← The Thais Gibson Podcast
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If you've ever been in a long term relationship with a narcissist, you know that you end up leaving that relationship, trying to figure out how to put the pieces back together once the relationship is over, and wondering, how on earth did I get here? How did I ignore so many red flags for so long? How did I fall into this seeming trap from the beginning without recognizing some of these themes or patterns? For a lot of people in recovery from narcissistic abuse, they also look at these situations and they ask themselves, how do I trust myself ever again to pick the right partner or to get into a new relationship and how can I trust somebody else? In today's video, I am actually going to break down the three major and really only pillars that you need to deeply understand about why you accidentally chose this person, what this says about you, and how you can heal these themes internally, once and for all, so that you then have emotional immunity to avoid the narcissist forever. If you're new here. Hello and welcome. My name is Thais Gibson. I'm the founder of the Personal Development School. We have a whole bunch of different programs that help you to really rewire your attachment patterns, your relationship baggage or challenges from past experiences so that you can actually heal and build the best relationships of your life. Honestly, starting with the relationship to yourself. We're gonna break this down and this is a really powerful topic and I just wanna give a disclaimer that this is also an emotional topic. Okay? And not everything I'm gonna tell you in this video is going to be easy to hear, but it is going to be extremely important to take in and to digest and it truly will give you the emotional immunity to make sure you don't end up in these situations ever again. And how we're gonna frame this is that there's three overarching themes that foster attraction psychologically. O obviously we have biological features of attraction, but I'm talking purely psychologically. These are the three things and I have to break them down for you in detail for you to deeply understand. I'll save the most important one for last because we're going to go the deepest into that topic. The first thing is we are attracted to people who express our repressed traits. Again, I'll make this make sense in normal language in just a moment. The second thing is we are attracted to people who meet our deeply unmet needs, especially from childhood. And number three, we are attracted to people who treat us the way we treat ourselves. And the third one is going to be the most Important. It's about our subconscious conscious comfort zone. So here's the first one when you look at this idea, and the first two are really like initial attractors. Okay? The third one is what we tend to invest in the longest term. So when you look at the narcissist, they end up usually having extremely expressed traits that are your repressed traits. You probably heard the term opposites attract. That's because we are literally wired for something called a homeostatic impulse or allostatic impulse at the subconscious level of mind. And we are wired to want to attach to people and things that express very different, differently from us, because when we attach and take that person as a part of ourselves, we feel like we have a greater sense of wholeness. So let me give you a really obvious example that will make this make a lot of sense. Oftentimes, narcissists are extremely assertive. They're really good at taking up space. They're assertive to a fault, right? They're assertive to the point of entitlement rather than just healthy assertiveness. But they end up being in situations where they're so assertive, they tell people how it is, they speak, they take up a lot of space, they have a really big voice. And a lot of times, quite honestly, people who end up being attracted to narcissists or investing in relationships with narcissists, that's a very repressed trait for them. So usually you're the type of person that's highly empathetic or empathic, and you end up being in situations where you feel so much for other people, you worry more about other people's feelings. And so what ends up happening is you're like, okay, well, this person, they don't worry about people's feelings. They take up space. And something deep psychologically within you at a subconscious level is wired to try to take on and attach to some of that in the other person, because then you feel that by proxy, you have a greater sense of wholeness within yourself. Okay? So this is the mind's allostatic or homeostatic impulse. And so you'll essentially, if you really struggle with assertiveness and somebody's super assertive, you're like, oh, I want proximity to that person. If I attach to them, they will assert for me. They will look out for me. They will maybe protect me sometimes. And so oftentimes, that's part of what drives it. And generally, what you usually have in relationships when somebody's dating a narcissist, is somebody who's Highly empathetic, highly caring, oftentimes very passive rather than assertive. And so, you know, and you often have the narcissist who's in the opposite polarity. They're more aggressive rather than passive or more assertive. They don't empathize with people very much. They're very self oriented and selfish and entitled. And you're usually the opposite. So there's this deep psychological subconscious driver that's like, ooh, this is so attractive. And they actually feel that way towards you too, right? They actually feel this need to gain wholeness and closeness and proximity to you too. So that's one of the first reasons, and I want you to understand here that like that's not me saying, hey, change all these traits. These are bad traits. But what one of the really powerful lessons for healing on the first one is, okay, because we still two other ones to cover, is that we have to learn the healthy expression of those traits. So if you imagine that you're kind of a little too far down the scale of polarity, you usually have to learn to have a voice, have boundaries, assert yourself in a healthy way sometimes learn to empathize with yourself as much as you do others. Learn to take yourself into consideration rather than people pleasing all the time. That would be you moving more to center instead of being in these extreme polarities. And the more extreme we are and the less integrated we have one another's traits, the more we're attracted to people who are very opposite to us. In other words, as you learn to have your voice, assert yourself sometimes take up space, have boundaries, look out for your own feelings and needs too. As you start to do that, you won't be as inclined to put the narcissist on this huge pedestal and think like, oh my gosh, they're so amazing. And then by proxy, put yourself down. Okay? So that is a huge opportunity to really grow and heal