. And I had all these really negative beliefs and stressors about marriage and what it meant. And I was terrified of it, quite honestly. And fast forward all this time later, it is one of the things I am profoundly most grateful for in my life. I can't believe how important a marriage has been in my life and all the lessons it's brought to me and all the fulfilled ways that I feel that I just honestly never thought were possible or understood in my younger years when I had a lot of wounds. So I do want to share that if you're going through a hard time in your relationships right now. Change is absolutely possible. And I don't want you to give up hope. I don't want you to sit down and feel like, oh, my goodness, it's impossible to change. It's impossible to have a happy relationship. I also understand that the dating landscape is difficult right now. I understand that, you know, there's dating apps and there's social media and more short term gratification. But as somebody who literally works with people all the time for a living, I can tell you there are amazing people out there who are still single and not in relationships. There are so many incredible people. And yes, you might meet some people who are going through difficult times along the way. But don't give up hope. So let's break down these seven things. Okay, the first thing, and I did this before meeting my husband. So this really changed how I showed up. Like, I had done a lot of deep work and actually started my practice. And I was really specializing in three things before I ever met my husband. I was specializing in helping people rewire their core wounds. I talk a lot about this on this channel. We have these core wounds that are the imprints from our childhood experiences. If you experience betrayal growing up, you have a betrayal core wound. You constantly fear being betrayed. If you felt abandoned growing up, that's what you're going to fear and project onto things. If you felt trapped growing up, that's going to. And usually we have many of them and I had a lot of them. I had a lot of core wounds and those are three of my biggest ones were betrayal, abandoned, trapped. We can have them in past relationships. We can have them from childhood. You know, conditioning is always happening. It doesn't like, stop magically at some point in your life. Conditioning is less intense after the age of eight, but conditioning is still happening all the time. I had a lot of core wounds and like triggers going into relationship. And before I met him, I had come a really long way. I had done a lot of core wound reprogramming. This is really step one. And I had done a lot of nervous system regulation work and somatic processing. So I had much more emotional control and containment. But I had never done any work prior to meeting my husband again in relationships. So I met my husband and the first year was really great. Things were going really well. And he was actually the one kind of like pushing the relationship along a little bit more in many ways. Then when we start getting more close, I started to feel him really withdrawal. And it was so Strange, because I knew he really cared about me and I could see all the ways he was trying to show up. But I started being like, what's happening? Something about him is so different. And I had learned about attachment styles in first year university. They teach you this much about attachment styles. And I went back and revisited it and I realized, oh my gosh, this whole time I had been a fearful avoidant. I was very hot and cold, and he was definitely a dismissive avoidant and had a very tough earlier set of years. I was like, okay, to make this relationship work, I'm going to have to make sure that I'm not abandoning myself. Because I knew I had a tendency to kind of meet his needs and not really show up for mine or communicate mine. So the second thing is that since I had done a lot of core wound work, I did a lot more core wound work specific to what was triggering me in the relationship. And that was very helpful for me. And I also decided, by the way, hey, we may have some problems here unless we really change our attachment styles and become secure together. And I'm going to do all the work I can on myself so that I'm just better off no matter what. And ideally, he comes along and does this work with me and we heal together. Now, he didn't do the work like sitting down and doing rewiring work or taking courses or going to therapy. He didn't do any of that. He just met me where I was. Which is again, much more common with dismissive avoidance than you would think. If you show up really healthily in a very secure way, then dismissive avoidance fairly frequently, because they're very logical and grounded, they usually will meet you part way. I know that the Internet says, oh, they don't, they don't. But in fairness, there's a very large sample size of people outside of people who are hurt by an avoidance, who actually do do the work and show up. So this was the second part. I realized I had to communicate my needs in the relationship. So I did that. I was like, I am going to take up space. I realized that what was hurting in me or what felt uncomfortable in me when things started to get a little more difficult was that I wasn't communicating. I wasn't taking up space and sharing my needs. And then I was kind of resenting him for not meeting them. And I was like, whoa, that doesn't make any sense. I'm expecting, expecting him to mind read. And because he's not meeting them, I'm resenting him that's crazy. I have to do my side. I have to clean up my side of the street and actually communicate my needs. So because I had done a lot of core wound work first, I had the capacity to regulate in a very healthy way and then communicate in a healthy way. So I started communicating consistently. If I needed him to be present because sometimes he struggled with that, I'd be