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If you're a fearful avoidant attachment style, one of the hardest things that you go through is that in every romantic relationship, once you actually attach to somebody, in other words, once you actually develop real feelings, it triggers off this intense push, pull, pattern. In other words, you feel the need to get close to somebody and you yearn for that closeness and you want that depth of connection and that passion and that ability for one another to be attuned and present. And you want to deeply know somebody and be deeply known. And yet the more you care for them, the more threatening it feels and the that causes you essentially to spiral. It causes you to feel like you want more closeness and you're trying to achieve it and get there. And then the moment it starts happening, you need to push it away and you need to self protect. And in today's video, I'm going to help you unpack and finally understand why that's taking place, what the root causes are, and how you can finally begin to heal. 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 rewire your attachment style. And as little as 90 days. And I put daily content out here on YouTube to really help you build the best relationships of your life, starting with the relationship to yourself. One of the first things that actually happens. And I want you to really understand this. I talk about this a lot in our personal development school, but when we go through painful events, the mind seeks certainty. Okay, we are certainty needing creatures. And what this means is that when we have uncertainty, when we have a gap in understanding why things happened or what's really going on, the mind gives meaning to things. So if you grew up in a home where there was a lot of chaos or a lot of pain, and let's say you were abandoned, let's say you were betrayed, let's say that you were trapped in situations that were hard to handle as a child. Then your mind says, okay, relationships equal abandonment, betrayal and being trapped. And that's what we store subconsciously. It's what imprints the subconscious mind, which is essentially the warehouse of your conditioning. Your subconscious mind literally stores all, all of your conditioning, all of the things that you've experienced, your mind stores. And then that's like a bear in the woods. So if you imagine tomorrow you go into the woods and you see a bear and the bear chases you and you run away and thank goodness you're safe. But then you have to go back into the woods, the Next day, what is your mind to do? I mean, the trees blow and your mind's like, the bear is coming, right? We brace for it. And so essentially, what's happening is that you go through life and these experiences where something traumatic or painful happens, and you store it. You store that abandonment, you store that being trapped, you store that fear of betrayal, and you project it back out like you would a bear in the woods. You go into relationships and you're like, being trapped is coming. I'm gonna get trapped or controlled. Being abandoned is coming, and you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, or, yeah, I love the person now, and we're good now, but that person's gonna betray me eventually. It could be in another five years or 10 years. How could I know that they won't? So the reason that love feels like it's something you want and something that scares you is because when you go through relationship chaos in childhood, and by the way, childhood's not the only place that our att cell develops. It's. We do develop it at a young age, but then conditioning is always happening. So different experiences repeatedly that have a big emotional impact can recondition our subconscious mind across time. In other words, you can go through these life experiences and your mind says, okay, love is a good thing, but it's also a threatening thing. Okay, if you had, you know, a set of parents and you saw them go through a really painful situation or you went through a painful situation with them, you probably also had some good moments, or you wouldn't have been a fearful avoidance. So you end up feeling like love is a good thing and a scary or terrifying thing simultaneously. And your conditioning is such that that's what you bring into every relationship dynamic. So I want to go through in a little more detail other major wounds that are going to cause this to happen to you so that you can understand what your conditioning is really all about. So we covered a couple. We covered three so far. The fear of being abandoned. Okay, so notice as well, by the way, that when you fear being abandoned, it drives your behavior. So you fear being abandoned. And how do you behave when you're afra that somebody's going to abandon you, you cling, or you people please or you overcompensate. Right? Sometimes you'll fear being abandoned and shut down because fearful of the fearful avoidance of the ability to deactivate, too. You're like, let me push you away first so that I hurt you before you hurt me even more. And you're trying to beat somebody to the punch as a way to protect yourself. That can happen. But notice that that abandonment wound shows up and it disrupts your relationship sometimes. Unfortunately, it just creates dysfunction in various ways. And so that abandonment wound causes you a lot of the time to want to cling or get closer. But then this other wound over here is like, but then I could be tr. Or then I could be betrayed and hurt more. So then that causes you to need to pull further away. And now here you are feeling like you need to pinball back and forth between this fear of losing somebody and wanting to hold on to them and show up for them, and this fear of being too close to somebody and assuming that the closer you are with somebody, the more hurt you're going to experience. Okay, so those are our first three major wounds, by the way. These are core wounds that we published in 2016. This is not traditional attachment theory. This comes from Gibson integrated attachment theory. We dove into the actual subconscious wounds of each attachment cell that came from me. Actually see thousands of clients in my private practice all the way back in 2014, and really documenting these things out. So abandonment, trapped, betrayed is a huge one. Another huge one is this fear that people are going to think that you are unworthy. Unworthiness is a huge core wound of the fearful avoidant. And there's a deep narrative behind that. A lot of fearful avoidance feel like they have to earn work, earn love in their childhood, and earn worth. And so they go through