← The Thais Gibson Podcast
The Thais Gibson Podcast
Without THIS, Every Avoidant Eventually Falls Out of Love (The Brutal Truth)
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There is one thing that if a dismissive avoidant is missing, they will never actually sustain love in a relationship. They could love you or care about you, but they're not going to be in love with you without this really important differentiator. In today's video, I'm going to give you the brutal truth about what the dismissive avoidant actually needs to truly stay in love long term and why most relationships are missing it. This is going to be a bit of a masterclass on understanding the nervous system as a whole and how it relates to a dismissive avoidant and their conditioning. So we're going to start by talking a little bit about the nervous system and what it actually is, just so you have a high level understanding. Then we're going to talk about vagal tone, okay. Which is a really important concept when it comes to nervous system regulation and how this affects us. And we're going to talk about the differences between somebody who has healthy vagal tone, maybe because they came from a securely attached household, versus versus somebody who may have unhealthy vagal tone as a dismissive avoidant because of conditions that they grew up in and the way that their emotions and emotional state were mirrored back to them by a caregiver. And then we're gonna dive into what you can actually do to improve vagal tone using neuroplasticity backed methods. But most importantly, how to address the root of this. And at the end of this video, as I mentioned, we will dive into how to show up if you are with somebody who has a dysregulated nervous system and you're the partner or loved one of them. And some key ingredients here with the dismissive avoidant help them learn to co regulate and thus be so much more available for connection. First and foremost, the nervous system. If you're not familiar, the nervous system is essentially your body's master communication and control center. And it takes information in from the world around you, but also inside of you, also according to your own previous conditioning, and then processes it and sends signals out that direct your body in regards to how to respond. Everything from physical movements to emotional reactions to things. And there are two parts of the nervous system. There is the central nervous system, which is your brain and spinal cord. And this really processes incoming information and makes decisions. You can think of it as literally the command center and then the peripheral nervous system. And this is all of the nerves that branch off from your spinal cord and it carries messages between your brain and the rest of your body. And there are two Key functional branches at a very high level here, okay, there is our sympathetic nervous system, which is what activates and. And sends all of the signals out when you're under stress or in danger. And you'll see things like when you're in sympathetic nervous system, you hear this often referred to as fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. And this causes tensing of your muscles, an increase of heart rate. It slows digestion, and essentially cause you to respond quite quickly. Then we have our parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest modes. And this kicks in when you feel safe and calm, and it helps support digestion, promotes healing, and it helps you feel regulated and recovered. However, there's also an aspect of the parasympathetic nervous system known as ventral vagal and dorsal vagal. These are sort of branches that come off of the parasympathetic nervous system. And for dismissive avoidance in particular, this plays a crucial role because ventral vagal is sort of your social, open, calm in terms of how you're going to interact with other people mode. And dorsal vagal is often referred to as dorsal vagal shutdown mode, where you feel like you're literally in this intense shutdown period. Now, I used to work with clients, and there was a large family, and there were quite a few dismissive avoidants within this family system and fearful avoidance. And they both used to joke around that after a long day of work, we go into dismissive, avoidant coma. And it was this idea that they would come. Come back from work and basically go into dorsal vagal shutdown mode, where they would completely shut down and just retreat from the world. They didn't want to do much of anything at all. Now, I'm going to come back to this in a minute, and you're going to see why this actually has a crucial impact on relationships and what's really going on with the dismissive avoidant as a whole. But what you want to understand is that these systems in your body are always working together to keep you safe and balanced and functional. And your nervous system affects how you emote. So it affects your emotions, it affects how you take in information, it affects your behaviors, and it even has an impact on your health. Things like inflammation, digestion, immune system response. But when your nervous system has been chronically dysregulated because of trauma, chronic stress, or unresolved emotions, you are more likely to enter into dysfunctional modes. Now, I say dysfunctional, but in reality, it's your nervous system actually functioning to support