Episode 561: Thais Gibson: The Four-Attachment Styles Explained + Why “Self Sabotage” Is A Myth

You're listening to "Havits in Hustle." Pressure it. - Wow, okay, what a morning today. Okay, today you guys, you don't even wanna know my morning, but the good news is we have a very, very cool guest

joining us today on the show. Her name is Tais. I said that right. - Correct. - Tais Gibson, who is certified in over 13 therapy,

oh my God, 13 modalities. Wow. And you also are a PhD in pastoral studies. - Pastoral counseling. So, I'm going to tell you what that is, okay.

So, I, my thing for sure has always been

where neuroscience overlaps with psychology and different spiritual teachings. So, pastoral counseling links back to Christianity and Christian studies. And then I've been a huge fan for years

of like studying Zen Buddhism and mindfulness and all these different things and they play such a huge role in my own life. Then I really sought to understand, okay, if I started on that path and that was so big for me,

what was happening from like a neuroscience psychology standpoint and then they were so impactful.

“So, that's why I went into all these different certifications”

and cognitive behavioral therapy and neuro linguistic programming and hypnotherapy and trying to just bridge understanding, especially our subconscious mind and how we get wired and how that changes

and how a lot of these different teachings have an impact on our neuroplasticity and impact our brain and the way that we show up and move in our lives.

- No, I know a lot of the things that I always kind of

think, when I think about you, I think about the attachment styles 'cause so much of your content and what you speak about is about all of our program, right, attachment styles.

And you're a big believer that we can reprogram ourselves to change our attachment styles, to have better relationships, not just personally in terms of man, well, man, it can be friends, it can be husband or what,

it can be, it can be on every level, right? - Absolutely. - My first question to you is when we make a decision in your opinion, are we basing the decision on our subconscious mind or our conscious mind?

- It's a great question. So, 95 to 97% of all of our beliefs, our thoughts, our emotions, and our actions, our choices, decisions are made at a subconscious level. That's the part of us is our habituated self.

So, it's sort of the warehouse of all of our conditioning and programming, and it's interesting, because you hear about it in spiritual teachings, almost referred to as like the ego, right?

It's like the warehouse of all of your conditioning, and it's so interesting and we get wired with these different patterns, but then your conscious mind is only three to five percent. And what's really crazy is that your conscious mind,

that three to five percent of you, cannot outwill or overpower the subconscious mind. - Isn't that crazy? So, if most of what we do is based on that number, but yet, we have no idea what we're even in our subconscious,

so it's kind of, we go by our intuition, like, how do we know when and when we're being controlled by our subconscious? And then how do we, like, stop it in its tracks to take us on a trajectory that would be bad for us?

- Great question, so it's very context-specific.

“So, that's why I got into attachment cells,”

'cause it's sort of the warehouse of our deepest conditioning from our childhood, and you can find it based on your patterns and themes, according to how you learn to attach, it's such a foundation of what your conditioning will become. And so, we can come back and explore that,

but one of the easiest things to do is to recognize that there's no such actual thing as self-sabotage. What we experience as self-sabotage is our conscious mind in tending one thing with that three to five percent of us, and our subconscious mind having different conditions

that go against it. So, nobody's waking up and saying, "Oh, today I'm going to sabotage my life." Like, there's such a actual thing, but if we say, "Okay, I'm going to quit eating chocolate

or I'm going to go to the gym every day," or "I'm going to set these new year's resolutions for myself," well, why do we think that roughly 88 percent of people fail their new year's resolutions in the first seven days, because when we set goals, it's only with our conscious level of mind.

- You know, it's interesting. I want to interject there, because I know what I do a lot,

and it's always been very, it's nerve-wracking.

When I know I have to do a particular thing, like a shoot of some kind, like a fitness shoot, I've been in fitness, but I was really heavily a fitness person many years ago of kind of morphed and evolved since. However, when I knew I had to do something

that was really, really time-sensitive. Like, I had six weeks to get ready for this, eight weeks, or something like that. Without fail, I would, what you call it, there's no such thing as self-sabotage,

but I was self-sabotage, purposefully. Like, I would overeat intentionally, I'd eat the wrong things. I would not want to do that. Like, I would go against my conscious wants for that thing.

- Yeah. - Why would I do that if there is a goal in mind that I really want to achieve? Why am I self-sabotaging?

“Even if I think I know that's not what I want to happen.”

Like, I know what I want to happen, I do the opposite. - Okay, so I'll give you a rabbit hole answer,

- Okay.

“- We have two major things that are driving us”

at a subconscious level all the time, are limiting beliefs that we've acquired, and then are needs. Okay? So let's start with our needs,

'cause the limiting is the little more obvious. Everybody has subconscious drivers that are driving their behavior all the time. And we have six basic human needs and then how we get used to meeting those needs

become our personality needs or sort of like our personal needs. So I was working with a woman once and she came into to meet with me and she said, hey, I am here to actually do the psychological work. She was pretty diabetic, she just got told by her doctor.

She's pretty diabetic and she's like, every year for the last 12 years, I've told myself, I'm gonna eat healthy, I'm gonna go to the gym and I don't. And I've tried meeting with dietitians and nutritionists,

all these things, I don't, I just, I go through the same patterns what's going on. So we did our needs assessment. And what we found is there are biggest needs that to stop conscious level these drivers

or for family, social connection, emotional connection, comfort and safety. And so what happens is your conscious mind says, I wanna eat healthy, I wanna go to the gym every day and her subconscious mind says, no,

“that's gonna take time away from family,”

social connection, emotional connection, safety and comfort, we don't feel these things. And so these drivers is like your conscious mind intends someone with that 3 to 5% and your subconscious programming is something else.

Second to that, what's also really interesting

is that it's earliest wired conditioning around food. It happens when we're being breastfed. And when a mother is breastfeeding their child, what happens? Well, there's a tremendous amount of oxytocin

produced the bonding neurochemical. So all of our wiring deeply about food is that food equals safety and comfort. I mean, held and protected and cradled and connection. So our wired associations to food are that it gives us

safety, connection, comfort. And so what ends up happening for a lot of people is they say, I wanna quit eating chocolate or quit, you know, or go to the gym every day and this woman, what we had to do

is we had to find a way to link her subconscious needs with her conscious mind's schools. So we had her, you know, social connection, family. We had her start there. We got her to go to groups, but in classes

with her friends, group yoga classes, in our social community. We got her to sit down and then start doing hiking classes with her, or going to hiking groups with her husband, going to the park on weekends with her family.

All these things that were more active. So instead of her conscious and subconscious assuming that these things are separate, they were now working together. And right there, that's diminished so much

of what the resistance was, because now those conscious desires or goals with the subconscious needs were an alignment and in resonance instead of distance, instead of against each other.

