← The Thais Gibson Podcast
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There is one behavior that signals a fearful avoidant is done for good. And if you see it, the relationship is probably over. In today's video, we are going to break down exactly what that behavior is. We're going to talk about what precedes these things, so what early warning signs to look for. And then we're going to talk about the neuroscience of what's actually going on when somebody leaves a relationship abruptly, how this affects both individuals in the relationship. And at the end of this video, I'll take you through an exercise that you can do if you are the loved one of a fearful avoidant, so that you can move through the situation and heal in a much easier way. Fearful avoidance, number one, have a really hard time communicating their needs in relationships, of course, until they start doing the work. And this is because they often grew up in environments where they couldn't really have needs either. There was so much chaos going on around them that there was no room for their needs to be met. Or even if they tried communicating and being known, sometimes they had really unhealthy caregivers and people in their lives that would shame or punish them for trying to have their own needs or trying to speak up. And so what this leads them to is to get locked into cycles when they first start dating and getting into relationships where they automatically assume subconsciously this is not a conscious experience, they automatically assume that their needs will not be met anyways. And so it's almost this unknown. And as somebody who once was fearful avoidant, I can tell you this very clearly. The idea that you could even communicate needs in a relationship was this, like, foreign concept. I didn't know that I had needs. I didn't know what needs were. And, you know, this is a big part of the reason I share this work is because being able to heal these areas of your life as a fearful avoidant is like, so powerful. But of course, as any insecure attachment style, healing really changes us internally as people, but also in our relationships. It gives us actual options in our lives. So, you know, what often happens first is fearful avoidants don't realize they can have needs. And what this leads to is automatically when you're not communicating your needs in a relationship, you are on a one track trajectory towards literally getting into situations where you're gonna feel frustrated, you're gonna feel resentful, and number two, fearful avoidance puts so much pressure on themselves to be able to meet the needs of other people in their life that you end up in an imbalanced relationship dynamic right out of the gates. It's like you're in a situation where you're gonna have to pour yourself into somebody because you expect that somebody really wants you to meet all of their needs. And then you never communicate your needs. And so your needs are inevitably just not gonna be met because nobody's gonna know how to read your mind. And this leads you to burnout, to frustration, to feeling res like, oh, my gosh, why doesn't anybody care about me? And it's a really painful place to be. But the problem here is that the fearful avoiding themselves until they learn this doesn't realize that, like, you know, and I'll speak for myself as somebody who was in that space, I was part of that problem, right? Like, I would burn myself out trying to meet everybody else's needs, never share my own. Well, whose responsibility is that? Well, after doing some looking at myself, once upon a time, when I first started my own healing journey, it was like, I'm that problem. Unless I actually give room to share with people what it is that I need, what I'm feeling, what I'm fearing, what my concerns are, Then how can I possibly expect that somebody's gonna meet them or show up for them? And how can I possibly resent other people or be angry at other people if I haven't given them a fair shot yet by never communicating? Now, once you communicate, if somebody never shows up or makes an effort, great, you've got an answer. Maybe that person's not the right person for you. Step away from that relationship, most likely, right? But unless you're communicating, you're on this trajectory. And then as a fearful avoidant, you get into this protective defense system where it's like, you have to convince yourself. O and I used to do this, and again, I hope it helps to share my own past experiences here. But I used to be in relationships where then I'd be like, oh, see, this person doesn't care about me. If they cared, they would know my needs. They would show up. And it took a certain level of awareness and introspection to go, wait, hold on, Let me see if I can tell if people care. Once I. Once I practice being vulnerable, once I'm able to open up, and as soon as I did that as a person, like, everything in my relationships really changed. If this is something you struggle with and you want to really go deep into this topic, if you want to overcome these wounds that you have fears around, betrayal, abandonment, unworthiness, these types of dynamics, you can check out our belief rewiring and emotional Mastery course, you get seven days to access it fully free. At the same time, we're doing a free giveaway right now where you can actually keep our needs course for life. That will help you learn your needs, learn how to self soothe, and these are gonna be really important. If you are a fearful avoidant and you're finding yourself in these patterns and just wanna break free from them so you're not just repeating your past over and over again in your future relationships. Okay, so link to that for free. Really powerful. If you're the loved one of a fearful avoidant as well, and you're on the receiving end of this, so you can break free of your wounds and you get the needs course where you can actually do your self soothing work around this. You're healing and recover from this relationship if it did unsettly. I want to talk a little bit about what you can do to heal this. If you are the fearful avoidant, but also if you're the loved one of a fearful avoidant, how to approach this with them, what you can do. But first, let's talk a little bit about the neuroscience of all of this. Joseph Larue's amygdala research actually shows that emotionally charged memories from our past actually create heightene fear responses. So this is something we talk about on this channel all the time, is that when we have these old wounds and memories. As an example, if you had an experience where you tried to communicate a need as a child and it felt suppressed, rejected, diminished, we store that and then we hold onto it. We project that back out onto our external world. And this is what explains why fearful avoidance often conflate or confuse vulnerability with a sense of emotional danger, emotional threat. I can even remember being a fearful avoidant. And like when I would have feelings for somebody in relationships, I would feel threatened by that person. Like I would feel scared of them at the same time, like, oh gosh, this person could hurt me. Oh my gosh, I feel feelings for this person wanting to kind of push them away, keep them at arm's length. And that was because of my previous conditioning about vulnerability, not feeling safe a lot of times growing up. And so when I felt vulnerable as an adult, those safety circuits would go off. Those fears of opening up and feeling unsafe would