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Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world, it is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s. Okay, so one of the big hot topics in psychology, online, in the media, especially in self-help communities at the moment is attachment styles.
Attachment theory essentially says that we learn how to form intimate attachments and bond with others based on our childhood experiences. And when those experiences and our primary relationship with our caregivers is disturbed or difficult, it can lead to a disorganized attachment style relationship.
Now, I think that it is so amazing that so many more of us have the language to describe how we relate to others, how we form attachments. It is one of the biggest and most valuable, important theories in psychology.
With a small caveat being that I also think it's important that we get it right. And if we are going to apply these labels of insecure, of anxious, of avoidant, we actually know what it means. So today we are bringing back a favorite guest of ours, somebody who has been on the show before and also one of the world's biggest experts on the topic of attachment styles and attachment theory, Kirsten.
Thais Gibson, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Excited to be back here with you. Yeah, so for those of you who don't know, we've previously done an episode on anxious attachment theory or anxious attachment style, sorry, last year, which actually goes into the overall theory a little bit more around John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, who created this theory and the unique style. So if you missed that, I would recommend going back
and listening to that episode. But can you tell us a little bit about yourself and, yeah, I guess where your interest in attachment theory really began? Yeah, so I really started getting interested in people, I think, at a really young age. So I went through a family dynamic that was pretty chaotic. There was a lot of intense fighting and arguments and saw my parents go through like a very long and quite intense divorce.
that went all the way to like the Superior Court of Canada, like all these sort of dramatic things. And I think I was a really sensitive kid and I was parentified a lot. So what that really means for anybody who's not familiar with that term is I was put in the middle at a very young age, sort of forced to play like an emotional parent role for my parents. And they would both vent to me about each other a lot. And I think I spent a lot of my early childhood wondering
Like, why do things have to be so difficult? Why can't people who love each other just kind of come together and figure it out? And like, you know, they obviously care about each other and they care about me and my sister, but why can't they just figure out how to not be like this with one another? Because they really kind of brought out those hard parts of each other.
So from a really young age, I was really interested in like people and human dynamics. And I was definitely there as sort of the therapist kind of child for my parents too. So I think it was just very natural for me to evolve into this type of work.
It was definitely not something I disliked. I always liked like talking about real things and breaking things down. And it was through my own kind of struggles as like a teenager and going into my early adult years that I ended up doing a much deeper dive in a more serious way into like, how do we really heal? How do we really work through these things? And it was through that, that one of the things I revisited was attachment styles and
And ended up sort of combining a lot of my research in hypnosis with my background and a lot in like the subconscious mind. And then traditional psychology and the traditional sort of school system route, I combined that with
the principles of CBT and NLP and ultimately attachment styles to really create a body of work about how not only can we change our attachment style and become securely attached, but also diving deeper into the work of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth of how our attachment style originally forms. So basically went on to run like a 10 year, almost 10 year client practice, and then put a whole bunch of programs online at the personal development school, all about the attachment theory kind of stuff. Oh my gosh. I love that.
that whole story because I feel like you make a great point, which is that, yes, the original theory is like amazing and it's such a solid foundation, but our understanding of how the human mind works has also evolved a little bit. And so it's important to kind of evolve our traditional and conventional theories with like that more modern understanding. You also spoke about parentification, which I find to be such a fascinating thing.
subject. For those of us who don't know what that means, it's basically you become the parent for your parents. So that child parent dynamic actually kind of reverses. And so you might become a confident, you might be a mediator, like you said, you might have to provide for them physically, emotionally, financially. What do you think
Is there like a specific attachment style that that normally contributes to? Because part of me is like, oh, is it, would it be secure because your parent really needed you or would it be avoidant?
Such a good question. It's so interesting. So a lot of the research in attachment styles actually shows that you're more likely to become at least a fearful avoidant or dismissive avoidant, like have an avoidance side, the more enmeshed you are at a young age with your parents. And I think part of what often happens is that you'll have that side of like feeling engulfed and overwhelmed. And obviously in like traditional dismissive avoidant situations,
The two fears are really about engulfment and then being defective in some way, right? So they fear being trapped in the wrong relationship or, and a lot of that trapped core fear first comes from being enmeshed in some form, whether it was through parentification or just
I talk a lot about this topic. It's interesting. We have like direct parentification and indirect parentification. So direct is like myself and I was a fearful avoidant before working on my attachment style. And my direct was like, I was directly in the middle, people directly coming to me.