Right? She no longer sits there thinking, going to the gym and doing all these things takes time away from social connection takes time away from family. Now she's lined them up together.

Right. How do you figure that out though? There's a lot of this assessment. Okay. Yes, I can take you through how to find them in a second.

There's a few, your needs are always gonna be in your behaviors,

but we can come back to that. The second part of it is that we have these limiting beliefs. So a lot of times, if we acquired because of our childhood things, like I'm deserving of being around worthy,

then sometimes when we get really close to a goal that we have, we sabotage 'cause we just don't believe that we're worthy of it. Or if we think we're not good enough, then we sabotage 'cause we just don't think

that we're deserving of having that thing. So there's ways to find both through a needs assessment and through a questionnaire to find your core wounds or limiting beliefs, what those things are and then you rewire these limiting beliefs

through neural plasticity and changing, there's an exercise that we do and I'm happy to share that. And then you align your conscious mind's goals with your subconscious needs.

And other things that we're causing resistance at a subconscious level are out of the way. So if you wanna go back to that for a second and say yours, like when you think of that time period where you would sabotage as you were getting closer,

a good way to find your limiting beliefs on this side is as you were gonna go up and assuming it was like a competition that you were preparing for? - No, it was like a cover of a magazine.

It's happened all the time. All sorts of times.

Like I guess I've never been like a bodybuilder

by a police judge, but I do a lot of, I did a lot of work in like the, I still do, health and wellness but on the more on the business side. So when people were profiling me or I did a cover

for I was getting ready for like a fitness magazine a couple times I put me on the cover, I never thought of it though as me feeling unworthy of it. But if I would maybe go dig deeper, I would like you have maybe that was why.

I mean, can I ask you and we can try to find it? - Sure. - So you're gonna go think of a specific time in your mind. - Okay.

“- Do you have a specific time that you remember doing this?”

- Oh all the time. - I do it all the time. - It works as if you do a specific time. - But I was gonna say that the thing that I was gonna point to was that I really believe it's because I don't like

having restrictions. Like I don't like when I feel like when I feel like I'm a caged animal or when I cannot do something, that makes me wanna do it more.

- Okay. - So like with anything, like if I say, I'm only gonna have this for dinner tonight. Those are the nights I'll eat 97 more, you know, 100 calories and I'll have the bad thing

because I don't like to feel deprived or restricted. - Perfect. Okay, so you didn't even have to go to class. - I know I didn't have to go to class. - Okay, so my question.

- But I need for freedom. Big need for freedom is probably the one of the needs.

- Freedom, freedom, economy and dependence

is gonna be big ones. So probably your conscious mind says restrict, your subconscious mind says no, we're prioritizing freedom.

“It's a big need, so then that's what we sabotage,”

but it's not actual sabotage. You know, choosing a sabotage or subconscious programming just winning out. And on the flip side, sometimes we can have core wounds or these limiting beliefs.

And some of the big ones. And you know, you can see how these line up for you is one is fear of being trapped. So sometimes if there's a history of ever feeling like controlled in childhood, trapped, really strict parrying,

some kind of instance or dynamic where you felt like you couldn't really beat yourself, then that becomes a trigger as an adult and that causes more rebellious behaviors. And then the other one can be this fear

of being helpless or powerless. So those things, if there was ever times where you had to rely on somebody, you didn't feel like they were really helping empower you, they were kind of unpredictable or unsafe.

Then there can be this dynamic of like,

oh, if I have to, a trapped helpless

and powers just often go together. And so having to restrict, having to be in a container, having to be in a cage in any way or another. So say it with that, there's this intense need to rebel. And so that would be these core wounds on the side

or limiting beliefs. Like if I have to restrict that means I am trapped. - Yeah, I love that. That's actually very, that I like that, that's true. I guess what that is thing, right?

“You can go down, like that's what you say,”

I go down the rabbit hole, right? Like you get to a certain level and think that's the answer. But then if you keep on going, it's like actually, maybe there's something deeper to that. No, I like that.

- And so what's cool is that once you discover it, you can find ways to restrict, you can actually rewire that discipline equals freedom 'cause discipline does equal freedom in a lot of ways. - And that's what I'm talking about.

- That's the irony, right? Like I do believe that discipline does equal freedom and that you can't rely on motivations, all about discipline, you have to do the hard things and things you don't like to get to the other side

of doing the thing, to get to what you actually want in life and you can make it so that it doesn't feel so hard. - Right. - Discipline by rewiring because consciously we can understand, but until your subconscious mind feels fully invested

and believes in that, then discipline will still feel like there's a little bit of well-power or forcefulness. - Yes. - And then the other part of it is that if there's this trapped core wound, then you will still feel this like inquiring to rebel.

Like there will be this part of you that when somebody, and you'll probably see it in different areas of your life if that shows up for you or somebody who kind of tries to push something on you or force something on you, it will be external too.

That you may kind of sabotage when people are trying to ask you to do things and it feels like they're trapping you. Like you might want to push back just instinctively. - So what kind of attachment style would that be? - I'd have to ask more questions.

- Oh no, okay, let's okay. (laughing) - But generally it's not anxious. Okay, so I mean there's a lot that goes into it. Like you could have been some attachment styles

and done a lot of work and become, have you been married for a long time? - Yeah. - So you're mostly, you're probably mostly secure. Are you happy in your marriage?

- Yeah. - For you on the screen. - On a podcast. - What am I supposed to say? Yes, Mary.

- No, I know, like I'm gonna say here. (laughing) - We're talking from the show. - What are you talking about? - No, no, no, no, no, but, and you find

in your history of relationships. 'Cause you're probably mostly secure now, if you've been in a longstanding relationship. - No, I'm just thinking, I don't think I'm a, maybe I am.

I don't think I am. - I mean, I don't think I am. - I mean, I don't think I am. - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We rule that one out.

You're probably mostly secure, but you may have had a history of being either for your full of awareness or dismissive awareness. - Who's the difference? - Yeah, well, it was the difference,

'cause I think a lot of people would be curious

“for themselves, 'cause that's what I see a lot”

on social media, like every second TikTok video is about an avoidant, a fearful one or dismissive avoidant. What's the difference between those two? - And is it the most popular? - No.

- Oh, yeah, interesting, right? It's just that people are, what happens is, you get the anxious who are interested in the avoidance. So the anxious ones, because they're anxious and they're people, please, and they're very externally focused.