like, hey, I really need you to listen to me and be present right now. Or if I needed him to open up and be more transparent about something I didn't understand, if I felt him like withdrawing, I'd be like, hey, I need you to communicate to me and be open and actually do the work, to talk through whatever's going on on your end. And I would just tell him what I needed. I wasn't trying to babysit his needs coming out of him. I would tell him once and I would be like, here's what it is. And my husband, literally, who's an amazing, amazing man, and he's a godsend in my life, and I can't even imagine my life without him. He's been so, so good to me. He would do this thing where he would go reflect and he'd come back and he would do it. And that was this theme I noticed so much in our marriage and in our early relationship before we got married, is if I just said it to him directly and I was really calm that he would, like, go have a think about it and he would come back and he would start doing it in his relationship. And I could tell that his way of doing the work in his relationship, in our relationship. And I could tell that his way of doing the work was that he would reflect on it logically, think it through, see the value in what I was saying and see why it was important and show up and do it. And he really showed up in actions and in embodiment of the work. And so I had told him, like, you know, I need you to be more present sometimes. Like when I get home from work and you're not present for a little bit, I don't like that. And I need you to be more vulnerable and transparent about what's happening in your inner world. So I feel connected. And I had said these things to him and I would see him make such a big effort. So this brings me to kind of point number three, which is that he really showed up to practice co regulation. He would sometimes say things to me like, I don't really know what I'm feeling, but I know I feel off do you want me to share it with you? Do you want to talk it through? And he did an amazing job of, like, doing that work, meeting me there. That allowed us to get really close and really understand. And I think those were the parts where, like, I would say going into the relationship, I was maybe 50% secure. I had been very fearful avoidant in the past, but I had done a good bit of, like, core wound work and nervous system work first. But I hadn't communicated my needs or set boundaries very well, and I hadn't done all my core wounds yet. Then going into it, we did that, like, foundational work together. And I could just feel us feeling so different in the relationship within a pretty short period of time. It could feel us, like, really getting it. Like, getting each other, connecting to each other, understanding each other's inner world. And he really showed up to practice flexibility and compromise. So we did things where we would have, like, a weekly needs check in, and we'd be like, oh, what do you need this week? Are your needs met? And we would check in. And if I said, like, yeah, I need more of xyz, he would show up, like, very consistent, reliable, like, did the work. And when I say this now, it's, you know, we've been very in a healthy, super good place for a very long time. Like, we were doing this work, like, 10 years ago. And so, you know, I'm aware that I'm thinking seeing him through this lens of he just understands me so well now. But he was really quite dismissive avoidant at the time. It wasn't. He had to plug in. He showed up to do that work. And I found a lot that when I explained it just a little bit, and I never took care of him doing it. I was never babysitting him to do it or anything like that. But if I said, hey, I need you to share what's going on in your inner world. Healthy relationships, people are transparent. People talk it out. And I would say that once, or if he. He was, like, triggered and I could tell him he was shutting down, I'd be like, hey, I know you need space right now. That's fine. But you have to come back and talk to me. We have to hash things through. I'm not gonna be in a dynamic where we don't talk things through. So when you're ready, come back and chat. And, like, that didn't happen that many times, but he would take that in, and I could see that his wheels were turning, and he would be like, oh, yeah, like, that Makes sense. Obviously, you have to talk things out. So he might take space for a minute, but half an hour later, he'd come back and be like, yeah, let's talk it out. So he had to plug in, too. Like, I am making it seem like he was already mostly secure or something. He wasn't. He had to really plug in and do that work. But that was huge. And he definitely practiced flexibility and compromise. And then I have three other big things that are more like practical solutions. Another thing that I think has brought us really close over the years is we play this game. We do a date night once a week, religiously, unless the sky is falling. Like, unless, like, I had my appendix taken out years ago. Like, we didn't do it then. You know, stuff like that. But we really try. And date night doesn't have to be like fancy dinner. Like, sometimes we just do date night in. Where we cook dinner together and we, like, sit at the table and we're present and we, like, talk. We play a game, and we call it the questions game, where you each have to ask each other three meaningful questions. And it has to be meaningful, because the idea, and we talked about this together early on, is that you're either going to grow together or grow apart. And who we're going to be in this version of ourselves at one stage of life is not going to be who we're who we are 10 years later or 20 years later. And so we have to keep getting to know each other. And so what often starts as one meaningful question that we ask each other. Each ends up as, like, three hours of amazing conversation. And then we don't even get to the