In client practice and through our programs at PDS, I've often seen instead that dismissive avoidance are indirectly parentified. So they may have a parent who's like very depressed all the time and the other parent not around and they start worrying like, okay, my parents aren't okay. And if they're not okay, how will I be okay? Right? Because we're very aware that we're completely dependent on our caregivers for survival at a young age. And so if there's a combination of avoidance
And then indirect enmeshment, I find that to be the most consistent output that will produce a dismissive avoidant as an adult. That makes so much sense, like the engulfment, the enmeshment. I feel like we've jumped the gun. I've jumped the gun. I went straight to an in-depth question about avoidant attachment style. But that's what we're focusing on today. What exactly makes somebody avoidant? How common is it?
Is this in society? Can you kind of break down something you've already spoken about is dismissive versus fearful? Can you break down what it means to be somebody who is avoidantly attached according to theory, according to your own personal experiences as well? Yes, it's such a good question. So there's two quote unquote avoidant attachment styles. One is fearful avoidant and one is dismissive avoidant. So fearful avoidance, one of the big differentiators is they have an anxious side, right?
So they basically oscillate between being anxious and avoidant. And they basically, because they grew up with conflicting ideas about love, they often have
some very good experiences with love like having some very loving moments, some caring moments, and then having some really chaotic ones. And fearful avoidance are characterized by a little bit more trauma than the average attachment style. That's the type of trauma we think like big T trauma. So it can be physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, addiction in the family or household, really, really intense divorce processes, these kinds of things where there's a lot of that intensity.
And dismissive avoidance are characterized more by emotional neglect, but also can be combined with that sense of engulfment or enmeshment. So fearful avoidance will tend to have that side of like fearing abandonment and yearning for closeness, but then also fearing engulfment and enmeshment and entrapment in their relationships. And so they can really go from being really hot to very cold. So they're kind of the attachment style. If anybody's newer to this stuff, it's like
come get close to me. Come get close. I want love. And then they're like, no, get back. You're too close. And I experienced that my whole early teenage years and early adult life. Like I would constantly be like, I really want connection. I really care about connection. And then when I felt really connected or attached to people, it would terrify me. I would be like, we're going to hurt me. Something bad's going to happen. And I would try to start pushing them away. And I was less like that with friendships, but I was
was extremely like that with romantic relationships. I was probably a very difficult person to be with before doing the work. And so, you know, it's because we first have those core fears about like closeness has good moments, but it also has really scary moments. And so we go back and forth within ourselves, which really mirrors back the way we were conditioned about love and attachments to begin with.
And in dismissive avoidance, their overarching theme is childhood emotional neglect. So generally we'll see that they neglect their own emotions as adults because there was never really a lot of emotional attunement. And if that's combined with indirect enmeshment and this fear of getting too close or being engulfed, you'll see that they tend to be people who constantly keep people at arm's length.
And so they may show up in like the dating stage of relationships when they're first, that the attachment bond hasn't been built yet. And they may be more charming or charismatic or seem to be, you know, quite available in a lot of different ways then. But once they start to attach, they tend to just exclusively fear being trapped or, or being criticized. And so they'll really push back and they may be the type of attachment style that, um, you know, seems unable to commit, pushes away all of a sudden out of the blue, even when commitments just starting and when things are getting more real, um,
And they'll work really hard to maintain their privacy and their distance from people a lot of the time because as a child, closeness meant I was neglected and I was engulfed. And so those are things that they're scared to relive as adults and they'll go out of their way to stop that from happening. So those are sort of the two avoidant attachment styles and some of those key differences between them.
That was like so succinct. I also like the point that you made around it being kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Like you start pushing away so they start behaving the way that you always expected people you were close to to behave and so you reinforce that like primary maladaptive behavior of once again avoiding connection and perhaps self-sabotaging. Okay, I have a hot seat question for you and maybe you probably don't know the answer to this but
How common is avoidant attachment in society? Really good question. So there hasn't been a huge body of recent research done about the attachment breakdown. About 30 years ago, research showed that it was roughly 50% of people were secure. And then research showed that somewhere between 5% and 10% of people were disorganized attachment style. And then the rest of the split was between anxious and dismissive avoidant.