So right away, instead of them focusing on themselves, they're focusing on others. And if you're a full avoidance, like to learn about other people too, but they also like to learn about themselves,

but then you get the skew towards dismissive avoidance. So you get everybody wanting to learn about the avoidance because of the sort of polarization. So I can take you through the differences, okay? So fearful avoidance and grow up, generally,

with a lot more chaos, bigger tea trauma. So you'll usually see dynamics where there could be things like moms and alcoholic, that has narcissistic personality disorder. These things that basically the overarching theme

are that you never know what version of somebody

are gonna get. So it was an analogy, if mom's a drinker, and one day she comes home when she's in a few drinks, she's in a good mood, and she comes home and she's happy. She's nice, and you're like, as a child,

you're like, oh, I want closeness. I like mom, I want to be closer. She feels good to be around her today. But then a few hours later, she keeps drinking, or a couple days later, she's drinking a lot more.

I know she's passed out, and you don't know if she's okay, and you're so scared, or she's mean, and she's angry, drunk, and she's cruel. And so you're like, I don't know what version I'm gonna get. Same thing if you have a parent who's a narcissist.

Like, one day they love bomb, and you're the Golden Child, another day they're tearing you apart, because they're taking their anger out on you. And so fearful winds grab not knowing what version they're gonna get. And so they have this really interesting conditioning

but they're also scared of it. They feel threatened by it. And so as adults, they have a lot of these kind of anxious leaning wounds where they're afraid of being abandoned,

and alone, and they feel like everything's always on them,

and they carry the way to the world on their shoulders, and they're usually like the caretakers, and all their relationships, and people always go to them to solve the problem, 'cause they usually, that's their conditioning growing up, they had to be that way.

And then they're usually really tough and strong individuals, and they're great under pressure, but they feel a lot of internal emotional distress, because one day they feel anxious, and another day they're avoided.

Another day they're like, oh, you're gonna trap me, or if I lean on you, I'm gonna be helpless. I can't rely on other people, and they're scared of being powerless, and they usually have a big wound of betrayal.

And we found this from a lot of our research, and the betrayal won't isn't necessarily just that, but they think somebody's gonna cheat or lie, it could be that. But it's also like, geez, I like you now,

“and you like me now, but how could I possibly trust the future?”

Because if you grow up in an environment where if your parents are so unpredictable and they're crazy, and you don't know how to really deal with that, it's like, well, geez, if my own parents couldn't be trustworthy, how am I gonna trust somebody

who came into my life as a stranger? Like people are just, we can't really put into a clear box, how they're gonna behave. And so fearful of winter, very hyper-vigilant. They really read into micro expressions,

and body language, they clock everything. I joke that the fearful winds are kind of the human lie detectors, like they just notice every little shift. And if you tell a story one day, and you tell it differently three days later,

or three months later, they're like, wait. And they notice everything. And so they're kind of a little bit suspicious, they're kind of on edge. They're usually, if they do enough regulation,

they're usually quite highly successful, because they're very much like good at reading people and figuring things out, and they're great under pressure, and they're resilient, they often end up being entrepreneurs, they're regulated enough to get there.

So those are fearful avoidance, they're very warm, they're very deep, they're very present, but then when you get close to them, they're like, oh, too much. So they end up as adults, being very hot and cold,

because they have the anxious and the avoidance side to them. And so they'll be like, come get close, come get close, and you get close, they'll get back. You're too close, and then somebody moves away, and they're like, oh, we are so far,

like come back close, and so they sort of pinball a little bit and their relationships is spatially, the relationships where they feel the most vulnerable. - So it tends to be quite ambivalent, so that's the fearful avoidance, and then I'll go into dismissive avoidance,

unless you have anything you want to add. - No, I want to ask it. So what type of relationship do they have good relationships, typically a fearful avoidance struggle a little bit until they do the work?

- Yeah. - I was a fearful avoidance. - You were. - That's part of how I got into this conversation. - Oh, this is how you got into it.

- Part of it, yeah, yeah.

“- 'Cause okay, what is the other kind of avoidance?”

- So dismissive avoidance. - I dismissive avoidance. - dismissive avoidance are very different. So they are number one, they're over arching them and childhood is more childed emotional neglect.

And sometimes you hear that, and you think it's gonna be really like over,

like parents are never home,

child while some from school, parents get home at midnight. Like it can be that, but the vast majority of cases, it's more subtle. So a lot of times instead, it's like parents are both home, but they're both emotionally shut down and unavailable,

'cause they're busy or preoccupied or not present. And then when children try to make emotional embeds for connection, the parents are like, they just don't have time, they deflect, they diminish if the child cries or expresses distress.

The parents end up being like, "Oh, don't be a cry baby, get it together." And because children are wired for a tunement and for that emotional closeness, if it constantly gets rejected at a young age,

they're like, "Well, I just constantly get rejected. "What's the point of trying to need somebody?" And so they suppress their emotions. They actually come to believe that their own emotions are shameful or make them weak.

- Oh, yeah. - And so then they really suppress down their own emotions. And they're at adaptation to growing up in an environment like that is like, "I just have to become hyper independent.

"I have to not need people." And if I don't need people, then I feel in control again. Because if I'm in this environment where I'm trying to emotionally lean on people

and I feel like I need, but I can't get access, then I just feel out of control and shameful. And so as adults, they become really hyper independent. Sometimes they tend to sue through creature comforts.

They never got to sue through people.

So they sue through things. That can be food, television, work. It can be work-a-holics a lot of the time. It can be people who take up a ton of hobbies, like fishing, hunting, all these things.

- So they can have a lot of these things where they're soothing through external things 'cause they never learn to co-regular with other people. And they end up thinking that this part of themselves, that's emotional is so wrong and defective,

that as adults, they never want to get seen. They don't want their emotions to be heard and seen. They don't want to be vulnerable to people. So they usually end up in relationships where soon things get real,

like four, six months in, they start chatting down. And if they stay in a relationship, they're quite unavailable to people a lot of the time unless they do the work. And sometimes they don't stay in relationships.

Sometimes they go through series of patterns and relationships where they get close to people. And then as soon as things feel too real, their nervous system can't handle it. They're like, oh, every time I felt vulnerable as a child,

I was just rejected and my needs weren't that,

“why would I want to put myself back in that position?”

So they sabotage.

that they're like, I should stay in this relationship. Maybe I want a family or a marriage. And subconsciously, there are subconscious mind and nervous systems and there's no connection makes you feel like you're shameful and defective.

Like you're trapped in helpless and powerless. - So this is when your subconscious takes over because those are the core wounds or the core versus the core needs or the whole other area. - Exactly.

And where are a lot of their needs are freedom and dependence on ton and so they sabotage relationships, but it's just their conscious mind saying I should be in a relationship and their subconscious and nervous system responding

to the rest of their subconscious mind going, well, relationships don't meet your needs and they actually cause you to feel these wounds. - Well, what I find so interesting

is there's always trends in social media, right?

I find there's right now, well, in the last, I don't know, a while. A big trend are talking about people's attachment styles to kind of explain away why somebody broke up, why someone goes to do why this,

like there's a few things I constantly see, no contact, what attachments dial are you. Now, is it because people are having a harder time than ever before staying in relationships, being in relationships because of the sheer volume

of what people are like seeing because of social media, because of dating apps, because now you can just keep on swiping and there's no true connection anymore.