other questions because it strikes up all these cool things. But there's. The beautiful part of it is that there's a meaning and intent. There's intent to ask something meaningful and real, not like some silly question, oh, how was your week? Or some surfacing. But what's the biggest, hardest thing you've gone through in the last three months? And what have you learned from it? Just meaningful things. And it strikes up so many interesting paths and different types of conversation. And I'm a big quality time, emotional connection person, so that's huge. And that's a big one for him, too. So. So that allows us to really do that work together. And then I'll share two more things. And I just want to say, if you're listening to this and you are in this position and you're like, how do we do the work? What do we do? I have a free masterclass that I'm going to be teaching live, and it's on Friday, and you can totally sign up to it for free. You can come ask me your questions live. I go through, like an actual structured format of what works and a roadmap and how to reconnect and tools and I'll show slides and just like really in depth things. So if you want to join there and if that's a really helpful, supportive resource for you, I'll put the link down below and it's fun and you can ask me any questions that you have. The last two things are we have each other's back. And I don't think we've ever talked about this in hindsight. Like, I don't think we were like, oh, we have to have each other's back. But I think it kind of just emerged that way from doing all the other work where, like, we protect the relationship. Like, if something comes in, if somebody tries to get between us. And not that we've had like anything like that per se, but I just noticed that really early on we're both super proactive about having each other's back and making each other feel safe. Like, one thing I really respect about him is that if somebody were, like, if we were out somewhere and somebody were to come up and talk to him or flirt with him or something like that, he is very protective, like, oh, no, here's my wife, very supportive and respectful, and I'm absolutely the same way. I make great efforts to be like, oh, my husband. And I think that because we've both done that for so long, there's this natural sense of trust that's really built through that and respect. And I noticed that we both do things to protect the relationship in different ways. And like, if one of us is hurt or down and out or something's hard in our lives, we really look out for each other. And that's been a really important principle. And honestly, I see a lot of relationships where when there's resentment, that peace falls away. And I think that unless we are actively protecting our relationship proactively, there's going to be cracks sometimes. And unless we fill the cracks right up pretty quick, then it doesn't become like a little crack, it becomes like a crack in the foundation. And then it becomes bigger and greater than it needs to be. And so that has been extremely important. And we resolve conflicts right away in that same way. Like, if something's wrong, we are hashing it out. For me, as a person who was fearful, avoidant, one thing I've noticed on my journey for years of being secure is like, I can't hold things in. Like, if something bothers me with somebody in a meaningful relationship in my life, I am going to go to them and I'm going to be like, hey, this is not cool. I. We need to talk it out, we need to deal with this. I am not good at suppressing or holding things in, but I actually think in retrospect that's been really helpful for building trust, building understanding. Because if something irritates me or upsets me, I'm gonna go deal with it. Because the feeling of holding things in and not dealing with it feels like poison. And then the last thing I'll say is there is an act of appreciation. That happens a lot. So we definitely make an effort to appreciate each other, affirm each other, speak kindly and positively to each other. And I just think all of these things over time have really solidified the relationship. We did a lot of these things in the first two years. And by like year three, I felt like everything had changed in a really good way. Like things had transformed. I didn't even try to work on this until partway through year one, like after year one, like year one and three months or something. I noticed around then like, ooh, we gotta like plug in and do the work. And then it took us a period of time between that rest of year one into like year two, let's say a year and three months in, maybe to two years and three months in kind of like a year, the better part of a year to feel like things got like so much lighter and easier. But then it turned from like, lighter and easier until like, deeply connected and in like a really good rhythm and flow that was meaningful. It wasn't like, oh, we're not triggering each other and we understand each other better. It was like, oh, wow. Like we have such a deep sense of rootedness and foundation. And so it's not like this quick overnight process or everything changes immediately. But there's a lot of really important things here that if like we have a lot of core wounds and we're triggered all the time, that's going to just disrupt the living daylights out of a relationship. Or if your DA partner doesn't know how to co regulate, then they'll keep trying to regulate by withdrawing. Or if neither of you know what your needs are and you don't communicate them, that's going to be so hard because you're not going to meet each other's needs. So there's those really important pieces that make such a big difference and I wanted to share those with you because I hope that really helps. And if you want to go way deeper and get a roadmap, join me in that masterclass. I would love to share more with you and can't wait to see you there. Thanks for watching.