And disorganized is also, sorry, fearful avoidant, aka disorganized attachment style. They're often referred to as the same thing. It's the same attachment style at the end of the day. So it's funny because we have a big attachment style quiz. We have a lot of people to come in, take it,
And tons of people will be like, I tested this way, but I realized through doing some of the coursework, I'm actually this attachment style. It's one of the most common things we see. And research shows very conclusively, historically, that self-reporting is not always the most accurate thing. Sometimes, although research will show that we're looking at the totality of avoidant attachment being somewhere around 20 to 30% shared by dismissive avoidant and fearful avoidant attachment style,
I wouldn't be surprised if it's a little bit higher, particularly dismissive avoidance because dismissive avoidance tend to self-report as more secure. I've absolutely noticed that pattern. We've had like a couple million people take our attachment style quiz, so it's not a small sample size. And what will happen is people will think that because they're repressing their emotions, which is very dismissive avoidant, and because they tend to not get into lots of fights or chaos in their relationships, they'll often conflate that with being securely attached or
rather than realizing that what securely attached actually means is we can work through our conflicts. We can express our emotions vulnerably. We can let people in and let our guard down and let somebody get to know us and we can invest in commitment and invest in a relationship. And those are really the cornerstones of what it means to be securely attached rather than the absence of arguing means secure attachment, which is what the DA tends to conflate things as. So I think that
probably that percentage is significantly higher than just the 20 to 30%. But the more common research now that's coming out is at least showing that secure attachment style is on the decline over the last 30 years as well.
I don't want to make I'm going to make like broad statements here and maybe they're not true and there probably should be more research into it but I do feel like there is obviously like a separation between parents and children more now like with social media with our phones that really stops children in a way of reaching out but then also like parents from engaging properly with their children and we also know that there is a lot of generational trauma that
if not broken, gets passed on. That's largely... There is a core moment where you can kind of fix that, right? And it's like...
like if people aren't doing the work, then it's not going to happen. You know, that's what happens. I feel like, I don't know if that's a big broad statement, but we'll have to see. I thought that was a perfect statement. Like, I really, really agree with that. I think that we're in a generation now or because of social media and the phone and convenience. And also because of like a lot of our culture and a lot of places throughout the world, it's like hustle culture, like work so hard, do all these things. And obviously like just some of the things that are happening in the world too, like inflation and financial pressures and,
It's causing both parents to often be working and both parents sometimes to be working multiple jobs or to be overwhelmed and stressed. And just like you said, there's that generational trauma where if somebody is not right within themselves, I always say this, like trauma is literally contagious. It's not contagious in like a germ theory way, the way we think of like contagion, but trauma is contagious in all.
the more proximity you have to somebody who has unresolved trauma, the greater likelihood that trauma is going to be passed along. Right? And so to your point, if we have this fractured culture and this fractured sort of system that we're living in, in a multitude of ways, of course, that's going to affect somebody's attachment style. And so much of what really creates secure attachment is, is a caregiver able to be present?
Are they able to exercise something called approach-oriented behaviors in psychology? Meaning that when a child cries or they seem distressed, the caregiver goes towards that child, approaches them, and tries to soothe them, check in with their needs. And what that does is it allows a child to think like, okay, I'm worthy of expressing emotion. I'm worthy of negotiating my needs and conveying what they are. And I get positively reinforced by my parent when that happens.
And in a culture where everybody's on their phones or everybody's overstressed or overwhelmed or burnt out and parents don't have that emotional availability in that same way and they don't have as much bandwidth for those approach-oriented behaviors, of course that's going to affect the attachment style of children. So I really like that point as well. I feel like that is such a compelling thing because I see it a lot of the time. And it's not to say that people aren't trying their hardest and don't want to raise amazing, beautiful, well-rounded children
It's just hard to do that when your environment is trying to keep you like overly stimulated by your phone or overly engaged in social media or in work or anything like that. So this is kind of a follow up question. Do you think people who have a dismissive or fearful attachment style, do you think that they are aware as conscious of it? I think you kind of already mentioned this, right?
They're less conscious of the fact that they have this attachment style. Is it because it's kind of like protective? Is there like... Do you think it's because that they implicitly have recognized a benefit in being this way? So subconsciously like choose to be unaware of it? Why do you think people...
more so self-report is secure? This is such a good question. So I think the first two things is like the fearful avoidance and dismissible avoidance are different. So fearful avoidance, like I was fearful avoidance, trust me, we know we're insecurely attached. Like it is loud and clear. Like you'll be on the constant forever rollercoaster of relationships until you heal your attachment style.