you in the Best way that it can. It just may, from an outside point of view, have a dysfunctional output. So, for example, you might see, like I was mentioning those clients I spoke about, they said, oh, I'd come back home from work and go into dismissive, avoidant coma. And they might completely retreat from the world and they might unplug and not answer their phone or text or anything, but it's actually functional for them, given what's going on internally for them at the time. It's their way of trying to recover from a day that taxed their nervous system so much. And this is where it gets really important in regards to how a dismissive, avoidant nervous system functions compared to somebody with a secure attachment style, for example. So when you grow up in an environment where you are conditioned to feel like you can't have emotions, or your emotions are not mirrored back to you in healthy, adaptive ways to make you feel like it's safe to express them, when you grow up in a dynamic where your emotions are even perhaps shamed, minimized, deflected, and if you have just chronic shame as a result of constantly being criticized for your feelings or being made to feel weak or ignored, then often what happens is we develop really weak vagal tone. Okay? Now, vagal tone is essentially your body's ability to move from stress back into safety. And somebody with high vagal tone calms themselves very quickly after stress. But a person with low vagal tone may get stuck for longer periods of time in anxiety or shame or dissociation or fatigue longer than needed. Now, a dismissive, avoidant attachment style. They grow up in a household where literally there is not healthy vehicle tone in interpersonal relationships being conditioned. Now remember what I said earlier. Your nervous system and how it functions, it's not just responding to information in your external world. It's also responding to information in your internal world. What this actually means is that if you're a dismissive avoidant and you're a child that grows up with your emotions being denied, dismissed, rejected, there's only room for other people's emotions around you, perhaps, and you're enmeshed in that, but don't have the actual ability to connect or communicate or convey your own emotions and have that attunement and mirroring back to you, which is just. Even in enmeshment. It's simply another form of emotional neglect because you're often enmeshed with the caregiver's emotions, but nobody's there to really be present with yours. All this basically conditions you to feel is that spending time around other people is dysregulating and actually takes a lot of effort from your nervous system to be able to participate in. If you look at that compared to a securely attached individual, securely attached children grow up in environments where first of all there's attunement. So they feel like when they do express emotions or something's off, people notice and they care for that they take part in trying to help soothe or co regulate with you. For example, if you have a young child and they cry, or even if that child's expressing anxiety, the caregiver securely attached parent will go towards the child. They'll notice that they're feeling this experience because they are attuned and they'll make an effort to make them feel better through a hug, through encouragement, or through something to essentially ease the tension for that child. And what that child learns is that when my nervous system entrains with other people and other people entrain with my nervous system function. When we connect in this way and attune to each other, we can actually take part in what is known as co regulation. We can do things to support each other and that feels good and that feels safe. But if you juxtapose that next to a child who grows up in an environment where they don't have access to that, then essentially what takes place is a child feels like in training with other people's nervous systems, connecting with other people feels taxing, it feels overwhelming and it doesn't get my needs met. The actual ability to connect with other people and entrain, which by the way, everybody you know, it's something that all mammals do. Their nervous systems tend to naturally entrain with other people or harmonize essentially with people around you and essentially taking in that information to decide how to proceed when you're in that environment. But if growing up as a dismissive avoidant, there was a lack of attunement to you, there was a dynamic where literally your emotions were not seen or heard or connected to. And in fact maybe they were even shamed or criticized. The idea of going in and spending time around other people while you already feel uncomfortable is actually going to be something that is more dysregulating rather than it is reregulating. So in a sense you can think of it as this person who's a dismissive avoidant, goes in to connect with other people or spend time with other people, and it is actually more taxing on that individual than it is recharging. And on top of that dismissive avoidant attachment cells generally have much lower vagal tone. In other words, their body's ability to switch back from a stressed out mode, especially in the company of other people, back to a mode of safety is inhibited. And as a result of this, what you're going to see is that a dismissive, avoidant