there. Number two, a really important piece is we are attracted to people who meet our deeply unmet needs from childhood. Okay? If you were a child and I'm going to tell you the big needs that you're going to fall for a narcissist. And I'm going to tell you what to do about this so you heal this so you have emotional immunity to this. Narcissists, they usually in the love bobbing stage of relationships, so when they first get to know you and they're trying to win you over before they go into that devaluation, and eventually often the discarding phase, they end up love bombing you and they meet very specific needs. They are really good at reading. And pretty much every person who ends up in a romantic relationship long term with a narcissist has a lot of these deeply unmet needs. The narcissist makes you feel deeply seen, number one. They make you feel known and they're attentive and they make you feel like they can sort of read and attune to your behaviors and how you're gonna show up and what you need and what makes you tick and what lights you up as a person. They're so good at really getting there into the crevices of your own psyche to understand and to make you feel really seen and understood in that. And usually people who end up in long term relationships or marriages with narcissists did not get nearly enough of that growing up. And so there's this point of like, oh my gosh, somebody comes in and they make you feel like that and it's like fireworks go off in your brain. It's like this incredible attraction and magnetizing of like, oh my God, I need more of that. So that becomes a really huge thing. The second part of this is that narcissists often make you feel protected. So a lot of people who end up in relationships with narcissists, they feel like that narcissist is gonna like have their back, protect, look out for them, look after them. And so there's a sense of like, oh, okay, I can be at peace, I'm protected, I'm supported. And that's very strong in the love bombing stage. As you can imagine, what ends up happening is it starts that way. And once a narcissist feels like they've won you over, they then begin the devaluation stage. They start flaw finding and you putting you down, doing the opposite of protecting you. Right. But in that early stage, they make you feel like they're gonna be the person to do that. We could go into other traits. They often make you feel special, is a big need from childhood that's often unmet. They often make you feel deeply support worded or cared for. Like they're gonna do things, they're gonna take care of you, everything's gonna be fine. And that's sometimes in like a financial and physical way, but oftentimes it's also in an emotional way or in a stress way. Like there can be so many variations of how that person's expressing that care, but the version of it is gonna be in the way that you need the most. Okay. So if you feel the most financially unstable, they're gonna show up and feel like that part of your life is supported. If you feel the most emotionally distressed, they're gonna show up and make you feel like, oh, I'll take care of things. I'll take stuff off your plate, don't worry. And so there's a lot bombing stage. And then obviously, one of the biggest things for a lot of people is you feel special because you feel validated, you feel approved of, you feel known. They often give you this sense of certainty because they feed this future narrative about the future you're going to have together and what you're going to do. And they make you feel like, oh, my goodness, this person protects me. They make me feel certain. They make me feel supported and cared for and. Or taken care of. And they make me feel deeply seen and deeply known. And so these are a lot of those things that they are really good at pouring into and early stages of dating. And of course, once they feel like, okay, I have this person really here, the isolation begins, where they start to cut you off from other people in your life. The devaluation begins where they start to put you down and become more cruel and completely lacking in empathy. You then become the character in their story that you're just supposed to kind of be there in the way that they expect and need at all times. And of course, it goes downhill from there. But what's really interesting is when you look at the neuroscience of intermittent reinforcement, this is what gamblers get addicted to. Like when somebody's there pulling a slot machine, this is. It's the intermittent reinforcement that is profoundly addictive. There's a lot of studies in rats that are intermittently reinforced where they just. They give up on. It's around food pellets and pushing a lever for food pellets. But they will literally, when the food pellets come out in this intermittent way, like every seventh time, 12th time, 47th time, 108th time, when there's this sort of, you know, intermittency there. Rats in, like a rat park will give up on mating. They'll give up on even sleeping properly. They'll give up on grooming, and they'll just hover around these food pellet levers. Because literally intermittent reinforcement provides intermittent fluctuations in dopamine, the motivation neurochemical. And when you have that on top of intermittent reinforcement of oxytocin, the bonding neurochemical, because it's relational, this can be highly addictive for people. And it's part of why it feels so difficult to finally break free of the spell. And here's what you do. You learn to self source and resource those needs in healthier ways other than from the narcissist. I could go into so much here, like there's so much that we could get into. I try to be mindful that I can't create like an hour long YouTube video all the time because most people don't listen for a full hour for YouTube. But what I will say here is that there's a lot of work you can do to see going back to the narcissist as being more costly. You can actually rewire your brain to change this addictive part. We do something called a cost benefit tool where you write out all of the costs of being back with a narcissist, spending time with them, of dating them, of entering into relationships with them, and all of the benefits of holding your boundaries, holding your truth. And you write, you know, 20 of them down or so on each side and you record yourself saying them out loud and you listen back for 21 days and you really feel about them and visualize them. Because that's the language of your subconscious mind, is emotion and imagery. And so you feed this information down to your subconscious mind through a lot of repetition. And over time, it actually changes your conditioned emotional associations next to the narcissist. In other words, it makes you not want to go back to them. Okay? And it's a very powerful tool, so you can use that there. But also part of why you're so addicted to the narcissist is because you're so starving for those needs. And you will keep going back and you will keep, like