automatically be there. Now I just want to be clear, for anybody who's new to this channel, this is a solvable problem. Like I've been in a relationship with my husband for 10 years, like more than that. And you won't have to live this way Forever. Those are very solvable problems. But you have to target the subconscious mind and actually rewire these patterns because it's really hard to carry these patterns. It is not easy. It makes life chaotic and difficult. It makes relationships extremely hard. So just really important to touch on now. Again, we're going to get into what you can do in just a second. But I also want to share with you, Dr. Karen Lyon. Attachment studies found that unresolved fear from past situations leads to narrative disorganization in relationships. So what the heck does that actually mean? It means that once we have a story, okay, we see things through the lens of that story. So if I have a story that everybody's going to betray me or everybody's going to abandon me eventually, or I'm unworthy, you know, all of which I carried very much when I was younger before doing a lot of this rewiring work, then narrative reorganization essentially means that I am going to go into relationships, reorganizing how I'm interpreting the situation before me through the lens of my past experiences. Okay? We've all seen this. When somebody's been cheated on, they feared being cheated on all the time. When somebody's been abandoned, they fear being abandoned again, right? This is very normal and common. Once we have this story that's recorded that way and stored research actually shows that, it rarely changes. Okay? So we carry those stories with us over and over again. But again, that is why I literally started a YouTube channel, was to really spread the message that, sure, that might be most people's experiences, but that's most people's experiences because they're not targeting the subconscious mind. And when we target and we leverage neuroplasticity and the fact that we have neurogenesis and we can rewire these neural pathways. At one point, you didn't have that story. Then it got conditioned into you. You can recondition it by the same levers and mechanisms that caused that conditioning to take place in the first place. That's when we can actually change these things. So a lot of research shows, oh, once you have this betrayal wound or abandonment wound, good luck, you're going to be stuck this way. That's actually not tr. That's just the fact that a lot of our Western system is targeting the conscious mind for healing and growth. We have to be targeting the subconscious mind if we want to actually rewire these painful beliefs that we've acquired through painful past events. So I wanna talk about what you can do. If you're both a fearful avoidant or you're on the receiving end of a fearful avoidant, really pulling away in a final and often sudden type of way in a relationship. Let's talk about what you can do here starting today, okay? If you don't wanna go as deep into like all the worksheets and workbooks and daily exercises to really rewire, here's three things that just starting right now, okay? First thing is first, if you are the fearful avoidant in this particular dynamic and you find yourself leaving relationship after relationship, I want you to ask yourself, when I leave relationship suddenly from 1 to 10, how much should I communicate my needs? First, this is going to come with a caveat. We've got two more steps here. Number two, how well did I communicate my needs in a way that they were likely to be received? And if you're anything like me, when I was fearful avoidant, I used to think I was communicating my needs because I would hold things in and then I would kind of say them all at once and be like, six weeks ago you did this, and then three days ago you did that, and now today you're doing this. That's not constructive communication, okay? Telling people all the things they did wrong, especially after holding them in, this is not going to get you heard and it's not going to get your needs met. Healthy needs communication involves something called positive framing. It's our ability to say, hey, I'm needing ABC rather than you're not doing that and you don't care or whatever meaning we give to it. Okay? So, you know, I want you to ask yourself honestly, how well am I communicating my needs and how, how frequently do I do this? How consistent am I at communicating my needs or even knowing what they are in relationships? Because if you're not doing this, you're on a one track path towards never communicating, feeling resentful, feeling burnt out, leaving all of a sudden, never coming back. If you're on the receiving end of this dynamic in a relationship where you feel like the fearful avoidance starting to do these things, they're shutting down, they're not communicating needs. You fool them pulling, feel them pulling away. I want you to go to this person and I want you to tell them we need to be able to communicate in a relationship. We need to communicate about our needs. And a great habit to get into is to do a weekly needs check in. We talk about your needs in relationship, you talk about them proactively in a healthy way and you actually have open discussions and dialogue. This doesn't mean that you then just meet all the Fearful avoidance, needs. This means that you also share your needs in that dynamic. You share your ability to actually have them know what's going on inside of you as well. And I want you to set a deadline, I want you to look at this and go, okay, I'm gonna do this for like 6 weeks or 8 and see if that needle moves really vet to see if there's an improvement in the situation. Because if there is, then you're going to be able to work this relationship out. If, if both parties in a relationship can have a weekly needs check in, talk about needs in healthy ways ahead of time, really share them with their partner, really open up conversation. Communication becomes open, transparent, proactive. This is such a stabilizing and foundational force to having a securely attached relationship that's harmonious and loving and can and can consistently grows over time. It's when we don't do that that then we feel resentful, we feel burnt out, we feel misunderstood and unheard by our partners and frustrated and that's when a lot of things start to really go awry. Okay, so this is going to be a really important exercise. Of course both people need to be able to willingly participate in this, open the dialogue, have those honest conversations and that's a really important step to healing. Of course, rewiring your triggers is another really important step to healing. But I would really say that if we had to talk about the top pillars of healing and this is what we focus on from an integrated attachment theory point of view, how you can actually change your attachment style, the neuro sense of how we change our attachment style. It's rewiring your triggers, learning your needs, learning to communicate them in healthy ways, rewiring your nervous system function and doing somatic work and then having healthy boundaries. Okay. And we have a six pillar that's all about changing your behaviors, but that's actually the result of doing the first five really well. I hope this gives you insight. I hope this is helpful for you in your journey. Please, please like share subscribe to this video if you did enjoy it or if it was helpful for you and I look forward to seeing you in tomorrow's video.