← The Thais Gibson Podcast
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So I am not saying that it's okay to look through your partner's phone or making space for any kind of privacy violations. I actually think that a really healthy sense of boundaries is important and is part of what makes a secure relationship. But in today's video, I really want to explore the psychology of what is happening in the fearful avoidance mind that may cause this type of behavior. Snooping behavior, looking through their partner's phone. And this video can really cover for both fearful avoidant attachment styles and anxious attachment style partners, because both at times have the inclination to do this. And to be clear, not every fearful avoidant and every anxious attachment style do these things, but when they do, there are usually really crucial reasons as to why that must be healed and addressed at the root. So in today's video, we are going to break down, number one, the reason that fearful avoidance tend to snoop or look through people's phone. And then we're going to talk about what to do, how you can heal, the neuroscience of how these things even affect your brain. And because I love overlapping neuroscience, psychology and ancient wisdom, we're going to talk about some ancient philosophies and wisdom in non dogmatic ways and where all of these things may tie together. Here are a few of the things that you want to start by learning first, especially if you are the one doing the snooping. Fearful avoidance tend to snoop because they fear betrayal. So they're essentially scanning for evidence to prepare themselves for rejection, which is a form of creating self preservation essentially. Now this is a really painful cycle that comes from core wounds in the past. And anxious attachment styles tend to engage in these behaviors because they're fearing abandonment and essentially trying to be able to get ahead of it and prevent it from happening. Now, I like to use this analogy of the bear in the woods. And I want you to imagine that you see a bear in the woods and you run away and you're safe, thank goodness. But the very next day you have to go back into the woods. Well, what happens every time you hear any little sound in the bushes anywhere around you, you think, oh my gosh, it's a bear. And you prepare, you brace yourself, right? And that's because our subconscious mind is actually wired to hang on to negative things more than positive, and then project out the likelihood of these things recurring so that you can protect yourself in advance. And so this is survival wiring. It's literally there to help you survive. But if you're a fearful avoidant or anxious attachment style, you're not out in the woods trying to fight off a bear. So what's happening instead is that your wounds from childh get stored subconsciously and then get reprojected back out onto your external relationships, causing you to feel dysregulated or distressed and then engage in different behaviors to protect yourself in advance. But unfortunately, sometimes these behaviors are actually more likely to co create the dynamics that you're fearing the most. In other words, it's actually very common for people, and this is purely from a facts and research perspective, to end up in situations where their biggest fears and wounds become their biggest self fulfilling prophecies. And there's a lot of subconscious reasons for this that we'll get into. The second major theme you want to understand is that looking through somebody's phone is also this kind of terrible and tragic attempt to seek out control and reassurance. Because fearful avoidance and anxious attachment styles both struggle to ask for these things directly. And I think if you're a fearful avoidant and you're feeling on edge in a relationship and you're feeling scared, like, first of all, I want to start by saying I have so much empathy for you. Like I understand because I was a fearful avoidant and I've felt these things before and I definitely relate to them. And doing things to figure out if somebody cares about you, like looking through somebody's phone or even just going in roundabout ways to get your needs met. This is all coming from this belief system deep down that like, oh, we don't talk about things like that directly, we don't address these things directly. But what you'll come to learn is part of actually creating secure attached relationships. And secure patterns in the relationship to yourself directly involves the ability to have vulnerable conversations. Literally, you can't have a secure relationship without that. So it means instead of that urge or inclination to look through somebody's phone to be able to actually say to somebody, hey, I'm feeling like things are a little bit different between us or a little bit off, and I just need some certainty. I need to know where we're at, what's going on, and what we can do to reconnect a little bit better. And having conversations like that, rather than feeling disconnected and then thinking, I need to snoop, I need to find out what's going on, allows you to actually establish and protect the trust in a relationship while dealing with the fears that you have head on. And the third major reason fearful avoidant attachment cells often do this is it's this attempt to soothe this deep fear that they carry of