So like, if you're avoidance, they always know they're like the first to know like something is not right with my attachment cell because they have extreme highs and lows, like really good moments, and then really, really awful or chaotic moments and trust issues and you name it. So people avoidance tend to know the most. But again, that's not like five to 10% segment of the population. They dismissive avoidance, which are sort of larger portion there, you'll generally see that
I think you kind of nailed it. You hit the nail on the head there where they see an implicit benefit. You know, first of all, if I grow up and I can't get my needs met, let's pretend I'm a dismissive avoidant for a moment and I'm a child and I grow up and I can't get my needs met in a relationship for my parents and I'm wired for biologically wired for attunement and my parents are emotionally unavailable.
Then what happens is I go, well, it doesn't feel good to keep yearning for something and get rejected. So I'm going to adapt to this by just repressing my need to even attach to them. And by doing that, it creates relief. And so now I think that keeping attachment at a distance is a very good thing. It gives me this reward feeling instead of it gives me the relief instead of feeling like, oh, I'm just yearning for something and keep feeling rejected. And on top of that,
Dismissive avoidance because they're suppressing their emotions are less likely to feel their emotions and feel that something is off. And the third layer to that is that dismissive avoidance end up in a dynamic where they go, well, I'm the logical one. I'm straightforward. I use my brain and I'm not really giving into my emotions. And of course there's tremendous benefits to that, right? Like there can be huge benefits of all attachment styles that are insecurely attached. They have unique and really beautiful characteristics, but
but that's still going to be something that doesn't benefit relationships because when the moment comes to be raw and real and vulnerable and build a genuine connection, if somebody's so closed off to that, they can't even access that properly and they're terrified of it. And that becomes a really painful thing. So I think to your point, they are already suppressing their emotions. So they don't even feel as much as something's off. And then they see a benefit in themselves being that way, which makes it kind of,
this catch-22 where it's even trickier to realize that something's not right i'm gonna ask a follow-up question here which is do you think that men or women are more likely
to be this way because I get this question all the time where it's like the profile that you're you're describing right rash being incredibly rational right like that's something that I think we often associate with men that they are like these rational people when it comes to relationships and women are emotional whether that is correct or not or um
This idea of, like, men are allowed to be a lot more emotionally closed off. Also, the factor of, like, parentification, right? Like, women are perhaps more parentified. So does that contribute to them? Like, there's so many questions where I'm like, it's kind of like a scale to me of, like, which...
what contextual and external and environmental factors are kind of balancing the scale to maybe make men or women more likely to present this way? It's such a great question. So it's interesting in different cultures, you'll actually see different attachment style spreads ever so slightly. So like, it's interesting. There was a study done in Japan and,
And it showed that a lot of individuals are more dismissive avoidant. And culturally, it's like negatively reinforced to be too emotional or too vulnerable, right? So you can see some of those dynamics, but to your point, absolutely men are more likely to be dismissive avoidance and women are actually more likely to be anxious attachment styles.
The spread right now looks like there's competing studies on this stuff, but it looks like it's somewhere between either 80/20 or 75/25 men to women in terms of who proportionally is dismissive avoidant attachment style. And so it makes a lot of sense, right? Men are generally more emotionally shamed.
And they're generally taught like, don't be a cry baby, grow up, don't be so vulnerable. Don't let anyone see you cry. Like a lot of that messaging or messaging becomes our conditioning. And so a lot of that messaging is conditioning somebody to be like, Oh, I can't show these sides of myself. I'll get rejected. I'll be, you know, shameful if I show the side of myself. And so it gives even more incentive for somebody to repress those aspects of self. Whereas women, um,
you know, although this is changing more so recently a little bit, but women still tend to naturally be, you know, they have this culture where it's like, okay, we can express our emotions more or share things or be more open and vulnerable with each other than we would generally see in a group of men. Yeah, it's like classic social learning theory, right? Like you observe how your parents behave, how those around you behave, and you replicate and you mimic it.
And if you're growing up in a community, in a culture, in an environment, you know, I'm in Australia, right? Like that's a huge thing to be like a very macho man and to be very like tough and men don't cry and men get out in the field and do all the work like that.
If that is the environment you were raised in, even if you know it's incorrect, even if your parents know it's incorrect and have tried very hard to not enforce that within you, like it is still going to bleed in if it's kind of like the if it's kind of like what's in the air. Right. If it's the thing that you breathe in, if it's the thing that you see when you go to school, when you hang out at your friend's place, when you go to like the grocery store, when you watch when you switch on TV, like it's going to be reinforced.
or rewarded somehow. How do you think that both the dismissive and a fearful avoidant attachment style separately, obviously, look different for different genders?