“You have to literally fight to get an emotional connection”

with people because of the noise around. - Yeah, it's such an excellent question. And I think there's three major factors. Number one, exactly, social media is dating apps, which is a short-term gratification,

we're getting conditioned for that.

And I think that one of the casualties in that

became like a good relationship requires mutual effort, mutual investment, and being able to work through hard things. Like that's the only way a relationship really lasts and is actually fulfilling and successful. And because we have this outlet where we can hit the eject button

because of dating apps and social media, you could feel uncomfortable three months and have some of your attachments stuff come up and go, oh, I feel uncomfortable, sabotage its easy to sabotage and go find somebody else.

And then you say, oh, because I'm a blah, blah, blah, blah, the void into, I'm a blah, blah, blah, this. Like we all have these tag lines and titles that we can say and use those as the excuse for just behaving badly.

- And this is like my biggest button to pick an entire world right now, is exactly what you just said, which is when you learn your attachment style. - Yeah.

- For you to sit there and then just label yourself as it identify with the label and then just go around, go and bless everybody, but maybe you used it for the brain behavior. - But people do that all hurting yourself.

- Yeah, and people hurt themselves

“and they do it the only reason you should ever be”

interested in learning your attachment style should be that you go understand your underlying patterns and search everywhere. - I totally agree with you. - That's the only reason.

And unfortunately, this whole trend of like, I'm this, they're that, okay, that's why and then you put up with it or label yourself or excuse your behavior, excuse somebody else's behavior, it's actually really difficult.

- Well, there's a bunch of them, right?

Like, if I never hear the word narcissistic again,

attachment style ADHD, I can go on and on. But what that person is and that's the excuse of the year of why they behave terribly. And to me, I don't want any more. I don't want to hear any more titles or things

that you are, what went on health issue you may have or what psychological issue you may have to then just like treat people badly and to be a bad person or to do bad things. Like, own it except it either fix it or be acknowledged

and then like kind of like figure out how you can best be in society as a functioning human. - Exactly. And so like, so for us, that's like the exact body of work that we produce right now, our main thing is like

- Who's that? - Nope. - Myself and are okay, you know, you're cool. - Oh yeah, we've put the personal level.

“- Personal, these like, yeah, that's what you're meant to get.”

- Yeah. - And so, so what we do is it's like, you identify your attachments, all you take an assessment and then the whole point from that point forward is not to be like, I am this.

- Right. - Good for your two bad. - Well, that whole point is then you lock yourself into that, that pattern and behavior. It's hard to be insecurely attached.

I was, you know, and it works with tens of thousands of people who are, it's very difficult. And so finding your attachment style should be the very tip of the iceberg and then it should be, how do I change it?

- Right, what do I do about it to be? Like who's the best, like who's a good match for me in this way? Like, we're like, no to say, okay, that person has this and this and this. Maybe it's not the right, you know, chemistry together

or like long-term relationship together. Or how do I increase the odds of it working, knowing what I know? - Yeah, I'll be honest. I saw the bone to pick what that to a little bit.

- Yeah, all I did was try to be nice. - It's what you for a living. - Because people do this thing too and this is like a big trending body work too. They say, if you're insecurely attached

just data secure person and the data actually shows us that that only works of very small percentage of people. - Really? - Because here's why. Our subconscious mind running the show at the 95%

it equates familiarity to safety to survival. So it's like what's familiar is safe

“because we've been surviving the songs with working”

and what's actually most familiar to all of us is the way we treat ourselves. So what's really interesting is if you pick that apart, you can look at somebody who's like anxiously attached for example and they say, I should data secure person.

That's what I consciously learned. Their subconscious mind will often meet the perfect person and go, they're boring. Because at a subconscious level, what I actually feels familiar is somebody who makes you feel

like you make yourself feel, which is what? Well, if you're anxious, you're people pleasing and you're looking out wordly and you're trying to bend over backwards for everybody else. So as an anxious person, you end up being in a position

where you dismiss yourself. You avoid yourself, you don't set boundaries, you don't take off for your own feelings, you don't share your needs. So guess who you're most attracted to.

Often dismiss some avoidance. Who also will dismiss you and avoid your feelings and not look out for your boundaries or your needs in a relationship. And so then we tell people, oh, just data secure person,

if you're insecurely attached. And then they can go find the perfect person paper this happens to me. I see this with literally tons of thousands of people. And then I remember meeting somebody.

“I'll be, I'll use myself as the example.”

And this is a long time ago. I've been doing this work for a long time,

but first, you're a university.

And Canada, I'm Canadian, but I go back and forth. Oh, sorry, I didn't intend to interrupt. Do you said university, I'm Canadian, that's fine. Oh, are you Canadian? Oh, I didn't know that.

Toronto, I read you. Mississauga, OK. As far as we're a group of people, that makes sense. Well, that makes a lot more sense. You're Canadian, that's the title I'm giving you.

You're nice. [LAUGHTER] You're friendly. You're not from. I'm from Winnipeg originally, right?

I'm from Toronto for many years. I went to school in Toronto. Oh, crazy. And then they're for, like, most of my life. Oh, that's so cool.

I'm Canadian. But when you said university, you see very-- You're like perfect sense now. So maybe it's kind of a zoom out, or OK. We're just going to college.

I actually got a soccer scholarship for university, so I'm going to cancel a university in Georgia. Oh, OK. Sorry. So I moved out of Canada and then I went back there for years

and now it kind of lived between Canada and Austin. Oh, Austin, OK, yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. But I have to say something about the course. OK, sorry, so let's go back to that.

You said something. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I had to. You were saying-- We were talking about how-- And interestingly, it has to be, you

get told to data secure a person. Oh, no, I was going to tell-- Well, yeah.

So I remember, first, you're university.

I was-- OK, you're university. You're reading this story, but yourself. OK, go ahead. So remember, I was dating somebody.

And they were probably the perfect person on paper. Tried so hard in the relationship, showed up, and all these wonderful things going for them. Just excellent all around. And I remember being like, oh, this is boring.

Like, where was the spark? Yeah. And this happens to people all the time where you sit there and see you sabotage the relationship, but it's just your subconscious mind wanting

to go back to its needs, and it's comfort zone of what it's used to, which for me was chaos at the time. Before doing a lot of work. And so we do these things where we're consciously we say, oh, date the secure person, find the healthy person.

A lot of people say, date the emotionally available person, or date the person who respects my need for freedom, and you can say these things. But ultimately, we usually don't end up doing that. So really, if you're insecure, they attach the idea

that data secure person doesn't really work like that.