putting yourself out there and accepting breadcrumbs or accepting like this one morsel of food with all of this poison attached to it. In other words, this one nice behavior with all of these painful ones that you know are going to come. You keep going back there because you are starving. You go back and you accept the breadcrumb because you were so hungry for those needs deep down. And I've never seen somebody. And again, this is not, not your fault at all for going through this, for being in this. But I've never seen somebody who ended up investing in a relationship long term with a narcissist who first wasn't so deeply hungering for those needs. And so your immunity, and it's not your fault, right? This is your own childhood programming first that sort of teed you up for this. But we have to recondition these things because your emotional immunity to not going back is to learn what it is that you need, what it is that you are relying on the narcissist for, and to learn to slowly but surely empower those things in the relationship to yourself. So if you, for example, or feeling like, oh, that person made me feel wanted or important, or like I was a priority at the beginning and that's what my brain attached to and got so addicted to, how do you make yourself a priority? You learn to set boundaries. You learn to figure out who you are and what you truly want in life and make time for those things. You learn to actually honor your feelings, speak your needs to other people in healthy ways. Like, the more you do those things, you learn to spend time with yourself. Like you want to be with yourself and get to know yourself. Like date yourself in a sense, figure out who you want, who you are or what you want in like career or around your finances or mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically relationships. Like, you have to get to know yourself and you have to resource your needs internally. And then that's your immunity, that's your preventative measure to not going back. And honestly, a big part of what that comes with is your boundaries. Once you know yourself, once you honor yourself and your truth, you'll start to learn to set boundaries because you'll know who you are, so you'll know what you want to say yes and no to. And then all of a sudden you're going to be in a position where you're like, oh, if somebody violates my boundaries, I'm not cool with that any longer. I don't like that. I won't invest in that. And a really telltale sign that somebody's in narcissist is that they violate your boundaries like crazy. And you'll even see it in the love bombing stage if you set a boundary, they'll try to like sneakily work around it or get around it. That's a big sign. The last thing is that unfortunately we invest in the longest term people who treat us the way we treat ourselves. And that's again teed up by your childhood. But I will say this, and this is to be very clear, this is 0% of me, like blaming the person in the relationship with a narcissist. But I have to tell you that this is part of your conditioning. Because until you fix it, until you change these things within yourself and heal them, there is a chance that you repeat the pattern. Okay, so there's things that I've seen over and over again. I have yet to see an Exception to this rule. I know that those exceptions could exist, but every person I ever talked to or worked with who was coming out of a long term romantic relationship with a narcissist, they had these four patterns. They over empathize with other people and never empathize with themselves. They were very critical of themselves in their internal dialogue, like beat themselves up a lot, put themselves down a lot, were very hard on themselves, manipulated themselves to please others. They put a lot of pressure on themselves, a lot of expectations on themselves to essentially audition for everybody else's life to be what they thought everybody around them wanted them to be. And they very much violated their own boundaries to please others. So guess what? The biggest thing that we invest in long term is our subconscious comfort zone. What's familiar is the way we treat ourselves. And we see people who treat us the way we treat ourselves as familiar and thus safe. And thus we are more likely to survive. And so what ends up happening is people are like, oh, you meet somebody, you're like, well, I want them to be emotionally available, I want them to be healthy, I want them to be stable. And then you find all these red flags. And first, you're already addicted to the intermittent reinforcement before the red flags really start coming up. But second is consciously you're like, this is wrong. But subconsciously your alarm bells do not go off properly because this person feels familiar to you. And your subconscious, which by the way is responsible for 95 plus percent of all of your patterns and choices and emotions and beliefs in your life, it feels like, oh, this is familiar and thus safe because I've been surviving this long. So these patterns, whatever it is that feels familiar, familiar, they're working for me. And so you end up investing in that dynamic. Not your fault, it's the result of past conditioning at a subconscious level of your mind. But until you go and actually learn how to set healthy boundaries, how to empathize with your own feelings and check in and attune to your own self as much as you do others. How to stop manipulating yourself to be what everybody else wants you to be, and how to actually instead choose yourself, make room for yourself in your own life. And, and until you learn to be more gentle and kind and compassionate in your internal dialogue, a narcissist will feel familiar. And there will be something that there's this just like spark that you can't really put your finger on about it that you get so drawn into that, that type of personality. And it's because in a way, you kind of treat yourself in small forms like that person treated you. And that's tragic, that's heartbreaking. And that has to be something you commit to changing. And the more that you do, the less that will be your subconscious comfort zone. And now you have the deepest form of emotional immunity. And to not go back with all of that being said, that's usually at a high level. Those three reasons why we end up in those types of situations, that's the work to do to heal is to really move through those things. And if you want to go deeper, we have a whole course on that. But also hopefully those things give you some really great starting points to dive into. I hope this was really helpful for you and I hope you have some more understanding and awareness. Your subconscious conditioning is not your fault. And it's one of the greatest things that you can rewire to change it it to heal, to actually prevent yourself from ending up back in these situations. If you want more videos, make sure you subscribe to this channel. Thank you for watching and I'll see you next time.