Such a good question. So I would say, um, if we break down each one, so dismissive avoidance as men and women, they both tend to share some, some unique characteristics, but men generally, it's a little bit more socially acceptable for men to be dismissive avoidance, similar to like what we're talking about on this, this concept. And so I think it's important to note that like your main first influences will be in the home because, um,
Because basically how we get programmed from a neuroplastic point of view is like from neuroplasticity, we get programs formed through a lot of repetition and emotion, which fire and wire those neural pathways. And so we may have, if we're at home all the time with our caregivers, and that's the major environment we are in.
being sort of immersed in, then we're more likely to see that. But we have all these other features and factors coming at us, right? We're like, then we have these other parts that can either reprogram us or shift or change us. If we have a lot of like, I'll share just one quick example here. I had a, um, a client once and she was a really well-known gymnast and she was very, very successful. She
she had a very secure household, but she was around coaches all the time. She'd go home from school, not spend any time at home, go to the gym for four or five hours a night, and her coach made her really anxiously attached. So we can have these secondary influences that depending on our repeated exposure to them can actually usurp our original attachment style wiring. So just to speak to that for a second, I thought it was so important, but dismissive avoidance as a whole
As a male, you'll tend to see that they present as very stoic, very unemotional, sometimes slow to warm up. They can be a lot of like the boys boys, right? They tend to really like to spend time with other like-minded individuals. They get really into like their projects a lot of the time, their hobbies, those sorts of things. And they tend to be logical, rational, practical, all of those different dynamics. We'll see those same things as a male.
as a female dismissive avoidant, like those traits really don't change that much. I would say more of what changes is society's response to those traits. So men are sort of like, they're okay to be that logical, rational, practical, withdrawn sort of person. Whereas with women, you know, sometimes it's like, well, why is she so standoffish? Or why is she not warm? Or why is she, and I think the external response to it is more what changes.
rather than anything else. And so I find that men kind of have an easier time and are more socially accepted as being a dismissive avoidant compared to women. Again, overarching themes, not always the case, but we can definitely see that. And we'll sometimes see that dismissive avoidants are more likely to be kind of like the engineer types, right? To get really interested in that sort of style of learning. And they tend to really value their safety and their comfort zone. And they don't like to go and try tons of new things all the time.
And again, that usually comes from childhood programming. So men and women share in a lot of those characteristics, but it's just the external response to it that seems to change. And from a fearful avoidant point of view,
Generally, for low-boy and women will seem very warm and very kind and available until real attachment forms and then they push away and they fear and those hot and cold patterns come about. And I find that that is kind of easier if I had to say between men and women. It's a little easier for women to be like that because they tend to be deep and they want to emotionally connect with people and they care about understanding human behavior and psychology.
you know, men that are fearful avoidant, if they're big feelers, if they really feel everything and then they're like hot and cold, it's confusing for them, right? Because they don't have as much support in their ability to emotionally process. So those are some of the differences I would say, like the traits and characteristics don't change much, but more how they then relate to a society based on their gender with their unique attachment styles. I feel like it just goes to show that we think that we're, we're,
we're just socialized as children, but we are continually socialized as adults, right? And there continues to be these influences from our environment that can make us who we are and especially influence things like attachment style as well, which is a core component of
I think becomes a more core component of our identity and how we relate to others the older we get as we want to form those more serious long-term friendships and relationships and connections. I feel like recognizing this is one thing
And it could probably feel quite overwhelming when you kind of finally wake up and smell the coffee or kind of begin to realize that this is not helping me anymore. That this is something that I needed to survive a childhood experience that I am now out of. I'm now separate from. And I do want to be able to connect. And I do want to find meaningful, deep, secure love. How do we kind of approach this?