“Instead, what you should do is kill your attachment cell,”

rewire your maladaptive patterns, and then you become secure. And then you're going to end up actually being attracted to those people. Also, though, I'm going to take it one step further.

If you're a securely attached person, wouldn't you want to date someone who's securely attached? And that's exactly what happened. Right? Because if you're securely attached,

why would I want an anxious attached person, or an avoidant dismissal, or why? Because I would imagine the majority of people, though, are not securely attached. I would say that it's the smallest percentage in my right.

So the data shows roughly 50% of people are securely attached. There's two ways that we get the data, okay? One is through childhood research. So research of people's attachment cell and childhood.

There's a few things happening here. One, you could make the argument that like, if securely attached people, date securely attached people, which is absolutely what happens, because that's both of their comfort zone of familiarity.

That's what feels safe when somebody's really a regular or a addict, they don't like it. They're like, this is an healthy for me, and they have good boundaries, so the walk. So part of them go off the market, right?

A lot of portions of the security people go off the market. But sometimes we look at childhood conditioning, and we think that because this data shows that this amount of people are securely attached,

that, like, as if conditioning doesn't keep happening. And so they say, okay, this is the amount of people securely attached, but a lot of times, whatever we're exposed to our entire life, through repetition and emotion rewires us.

So somebody, we talk about attachments developing

in childhood, but the reality is that your attachment

is always changing if you are growing or going through massive life changes in your experiences. For example, if somebody's securely attached until the age of 12, and then God forbid one of their parents passes away,

then they're gonna come out of that and probably be anxious. Or if somebody's anxiously attached,

with somebody who is full blown narcissistic personality

“disorder and not the thorough around term,”

but the actual pathology. And now we see, okay, they're in this relationship with a narcissist, they're probably gonna leave that a fearful avoidant because they went through that extreme chaos and back and forth with the person.

So it's not like our attachment cells just fix, and there's a lot of things happening in life, and a lot of now things happening because of social media and dating apps that are shifting things. So the way that people obtain that data is incomplete

in its own sense, and then another big way that people are obtaining data is self-reporting and self-reporting is generally quite inaccurate. Like we have an attachment cell assessment and people often will answer through the way that they feel

and when we people come into our programs, sometimes people will be like, "Oh, I'm secure." Because they're answering questions maybe in front of their partner or the way that they would like to answer the question.

- How they want to be, how they want to be perceived or how they want to perceive themselves. - And then I take them through like a little more in depth question and then I'm like,

“"Oh, yeah, I think earlier touch and it's quite obvious."”

So a lot of times where it starts, like the 50% of the population securely attached give or take, it's questionable. However, the one thing that is very interesting is that the secure attachment reported rate

does move quite and locks up with a divorce rate. So as the rate of securely attached individuals goes up, the divorce rate goes down and vice versa. So that is interesting. - And I think that that is more about that.

- That's interesting. - Well, a couple of things to securely attach people of reporting in the longest lasting relationships, but I think more important than that or equally important is that they also report

being the most fulfilled in those long lasting relationships. And as somebody who's been both in securely attached and then done a lot of deep work and neuroplasticity work and become very secure for quite a long time now,

I used to never think that having fulfillment

in a long-term relationship was possible. I used to be like, "Oh, that's not possible. "You just stick it out." And I used to really believe that and then learning healthy patterns of communication and connection

and knowing each other's needs and rewiring my wounds. Like, I'm very fulfilled in my marriage and I don't say that to say like, "Look at me," but just the reality of both sides is very different. And so when you see that, like, I get it.

Like, I get why securely attached people of reporting happy in their relationships 'cause they've really good some conscious patterns that make relationships fulfilling, but they both bring to the table, I get it.

Like, I see them. So that's one thing, is that they report the longest lasting relationships and the most fulfillment in them and for good reason. The second thing is that when you look at the divorce rate,

the divorce rate sits around 50% at ranges, a little up a little down and so does Kurt Hushman rate. And so as we see the divorce rate, increase it's correlated with an inverse relationship to the rate of securely attached people.

And so in other words, what it's indicating is that the more securely attached people exist, the less likely they're gonna get divorced and the lower the divorce rate is. So you can see that in that relationship,

which I do find to be really interesting. - That is super interesting.

“I think all of this is actually very interesting though.”

I love like all of this, all the neuro science and how one thing leads to another thing and the ripple effect of all the things. (upbeat music) - We're taking a quick break so I can tell you

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Use the promo code Hustle. How does someone then reprogram their attachment style? Yeah, I love that. OK, so because that's the only reason you shouldn't even want to learn about it.

Right, like, how do you? I mean, for the, I mean, and I would imagine everyone's trying to reprogram their attachment style to be securely attached. Exactly. Yeah, OK.

And you can think of your attachment style too as being the relationship to your style.

It's like every person has one, but it's ultimately

like who you are to you first. And so it makes you a lot more fulfilled as a person. So the first, there's five pillars of rewiring.

“The first pillars, you have to rewire those core wounds.”

OK, so core wounds with these limiting beliefs. So I'll just list them off by attachment style. Ancient attachment style, their big ones, are all be abandoned alone, excluded, disliked, rejected, not good enough,

unloved, unsafe, if people leave me. So those are their biggest triggers and relationships. Triggers, literally, effector behaviors. So if you imagine, for example, that you are believing they're going to be abandoned, well, what do you do?

Well, neuroscience has proven every action we take is based on our emotional state. So when you believe you're going to be abandoned, you feel distressed. And then people are anxious, they do things like cling

or call a lot. So we have to be able to recognize it. The root causes that we believe these things first.

And I always give people the analogy that if you go into the woods

tomorrow, and you see a bear, and you run from the bear and you're safe, thank goodness. But you have to go back into the woods the next day. Well, what does your brain do? Well, as soon as you hear the trees moving,

you're like, the bear is coming and you brace and you're nervous system activates,

“because we've stored that perceived threat”

and we project it back out. That's how we're wired. And so that's great if it's a bear, and we're protecting ourselves, but it's not great when you felt abandoned as a child.

- Right. - And now you save the end of it everywhere. So those are the big anxious ones. The big dismissive of women ones are the fear of being trapped, helpless, powerless,

biggest ones are around feeling shameful if they're too vulnerable, weak if they're too vulnerable, feeling unsafe in a conflict or in vulnerability as well. And the seat belief that they're not good enough and often don't belong.

Fear of the avoidance, they're the trickier ones. They have a little bit of both. They have the abandoned alone wounds that are pretty big for them. They have the trapped help with powerless wounds,

because they have both that kind of anxious and avoidance side. And then they all so have the betrayal courtroom. It's a big one that we found in our research. All of these, we've pulled from all of these different discussions in case studies over the last 14 years.

And then betrayed and then unworthy.