attachment style is going to feel drained by being in the company or presence of others for long periods of time. And they're going to go into more likely either some sort of functional freeze mode, which is this fight or flight energy, but also contained within this sort of dorsal vagal shutdown mode where it's like this heaviness, this exhaustion, and yet this restlessness which you can often see with a lot of dismissive avoidance. They're often retreated, but kind of restless. Right. And that's very common when somebody's in a functional freeze mode for prolonged periods of time. And, and you're going to see that being in the company or presence of other people is often going to be a triggering event that is more likely to put them into that mode of being. And so what ends up taking place is people will start asking dismiss avoidance to participate, to be present, to be connected, when their entire nervous system is actually perceiving those types of events a lot of the time as a threat or something that is going to cause them to feel drained and exhausted. And as a result it's going to feel like social interactions are not only things that are draining and exhausting, but even potentially perceived as low level threats. So we have two approaches that we can start to take, right? How do we treat this type of scenario with somebody who's a dismissive avoidant? Well, there are things that people can do individually and there's also things that we can do within a relationship dynamic. If a dismissive avoidant is a friend, a romantic partner, a family member that are really important in terms of how this starts to shift. But before I get into that, I want to say something really important because I think this is one of the most important things that we can be mindful of. And it's actually something I see far too often out in the world that I think is very limiting. So a lot of people will say, okay, here's how to improve vagal tone. And there's neuroplasticity backed methods. And these are things like slow, deep breathing, cold exposure, humming, singing, chanting, things that are actually stimulating the vocal cords and thus your vagus nerve, things that are akin to mindfulness practices or meditation. And all of these things are true. Okay. Even Things like gentle movement, all of those things are extremely helpful mechanisms to improve vagal tone and actually to help somebody reregulate more efficiently and will really move the needle in somebody's ability to bounce back, right? To move their body from feeling like they're in a state of stress back into a state of safety. However, and I cannot begin to stress this enough, like I said at the beginning of this video, if we are only responding to triggering events by changing and trying to reregulate our nervous system, we are essentially only dealing with, with our external world. But like I mentioned earlier, your nervous system does not only respond to external world events, it's also responding to your internal world events. Let's take this example. Let's say we have somebody who's a dismissive avoidant, and they have a big wound around feeling defective, essentially shamed or criticized. Okay? Now let's say we have somebody who's securely attached, who doesn't have a core wound in that dynamic. They didn't grow up with a lot of shaming or criticizing, and so they just don't have a sensitivity there. Well, you could take both of these individuals as adults and put them in a situation where they get feedback. And maybe that feedback is slightly critical. Maybe it's coming from a boss who's having a bit of a bad day. And although it's intended to be constructive feedback, it's a little bit harsh. It's a little teetering on the side of criticism. You are going to see both individuals in that dynamic have completely different responses. The dismissible one, because of their prior conditioning, is going to feel much more triggered because they have these of sorts stored subconscious triggers in their subconscious mind that say, oh my goodness, criticism means that I am defective at my core, I am shameful. Whereas you're going to have a securely attached person go, oh, this person's criticizing me. I don't really like that experience. It may not meet my needs here in this situation, but they're not making it mean that they are a defective person at their core. And so we're going to see just through that lens. Although they're having the exact same objective experience, they're going to have two completely different subjective interactions with that experience. A dismissive avoidant is likely to go and have a very, you know, dysregulated response. Maybe they feel shamed, maybe they go home, they completely retreat from everybody, kind of ice out the world because they're in this sort of shame spiral. And then they go into this retreated mode where they're trying to kind of re regulate by avoiding everybody versus you're going to have a securely attached person who generally has more vagal tone but less inner conditioning in their subconscious mind. Less wounds that are the things being likely to dysregulate their nervous system to begin with, that are going to not have them be in a position where they then get so triggered and have that type of response. It's not just our ability to respond to stress by regulating our nervous system. We can't just do meditation every day or nervous