healing when we get to that point of acceptance first the next step is obviously to obviously you can't rewrite rewrite history but the next step is to think about your future self and how you want to change for them how are some of the ways that we go about not undoing but accepting and healing this part of us yeah it's such a beautiful question so
We created a body of work and we had about 31,000 people go through our programs and take this information and we see within about a 90 day period we can change our attachment style. Now that's the median of people, right? There's people who fall outside of that who may not be, you know, who may have way more childhood trauma and it may take them more than 90 days, but the vast majority of people can become dominantly securely attached in that 90 day period. And it's through focusing on a few crucial areas. So number one,
And when we say like healing those parts of ourselves and accepting part of ourselves, I think it's, we walk this really beautiful line between, um, being able to be self accepting, but also realize when there's a need for transformation, right? Like we can have a child who, um, does something wrong at school, you know, break something or gets angry or throws a temper tantrum. And it doesn't mean we like shame the child. We can be like, honey,
I love you. I care about you. I want you to feel okay. And that's not acceptable at the same time. Let's work on changing that behavior. So it's really like that attitude that we want to have to self first, where we can be accepting of like, hey, this isn't my fault. I didn't choose my attachment styles, whatever repeated things I got exposed to. And it is still my responsibility because only I can do that work.
And so that work can look like going to counseling or therapy, but that work can also look like doing deep inner self work. And so there's, there's really a few crucial areas that when we target these things, we can become securely attached. So crucial area number one is reprogramming core wounds. Our core wounds are like our relationship baggage. It's whatever we've been afflicted with as children, we will fear as adults. So if you had a lot of broken trust as
As a child, you will, as an adult, be like, I will be betrayed. And that's a core wound. Or if we had a lot of real or perceived abandonment in childhood, you know, through inconsistency or divorce or one parent pulls away, you will probably believe I will be abandoned as an adult.
If you are criticized or neglected, you will believe I am defective and that's how people are going to see me. And so you can hear that in the different attachment cells, the fearful avoidant, the anxious, the dismissive avoidant. And so when we can first find our core wounds, we're not born with these things. We can just rewire them. And so we rewire them and I can always share a tool in a little bit, but we rewire them through repetition, emotion, and imagery because that's what's necessary to recondition the subconscious mind. So there's a really easy tool to go through that.
But number one area, core wounds. Number two, we learn our needs and how to meet them ourselves.
So each attachment style has unique needs. Anxious tend to want a lot more certainty, consistency, validation, encouragement, to be made a priority, to feel important. Fearful avoidance want a lot of depth. They want novelty. They want growth in the relationship. They want deep connection, but they also want freedom and independence. And dismissive avoidance, they tend to actually respond very well to acceptance, support, empathy, and then small pieces of appreciation or acknowledgement.
and then being able to also have their freedom and independence. So each attachment cell has different needs. When we learn to meet our own needs,
And then number three, communicate them to other people. That's like the framework for how we give and receive love. People talk about love languages and that's great and it's meaningful, but meeting each other's needs is much more impactful than the five love languages. And just as an example, like I have a big love language around quality time, but if I'm watching a movie on Netflix with somebody versus having a deep conversation, the deep conversation meets my need for emotional connection. That's going to be way more important to me
than just quality time as an overarching theme, like deeply emotionally connecting with somebody is way better. So our needs and learning what those are for each of our unique styles and meeting them for each other is like this huge set of ingredients and a roadmap to finding deeper connection and love. So core wounds, learning to meet our own needs, learning to communicate our needs to others.
using healthy strategies. Sometimes we go, you never spend enough time with me instead of, Hey, I miss you. I feel disconnected this week. I'd love to plan something fun on the weekend. That's called positive framing. When we positively frame, we're more likely to get heard. So we can be core wound reprogrammers, meet our needs, learn to communicate better, and then learn healthier boundaries in our world.
These are four of the most important components to becoming securely attached. When we can really target those, we can actually heal any maladaptive patterns that we were taught and we can leave the relationship baggage that we have from childhood in the past where it belongs. Oh my gosh, that is so...
Such like a perfect equation, I feel like. And I love that you spoke about needs instead of love language. I will say I think love languages are like an amazing idea, but there is not as much research on them as you would probably like for such a huge term like used in psychobabble. And something they say is that it's not really a complete picture of what we need as people and as emotional beings to
you know five love languages does not make a relationship does not make a human like there is a deeper core need behind each of them that can be met not just through that expression that that we normally talk about um do you think that it's easier to heal i'm going to ask you one final question it's another hot seat question so yes i'm sure you have an amazing answer but do you think that it's easier to heal and avoid an attachment style dismissive or fearful
When you are single or in a relationship? Oh my gosh, what a great question. So I will say it depends on a number of factors. So we get this question all the time in our programs. People will constantly ask me this in like the weekly webinars we do. And I would say that it depends on how codependent you are.