Fear of the avoidance always try to over-deliver

and over-achieve just to feel acceptable in a baseline. They're very like, "I'll do the most. Just to feel like, "Okay, I'm acceptable at all." And then they haven't made quorum on a feeling unsafe. Now, if you ask if you're a full of wanting to feel unsafe,

I'll say no. I could handle myself, I'm tough, I'm strong. But if you pay close attention and a nervous system level, they spend a lot more time than the average person in fight, flight, freeze or fawn mode.

They people please in fawn mode, until they get frustrated with people pleasing and feel taken advantage of. And then they fight, and they get mad. And then they have moments of kind of freezing

or fleeing. They push things away and kind of run off or, you know, in a lot of different situations. Yes, you know, it's so funny. You're just scribing an x-boy for an in mind to achieve.

Interesting. Is it possible to be a combination of angiously attached and fearful and a sprinkle of dismissive? (laughs) That's usually just a fearful one who leans a little more anxious.

So it's an on a continuum. And because fearful went to both sides, they lean usually a little bit more and went ahead the other half. I thought, oh my God, that one was like a disaster.

So were you a little more avoidant, my little more dismissive would or you secure mostly at the time? I mean, the funny thing is, I think I, I don't know. I feel like I'm a secure, yeah. I securely attached, until someone makes me feel insecure,

then I maybe will get anxious a little bit. A little bit anxious. Like, 'cause typically I would imagine, you know, have you ever heard, I'm sure you have. But I'm a big believer that people like who like them.

So if you feel, if you feel that you're really liked by someone, it makes you like them back more, right? So especially for women, I feel like women want to feel pursued and chosen and cherished and loved. So when someone makes you feel that way,

when someone makes me feel that way, I'd like want to be with them more, until I don't. But that's a whole lot of their story. (laughs) We're a different podcast.

“And I think it's really important to note”

one thing that you said, which really stood out to me, which is that secure people are not robots. Like you are going to, there's a difference between me. - You can make someone feel, to me, I think a lot of your attachment style can tweak

So if someone makes you feel secure and chosen and just loved, it will make you feel more confident in the relationship and more secure. - So it makes you feel like you are an afterthought or that you are easily replaceable

or that you are just kind of not a priority. That will make you feel more anxious. - So here's a really interesting nuance to that. - Okay, go ahead. - So if you're secure and somebody makes you feel not a priority,

not chosen and doesn't show up, not good to you.

First things to hear really attach people

do is they communicate about it. They'll say like, I don't like this,

“I need more consistency, that's what I'm looking for.”

And then they'll vet how somebody responds and if the person keeps doing that, they will honor themselves, they'll honor their own boundaries. They'll step back, they'll move away. So they may have this anxious feeling

'cause you're not a robot, you'll feel uncomfortable, you'll address it had on, communicate openly, leave if it's not working for you on or your truth. Anxiously attach individuals, they will when somebody makes them feel insecure.

They'll generally feel anxious no matter what, no matter who they're dating, but if they're with a really secure person, they'll feel a little less anxious for sure, but they'll still have those wounds showing up. But if they're with somebody insecure,

they attach especially to somebody more avoidant, they're called anxious preoccupied. And anxious preoccupied means like they will ruminate nonstop, they'll try harder,

though people please more, if somebody's being avoided,

not really choosing them, not making them a priority. They'll be like, oh my gosh, I have to do whatever I can to be what they want me to be. They'll think about the person on top, they'll have a hard time focusing out work.

They'll text a lot, they'll try to cling, they'll try to look at the person's social media and on top to see what they're doing,

“like they literally make that person the center of their universe.”

And it just magnifies what's already existing in them. Those anxious wounds versus secure person was like, I feel anxious, but I'm gonna honor myself and eventually walk. So those are the big difference in it.

- Oh, that's a really good point. So you can feel anxious, but not acting, just-- - Exactly. - Yes, okay, so-- - And not abandon yourself.

- Exactly. - So acting anxious to me, though, again, 'cause I'm not that person by and people can attest to that.

But I will say that that's really interesting

about the anxious attachment, because what that exact behavior does is actually make that avoidant avoidant, try to avoid you more. It's actually turns them off more

when you are smuddering them. - 100, right? - If you're constantly, it's like not, it's like you're doing the antithesis of what you should be doing

if you're trying to like reel in, unavoidant. - Exactly. And so what's so interesting is that I establish a single trigger patterns and relationships. We relationship paths them until you work through them,

even to secure people. - Okay. - And I think after talking, I'm like, okay, you're definitely secure. - I think so.

- No, for sure, like, and from the things you said, if that's helpful, so when you look at it, it's so interesting. So every person is trigger patterns and relationships, and what this means, usually one or two.

But what this means is exactly your biggest core wound that you haven't worked through yet. How you behave to cope with your own wound, happens to trigger partners biggest core wound, and how they behave, happens to retrigger yours.

So you go in a vicious cycle. So for example, anxious, dismissal avoidant. dismissal avoidant, they like their space thingy space. They do their own thing, they kind of pull away, they're not as present and available as the anxious would like.

- Anger's person interprets it through the language of their subconscious mind, I am being abandoned. That's their bear in the woods that they're projecting out. How they cope with when they feel abandoned, exactly to your point is to cling.

- dismissal avoidant, one of their biggest core wounds. - I am trapped. You're now cleaning to me. - Okay, you're trapping me. I need to push you away further,

because I feel more trapped. So there are behavioral responses to push away further, making the person feel more anxious, to cling more, person feels more trapped. - So that's the bad combination right there.

That's a bad combination. Unless you really, what would make that person, those people want to stay and work at it, if that is that vicious cycle of like, oh my god, you're smothering me, like, go away for a bit.

Like I said, I had this one boyfriend. He was like so much. It felt like he was a girl in a lot of ways. And that was my next question. Do women tend to be more anxious

and men seem to be more avoidant? Or, and now in the last maybe 20 years, when now there's much more of a women have more masculine energy, or there are much more career oriented,

or whatever the thing has been like a shift. Where now men are more anxious, women are more avoidant. Have you seen any of this in terms of,

“yeah, I mean, you know, that's what we wanted it.”

So historically, I mean, if you look at culturally over the decades, men are told more step up or live, don't be a crybaby, we'd be tough, that's more of their messaging they get,

how we get conditioned is through repetition and emotion over time. And so keep in mind too, like if people hear these core wounds, you can rewire them, like you're not stuck with them,

you're all like either, but absolutely men get a lot more conditioning about repress your emotions, stuff them down. So dismiss them wouldn't skew very male-based

I mean, you look at not just in terms of society's messaging, but even like hormonally, I even historically women tend to be more in groups, like the gathers, right? So there's a lot more of that inconsistency,

in which is a big part of what causes anxious attachments, also anxious, women lean more anxious, historically, men lean more dismissive of women, and that gap is closing.