being fooled or Blind, blindsided. It's in other words, a way to seek certainty. And this is because the fearful avoidant goes into relationships. And if you're currently a fearful avoidant attachment style, you, it's basically a guarantee that your trust baseline has already been disrupted and dysregulated so much in the past. In other words, it's very common that as a fearful avoidant, unfortunately, your trust was shattered at some point along the way. It's like you have trust that's fragmented everywhere and you don't know how to trust. And so you seek for these ways to try to figure out if you can trust. And it's like you collect all the evidence and data and information and watch all the patterns hypervigilantly and closely to see if maybe it's safe enough for you to open your heart. But that will never heal you. You can't heal an inside inside a wound with external behaviors. We can only heal these wounds inside of ourselves by addressing the subconscious mind, by actually rewiring these wounds, these belief systems that people will always betray you eventually, or that people are going to fool you and leave you feeling stupid or foolish, which are both big core wounds. And also this fear that eventually people are going to abandon you and you can't trust them to stick around. You can't rely on people. All of these are deep fears. Now we're gonna get into what you can do at a high level, but I actually just wanna say on that note that if this is something that you're struggling with, you can actually check out a course fully for free. You'll be able to get through it in seven days. You get a seven day free trial. You'll be able to print off the workbook, do the exercises, get through the course, and it will help so much with this. It is all the principles I actually personally used to heal my own inner trust wounds and my own very fragmented trust baseline. And it really dives into the neuroscience and subconscious rewiring of broken trust. And literally for just a few days this month, you get to keep our how to heal from a breakup course life for free, so that you can dive into how to heal from a breakup if you ever go through one. And it includes friendship breakups or family relationships falling apart, like just how to know how to heal and based on principles of grief and deep healing around grief. Do the actual repairing of your internal trust wounds. Rewire all these fears that you're carrying that are your version of the bear in the woods, and it will seriously give you so much peace. Back and stability back in relationships is when honestly one of the greatest things I ever did for myself. So let's talk about the neuroscience and then we'll talk about how to heal and some steps you can take right now. So J. Douglas Bremer's trauma research is something that actually demonstrated that hypervigilance rewires both the hippocampus, which is sort of a memory center of the brain, and the amygdala to keep people locked in a space where they are chronically scanning for threat. And what we know about this is that the more that you're constantly scanning for threat and perceiving threats, the more dysregulated your nervous system becomes, the more time you spend in fight, flight, freeze or fawn, and the higher your cortisol levels are actually elevated. So this is not a healthy state to be in. And there was a study done in 2005 at the University of Bordeaux in France that demonstrated that over activation of the amygdala in trauma survivors, but including attachment trauma survivors, showed that snooping is basically an over fired threat detection circuit at work. In other words, these are ways that you are trying to cope, to feel safe, to feel like you can survive. These are not things that you're consciously trying to do or that you're like, oh, who cares? It doesn't matter what somebody's boundaries are. These are things that are coming from different deep coping because of deeper things that are rooted in your subconscious mind that you're still carrying. And you have to ask yourself the question sometimes, if something happened to me decades ago, how is it possible that this is still showing up in my life now? And it's simply because your subconscious mind is this warehouse. It carries everything and it brings it forth into your daily and external experiences. And so until we actually rewire our subconscious mind, these patterns aren't going to go anywhere. In fact, neuroplasticity research shows us that the more we on focus fire and wire patterns, the more deeply ingrained they become. So it's not like you're just sitting there having these patterns play out and it's just neutral. It's actually getting harder and worse over time, which I think is really important to note. So here are three easy steps that you can take, starting literally right now. First things first, if you need clarity, if you need certainty, if you need reassurance, you can start doing exposure Work on vulnerability to ask for these things. These are normal parts of a healthy relationship. This is what secure people do. They say, hey, I think things are Feeling off, I feel disconnected. I need to know that we're on this same page. Or I could use a little reassurance. And of course you're not going to do this on like a first date, but this is something that you can absolutely do in a committed