The reason being that if we are in a relationship and we're highly codependent, so usually this means if you're anxiously attached or even fearful avoidant, we tend to have a lot of those more codependent patterns where we'll kind of people please or put other people before ourselves. And because fearful avoidance share in that anxious side, it's quite a likelihood towards codependency. So if we are more codependent and we're trying to heal our attachment style while in a relationship, sometimes it's hard because we will get really locked into that
prioritizing the relationship over our own self work.
But if you're somebody who's highly committed to your personal growth and it's like a huge passion and you can really trust yourself to be mindful of that, then the reality is we can see faster progress in a relationship as well because that's the real life work, right? That's like where we're really going to do that work and have to communicate differently and have to reprogram our core wounds so we don't take things personally and have to like actually share our needs with somebody. So we can have really profound results in a short period of time if we're highly committed.
If we're not that committed and we're just kind of dabbling around and like, oh, you know, I'm kind of, I read about personal growth once a month or something like that. Then it's going to be easier to stay committed when we don't have the distraction of codependency by being more anxious leaning in our attachment style. Dismissive avoidance tend to actually do really well at healing when in a relationship because they're more action oriented and
So they tend to do better when they're actually like showing up if they're committed to doing so. And so I would say overall, you'll generally see that
easiest to hardest to heal. I would say anxious and dismissives generally heal a little quicker because they have less attachment trauma. Fearful avoidance generally have a little bit more. Although when you get them into personal growth related stuff, they tend to like go a million miles an hour and really get stuck into the work. Um, because they tend to really like the depth of all of that stuff. Those are those fearful avoidant needs and they like growth. Um, but
we will see that as long as somebody is highly committed in or out of a relationship can work. I personally, when I first started doing a lot of healing work was really single for like three and a half years. I was like, I'm not dating anybody, anything. And I was really codependent. And I think that was good for me. But in re in retrospect, like I didn't
I didn't need three and a half years. Like I could have, you know, done the first year or two of work that I did and then gotten back into relationship. And I had a lot of work to do, but you'll see, um, if people are committed, that's really the overarching factor, whether you're in or out of the relationship, are you doing the work? Are you willing to stay consistent with it? And as long as you're doing that, I think that you can actually have more of an upside on being in a relationship because it can create more rapid growth more quickly.
That is such an amazing answer. And I love how there's like, it's not just a simple one. You know, it's not just like, no, yeah, you should be single before you fix this. You know, you need to be single in order to work through this. It's like, no, there are a lot of people who are in relationships that have been quite successful, but they just want them to be better. And they just realize that maybe this won't last if
this underlying pattern is not addressed. So that's kind of all the questions I have for you today. Thank you so much for coming on the show and breaking this down. Is there anything else on avoidant attachment styles, on theory that
you haven't mentioned that you want to quickly say something about? I'll say one last really quick thing, which is that I find it to also be really powerful as an accompanying healing strategy that we do a little bit of nervous system regulation work. So if anybody is on this journey and they can just apply a simple tool like
meditating in the morning or breath work in the evenings, or just something that's helping them get out of this constant fight or flight and just get more back into their body and present in the relationship to self. It's usually like the fifth major pillar I'll mention after the core wounds and the needs and the boundaries and communication as this kind of honorable mention that can just fast track the healing process. Um, so another really great thing to focus on for sure. Yeah. It's honestly amazing because I feel like when you're
I don't know, reconstructing how you see love and how you see others and how you see connection. Like it's going to be pretty scary and there will definitely be moments of like distress and moments of perhaps panic and being able to slow down and say to yourself, this is just emotion. This is just a feeling. This is nothing that's going to end my life. Nothing that's going to ruin my life. It's just my nervous system doing what it's meant to do, which is respond to a perceived threat and
Yeah, I feel like we're going to be so much more successful. So thank you again for coming on. A reminder.
that Thais had another episode with us back in December, I think on anxious attachment stars. If you want to go and listen to that one as well, as always, if you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to leave us a five-star review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google podcasts. I don't know wherever you're listening and make sure that you're following along. It really does help the show to grow and to reach new people who might need to hear some of the things that we're talking about and
If you have an episode suggestion, if you have a contribution to this episode, something that we didn't talk about, something that you would want us to expand on further, your own experience, please message me at That Psychology Podcast. I would love to hear from you. And as always, until we speak next, stay kind, be safe and be gentle with yourself. We will be back next week.
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