It's closing slowly, but it's starting to close a little bit, which is interesting probably because of part of what we're seeing in society. Yeah, there are more women who are educated in school, working more, making more money.

Now there's a whole big trend with like friendships, versus like women don't want to even like be in relationships, like the whole idea of relationships has now shifted to such a place that that's even interesting. Exactly.

“I find all of this, and I think a lot of it”

is also kind of rooted in what you see in social media, which I think is also very toxic and terrible. 100%. I'm kind of a traditional person. I mean, like I said, I think no matter how successful,

I am or how much of a boss, you know, air quotes, you know, people will say you are, or I think I am, whatever. Just don't want to feel like a woman. You still want to feel like taking care of,

you still want to feel like, you know, you're being protected.

I mean, some things never change no matter what in life.

I mean, do you know what I mean? I wholeheartedly agree with you. Like, girl, I mean, any woman who sits here and says, oh, I don't need a man, or I don't need this, like, you're in a line.

And I'll be really honest. I'll be the first person to tell you that when I was like that, probably almost 20 years ago now, I was like, I was very like, I'm never getting married. I'm never having kids because I was wounded.

And I was wounded that my father had my most fears from men around things I was carrying from what I saw growing up that were difficult, that I didn't have proper understanding for at the time. And I internalized a lot of that and I was scared.

And so I had all these wounds that I can't trust anybody. I'm gonna be abandoned anyways. I'm gonna be rejected and I'm all alone. I'm gonna be helpless or trapped in the wrong relationship. So I had all that internalized and then that showed up

as, I don't need anybody. I don't want to need anybody. And as I healed, that distinctly changed for me. And then I stepped a lot more into the space of like, oh my gosh, what was I thinking?

Right. And then entered into a marriage where I'm actually very, very happy and so grateful. And I thank my own inner child for being able to withstand that. But I'm so grateful to myself not to put myself

on some kind of like pedestal, but I'm so grateful that I did the work because I would have really, really missed out.

“And by the way, the fact that you have to even say,”

putting yourself on a pedestal, why do people even have to say that? Like you should put yourself on a pedestal. And my opinion, you know, seriously like you did the work, you're accomplished, you're this, this is like,

you know, you should be on a pedestal. I'm just saying, thank you.

I'm just saying, we've always do that though.

They always like stop themselves from giving themselves like a pat on the back. Yeah, and I hear you and I agree with that so much. And I should work on that in a lot of ways. So I agree, but I also am sensitive

to that there may be people who think who feel like I did. Feel at one point who like didn't understand. And if I heard somebody say, oh, marriage is so great. It's so wonderful. I'm so glad.

No, it's not. But I might have been like, you know, I just worry that it's sad for people to hear that if they're not in that head space. And it's so worth working through your stuff

because on the other side of it, life gets so much easier. Right. So you're just kind of trying to be cognizant of people who are in a different space. Yeah, I feel like that's fair.

Okay, that's fair, right? I think I can appreciate that. I do have to work on like owning and building some of those cool things though. Yeah, I do too.

All women do it. You know, and you mean like, that's the other thing, right? Like, no matter how far we come, how far we've come, we still are back in these places where in general, like we feel guilty by like saying we've accomplished

something or did something good, did something nice or whatever. Like when someone compliments me or you or whoever, where was like, oh, you know, like it's like,

we're always like kind of like shrinking ourselves.

Yeah, agreed. I don't know. It's like a very strange thing to do. I actually looked into this one time. Really?

On my own self because I was easy to really like this. And I'm like, come a long way, but I have a little work to do. Maybe, but I made it mean that if I do that, then it's a threat to emotional connection.

And so I sort of my mind that, oh, if I own fully and I take up space because a lot of my conditioning in my own childhood was that when people took up space, they took a little too much space, and they didn't consider others.

And so it was mean or harsh. And so then I had wired it in that way.

“And that's what I was playing out of my own conditioning”

at a subconscious level. No, but I think that that's a really good point. I think that because we all want to be accepted and we feel that's alienating for people, right? Like, if we think too highly of ourselves,

then it comes across as arrogant or conceded, right? And I think that the way we were conditioned to think

and that's a bad thing. But isn't that what we're all preaching now? Like, isn't there like, it's so counter-intuitive.

Every second Instagram account is about empowerment,

personal development, self-worth, feeling good about yourself. And then when we actually say we feel good about ourselves, then we get trash that we feel too good about ourselves. You're not wrong. So where do you win?

If you're too pretty, that's a problem. You're too ugly, that's a problem. If you're too smart, that's a problem. Everything's a problem with the someone, right? Yeah, I agree so much, and that's a world of social media.

“But I think if it's two things, if you pull it back”

down to poor wounds and needs. So for me, my poor wounds, like, if I take up too much space, I'll be bad or I'll be rejected. So I had to work on that. Totally.

But I also believe that taking up too much space was a threat to emotional connection, which I really care about as a big need. So it's like me protecting that need, even though I've worked through the wound, you don't even need it.

Yeah, so that's the one thing. But then the other thing, which is interesting, is I do believe, and I'm curious, your thoughts. I do believe that when people take up so much space, a lot of times it's from its own insecurity.

Totally. I think true confidence is more quiet and subtle anyways, and it's not confidence is arrogance, it's confidence is the absence of all that in our dialogue and in our critic, and somebody living in alignment with our needs,

well being able to honor and be mindful of other people simultaneously. I think it's a really delicate balance. Yeah, yeah, really delicate balance. It's a really delicate balance, 'cause I totally agree,

because it's one thing to be abrasive in that and you're right. Like, I think that there is a delicate balance, because it's also about who you're talking to. There's also an EQ piece, right? If you're speaking to someone who's hard done by

or feels really badly about themselves, you're gonna be more conscientious of that, right? But then you happen to still shrink yourself. It's a very delicate balance. But I just want everything with social media,

how it's like, it's like, what do you call it? It's making, what do you call art imitating life?

“Now like it's weird, like life is imitating social media,”

based on what trends for a week, right? How we date, how we talk to ourselves, how we, how we respond in relationships. Everything is now becoming like, it's a microcosm for what we see on social.

It's so crazy that you said that.

Like, I actually have never thought of it that way,

and it's such a, I love that insight. It's also scary, because the reality is, when you look at like the neuroscience of conditioning, how we get conditioned is repetition and emotion. And especially repetition and emotion

when we're in a suggestible state, when our brain's producing more alpha brain waves, and then actually happens in the first hour that we wake up in the last hour that we've got a bad a lot. So you think of most people right now,

what do they do? They wake up, shut up their alarm, look at social media. Before bad, last hour before they go to sleep, scrolling through social media, a lot of people, that's going to be getting into a day.