relationship. This is something that you can do if you're three, four months into dating somebody, hey, I need to know that we're on the same page moving forward because I am developing real feelings for you. And so I want you to practice titrating this. You don't have to go full vulnerability right overnight because I know how hard and how confronting that can feel. But practice asking for things in really small doses. So again, you might say to somebody something like, hey, I'm really enjoying our connection and spending time with you, and I'm hoping that you're feeling the same way. And that way you're allowing yourself to ask for things, ask for clarity, ask for that reassurance and open those conversations. And again, I can't even begin to stress how normal these things are in healthy, secure relationships. The second thing that you can do is if you're not sure that somebody could be betraying your trust, set healthy standards and open the dialogue around trust and boundaries early. So, for example, you might have a conversation where you say, hey, I'm feeling really connected with you and I could see maybe a potential future with us together. And I want to just have a conversation about what standards we carry in regards to trust and boundaries. For me, it's really important that we treat each other's boundaries with care and that we're not in a relationship where we're texting other people or flirting with other people over text or anything like that. I wanted to know where you stand and what your thoughts are. And that way you're actually getting your clarity, your certainty met directly through open dialogue rather than being in a place where you feel like you're trying to get it indirectly. And I want to be really clear about something. The less we feel comfortable asking for something, communicating directly, the more the subconscious mind, because it is, it needs to be meeting machine will essentially rely on very indirect tactics or techniques. So essentially, if you don't feel comfortable having those conversations, your subconscious mind is still going to be driven to get its needs met. And it's going to go in these roundabout ways like looking for your through your partner's phone for certainty or for security, rather than being able to address it directly. And the more indirect we are, the stronger the downsides to the relationship become in Other words, the less you're doing things directly through communication, the unhealthier behaviors we use to get those needs met are usually quite destructive to a relationship, as you can see with looking through a partner's phone and how that can obviously destabilize trust over time. Now, the other really important thing is that you want to be able to rewire your subconscious wounds, your fears. You can't keep carrying them with you. They're wreaking havoc on your life. And I know this because I was a fearful avoidant. So you want to be able to dive into these ideas and that you're constantly going to get betrayed or abandoned or have the wool pulled over your eyes and feel stupid or foolish, that you're not emotionally safe to be vulnerable, or that you can never really rely on somebody. All of these things are acting as essentially an invisible prison that are stopping you from creating the relationships that you deserve, starting with the relationship to yourself and how you talk to yourself and what your own internal dialogue looks like. So it's really important to do that rewiring work. And again, like I said, if you want to dive into that course for free, you can check it out for free. Dive into all the trust stuff. And it's all about the neuroscience of rewiring those subconscious core wounds. Because your subconscious mind runs your life. It is responsible for 95% or more of all of your beliefs and thoughts and emotions and daily actions and habits. So it's so important to understand how it works and how to address it. Now, to tie in some ancient wisdom here, because I love this stuff. The Dao talks to us about how he who conquers others is strong, but he who conquers himself is mighty. And I think this really illustrates the power of us being able to conquer our own internal world rather than try to fix how we're feeling by dealing with outside things. If you keep going to regulate and soothe your fear, your fears around trust or betrayal, by looking through somebody's phone or doing things that are actually taking you out of your power. And I think this really illustrates that your power lies in responding, not controlling. I also think that your power lies in your ability to work through the things that you're carrying within you yourself, rather than again, trying to fix this inside wounding with outside solutions. I hope you enjoyed today's video. I hope this was helpful for you and something that you can use to really dive into your own healing journey and just some insights into yourself as a whole. I want to hear from you in the comments below. Have you seen yourself doing this? How did you overcome it? And do you see yourself being able to commit to these steps going forward? If not, you can always check out that course in way more detail. That dives into the rewiring part more than anything. If you enjoyed today's video, please, please, like, share. Subscribe to this channel and I'll see you in tomorrow's video too.