life overcompensating, putting all this pressure on themselves, all this expectation on themselves. And even that creates this push pull dynamic. Because the earning of the worth and feeling like I need to earn love, earn worth causes you to want to be on and understand somebody deeply and know them and know what makes them tick and feed into that and show up for that and be all that they could want you to be. And usually you've been conditioned to have to be that way to adapt to your childhood experiences. But then on the flip side of that, you're like, okay, I'm burning myself out over here. And fearful avoidance. And this is the next piece that really causes you to be in this push pull is fearful avoidance. Earn their worth all the time because they believe that they're unworthy subconsciously. Okay, consciously you might be like, oh, I get that I'm worthy, or I get that I'm contributing more to this relationship than the other person. But deep down, it's usually coming from this, I need to compulsively overcompensate sort of relationship to it. And so you feel like, okay, I'm unworthy, I have to show up, I have to over perform or overachieve or overdo everything in a relationship. But you usually, with all due respect, I was a fearful avoidant. I feel like I can say this. You kind of suck at communicating your own needs and you kind of suck at receiving. And so you end up in a situation where you over give, under receive. And then what do you do? Well, eventually you get burnt out and you need to pull away from everybody. You need to go off the radar and go missing for days at a time to just like recalibrate because you're exhausting yourself and you're in these one way relationships in too many aspects of your life that are likely to to lead to burnout. So now we have this over giving. Here I am, I'm giving and showing up and then these segments or sort of periods of time of burnout from doing that that cause you to need to retreat or actually sometimes resentment comes out of that because you feel hurt that you're trying so hard and not seeing the same in response. And what you don't often realize is happening is that you are not telling people what you need and people see you from the outside. The vast majority of the time is this kind of like really strong person who just can show up from this place of giving, from abundance. But the, the you're always good, you don't really need anything back. You've got it, you're strong, you have it together. And that is not a reflection of whether you do or don't have it together. It's a reflection of you not leading or leaning into your vulnerability. And the more that you keep your truth and your needs locked down, thinking that you shouldn't take up too much space or you shouldn't communicate, the more you're going to feel lonely and basically alone in relationships. Like it's all on your shoulders. All by yourself and alone is another common core wound, a fearful avoidant. Attachment styles. If you really want to do some in depth healing around these things, we have a codependency and enmeshment course that you can check out fully for free and actually keep for life. It's valid at $250. That course will really help you if you struggle with emotional over functioning, if you struggle with keeping your boundaries, honoring your truth, not self silencing. The course will really go into all of the reasons why this happens and what you can do instead. And I'll put the link below for free for you below Another big one that often caused you to push away as well and not share your needs and not share your truth is this inherent fear that people will see you as being bad. And most people, when you, they hear this that are fearful avoidant, they're like, no, I don't think nobody thinks that I'm bad. Everybody knows I'm trying. And yeah, but if you pay close attention, if we're being really honest here, as a fearful avoidant, you probably over explain yourself a lot. And if you really look into that more deeply, it's usually because you got punished unnecessarily for things growing up. Often things that like, were human mistakes. Let's say you spilled water and one of your parents got really mad and yelled at you and it's like, well, geez, they made you feel like you're a bad person in that moment. But it's spilling water, it's a human mistake. And usually there's so much of that in some form that you're like constantly trying to over explain things and beat people to the punch, let them know that you're good or that you didn't mean anything by it. And you're trying to get seen and heard and understood for your innocence. And that's fundamentally exhausting and is going to be causing you to carry this huge responsibility and burden of like trying to control people's perceptions of you and make sure that they don't think bad things of you. And that's going to cause you to burn out too. Okay. That's going to cause you to feel like, oh my gosh, I have to constantly explain myself in relationships and constantly be on guard and hyper vigilant and pour into people and then not receive back and then fear losing them anyways. And then also when they do get close to me, I need to push them away. And honestly, all of this creates inner chaos and inner turmoil. Okay. And it can be exhausting to feel all of these things. The last thing I will just say is that one of the other things you're gonna have to learn is to change and heal your all or nothing relationship to your boundaries. Triple winds are very all or nothing people because they've been through a lot of all or nothing circumstances, really extreme good and extreme bad. And so that causes you to go through and play with these patterns of like being all in or nothing. And that happens to be very particularly relevant when it comes to your boundaries where you will have no boundaries at all. And then you will suddenly have the strongest boundaries ever because you're sick of having no boundaries. And then you get frustrated and you communicate your boundaries from anger. Then you feel guilty about doing that and go back to being boundaryless again. I call this the fearful avoidant boundary cycle. But it is really important to learn how to rewire that, change it at its core, once and for all. Because it will really be powerful for you to transform and heal at the deepest level, starting with a relationship to yourself. So I hope this gives you some good insight in terms of what's going on inside of you and helps you more deeply understand yourself. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed today's video, please, like share. Subscribe to this channel and I'll see you next time.