system regulation through deep breathing every day and expect our entire nervous system function to change on its own. No, our improved vagal tone has to be through partaking in those behaviors on one side, but pairing that with the ability to recondition these core wounds, these fears of being not good enough or defective or being seen as weak or helpless, if you do express vulnerably, and until somebody is doing that inner work to actually rewire those core wounds as well, just regulating your nervous system will only be a reactive force in the situation. It'll be like, okay, maybe you get really good at those things and you can move from stress back to safety more effectively. But how about actually mitigating all of those core wounds that cause you to be so stressed by those events, like your boss giving feedback to begin with so that you don't constantly have to then go reregulate? Right. Let's wipe out those things at the root. And so when we talk about healing in this particular dynamic, it cannot only be the experience of healing by regulating our nervous system. No. It has to actually be reconditioning our subconscious mind and the way that we perceive information and take it in to begin with, along with being able to do nervous system regulation work. Okay, so this is really important to pay attention to if you're the partner or loved one here. Some big things that you want to be able to do. Number one, you want to, with a dismissive, avoidant attachment style, be accepting of their emotions. Okay? So if you are criticizing somebody all the time, a dismissive avoidant will feel so dysregulated by that, and they will retreat so far away from that, it is literally the worst thing that you can do. And I don't mean don't give feedback. Okay? It's important to give feedback and secure relationships. And if you're building a secure relationship and hoping this person jumps on board with you, you have to give feedback, but you have to do it in an accepting way. And the difference for this is the difference between Saying something like, you don't care about me. You never can communicate enough or text enough. What's wrong with you? And speaking in a way that's critical versus saying hey, for me, I really value when we communicate and I want us to go a little bit further in terms of trying to ramp up our communication and so just be a little more consistent. That looks like having an extra text exchange every evening before bed. And if we can work on that only takes a little bit of time each day, that would mean a lot to me. So you're communicating from a place of sharing your needs, but not in a way that's shaming or diminishing somebody else. And thus they're not going to feel this need to retreat and feel completely dysregulated and then have to take all this time to bounce back from that because their nervous system's so out of whack. The other thing too is you want to have safety, security, harmony in your relationship. The more you can be empathetic to a dismissive avoidant, they may not show it all the time, but that goes a very long way. Like, hey, yeah, I can see why you're feeling like that. That wouldn't feel good. The more that you can have a sense of harmony in how you communicate and the things that you do and the more that you're consistent across time. Those are all key signs that tell a dismissive avoidant from a nervous system perspective, usually dismissive avoidant that didn't have a lot of these things growing up. You are going to be attuned to, empathized with, accepted there is safety and harmony here as long as you're communicating your needs as well. So it's not just you walking on eggshells to do these things. No, it's you giving these things to somebody in a relationship that will then help them regulate their nervous system, feel more comfortable and safe. They'll start to open up and learn to co regulate as a result of those things. And as long as you see them then meeting your needs too, as you start to express your needs, you're actually going to see a lot of positive momentum there. Now, of course you want to set a deadline around this. You don't want to just do this forever if you never see somebody getting on board or moving the needle and showing up for your needs too. But generally these things are those crucial ingredients that we need to really lay that foundation to allow those things to take shape. We could go so much further into this. And if you want to see more videos about this, please let me know in the comments down below. But these are some really important recognitions to have. Everything from you can't just heal your nervous system by only doing right nervous system and regulation techniques. We also have to work on root cause, meaning our core wounds, our conditioning, the things that cause us to perceive the world in a way that triggers us and then gets us all dysregulated. And also just recognizing dismissive avoidance. They're not always coming from this place of like, you know, being so afraid of connection or closeness. It's our nervous system. Being so dysregulated by it. Being able to shift and change that perception there and recognize some of the steps that are actually happening within a dismissive avoidant, and then how to approach it can be extremely meaningful for improving the relationship dynamic. Make sure you subscribe and I'll see you in tomorrow's video.