So we're getting conditioned, and honestly, a lot of stuff that's on social media is kind of BS. Like a lot of stuff on social media, these trends are these things. They're not actually healthy.

And so now to think that. And you just, I got, I got a little jorn by that. No, it's not true. It's not bad. If you become like, well, social media has become like a real Truman show.

Remember the show the Truman show? Yeah, definitely. And also nothing is what it seems in real life. I really believe that to be. Like it's like everyone is most people are Charlotte Tins.

And they are figuring out a way to hook you in. Like what's the best hook to get you to watch this video? So they'll just say whatever is necessary, and then they'll just keep on going down that whole. Like so I think that we are all being programmed in a way

that's not necessarily in our best interest for our own mental health. Well, I was going to say earlier, you said something about limiting beliefs. Right? I mean, I did it. I did it.

My first TED talk ever. I talked about this. And it went viral. It was like millions and millions of people.

I mean, this was my first one was like seven years ago or whatever.

And this whole idea of limiting beliefs. And now everyone's, of course, not net. Everyone talks about it. And it's about this idea of self-doubt. You just talked about it again.

“And that's what kind of triggered me is even saying this is because time is passed,”

but we're still exactly where we are. Right? Like we're all preaching how to get over self-doubt, how to kind of get yourself to a new place. And yet when we eliminate self-doubt, we get kind of pounced on.

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But I wanted to talk about it because now that was a whole different tangent, but other questions that I know you're super, super, super-like type for time. Can you please tell me how we do reprogram ourselves because they still don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Okay.

So there's a good one. Yeah, the first step. So there's different tools for that. So there's five pillars. So one is we have to rewire those core wounds, seconds we have to rewire a relationship

tour needs.

Third is regulate our nervous system, fourth is learn to communicate effectively because most people

have really poor communication strategies and just some have learned and last is boundaries. And we have to do it at a subconscious level.

“So I'll start with just the rewire core wounds.”

I do not believe in affirmations. I'll tell you why affirmations are language. Okay. So if we have a core wound and let you say, for example, the core wound is I am not good enough. Okay?

Well, your core wound is of your subconscious mind. So nobody wakes up unconsciously chooses to tell themselves, "Oh, today I'm going to tell myself 64 times that I'm not good enough." Right? That's not conscious.

No one's choosing that. So the core wound has been imprinted at a subconscious level. Like the bear in the woods. We stored the thread and now we project it onto things on autopilot. It's not by conscious choice.

So when we do affirmations, we are using our conscious mind to speak to our conscious mind. It has even reached our subconscious mind because the conscious speaks an language and your subconscious speaks an emotions and imagery. For example, if I were to say to you, okay, whatever you do, do not think of the pink elephant.

Yes, so true. So subconscious is like think elephant and conscious is like do not, but it was too late. And so what happens is people do all these affirmations and they're just using their conscious mind to speak to their conscious mind and it's not even getting picked up by their subconscious. So there's three steps to do this properly to actually rewire.

Step one, find the core wound and it's opposite. I'm not good enough. I am good enough. I will be betrayed. I deserve loyalty.

I'll be abandoned. I'll have connection. So you find the opposite, okay? Step two is now we have to take that information and drive it to our subconscious. The subconscious mind speaks in emotions and imagery.

“So how do we elicit emotions and imagery so it reaches our subconscious mind?”

Well, every memory we ever have is a container of emotions and images. If I were to say, tell me your favorite childhood memory and let's say you said I was playing at the beach with my family. You would see the images of the ocean and the sand. Maybe the red sand bucket is your building a sand castle.

And we've all seen people when they were called. Well, the memories are old stories together with your friends from decades ago. When you tell old stories and you laugh and you smile because all memory contains emotion. So now we know that we can leverage memory to reach our subconscious mind. So step two, after we go, I am not good enough.

I am good enough. Step two is we come up with 10 pieces of memory. I have times we actually did feel good enough.

And there's a third step.

But this allows us, there's a little bit of repetition, repetition, emotion, and imagery, fire, and wire, and neural networks in our brain. So now we've got 10 times we felt good enough and we can pull from the different areas of life. Career, family, or friendships, or romantic relationships or money. You know, we can pull from different areas. Okay, when did we actually feel good enough?

We don't need big things. Just enough to elicit a little emotional response. So it might be, I was good enough last week when I had a hard conversation with somebody at work that I was nervous to do and did anyways. And you feel that little bit of emotion in your body. And you get that little, that imagery of you sitting at your computer having that hard conversation, for example.

So now we record that down. We record ourselves after we've written those down saying it out loud. And in step three, what we now do is we listen back in a suggestible state for 21 days. Suggestible state means when our brain is producing more alpha or theta brain waves. And we are super suggestible, meaning our subconscious mind really picks up information and sponges it up more effectively.

And so what we're doing is first thing in the morning, you snooze your alarm.

And you're producing these alpha brain waves instead of scrolling on social media and conditioning yourself with social media. Right. You're now thinking back and feeling in your body about times you did feel good enough. And visualizing the imagery. And you've got ten of them.

So it's repeated across 21 days and research shows that it takes roughly 21 days to build entirely new neural networks in our brain to believe new things about ourselves. If it's at least with high emotion. And we're doing it in a suggestible state. So when we're rewiring behaviors, it can take up to 63 days if it's just behavioral. But doing this fast tracks the process and what you'll see and we actually had people.

We took all these people who came to our program.

But we took everybody we sent it to everybody.

Hey, tell us if you didn't miss a day. You were highly present and focused for that two to five minutes. And you found yourself feeling the the feelings in your body and visualizing the times you felt good enough or whatever the opposite of the core one was. How effective was this at getting rid of core wounds and we use this satisfaction score like an NPS score. And we got a 99.7% NPS score.

I chose that exercise alone. Yeah. So what's happening and trust me. It really, really works.

I did this like crazy on myself firsthand and and and it really, really works.

And people will go through these decades of carrying these crazy wounds like these really hard things like the fear of abandonment and look at how that blows up your life. You accidentally push people away because you're clinging or if you're avoiding you sabotage by pushing people away in stone walling like these things it really hurt us. And they can be core wounds that show up in our workplace like you believe you're on worthy. You don't ask for raises the way that you showed you don't take up space in a healthy way.

So all these things that show up for us. You can literally rewire them you're not born with these wounds they get wired into you and you can change them.

“No, I think that's a that's a that's why like I like things that are actionable that people can do.”

The pleasure of their life as opposed to just you know talking and learning. Yeah, because then you just it's just intellectualized information it's just more info instead of actually changing things. So we have different tools for each pillar there's the needs pillar the nervous system pillar the boundaries pillar the communication pillar. But all of them are designed to rewire these patterns we're carrying at a subconscious level. And when you look securely attached people what do they have less core wounds.

They know their needs and how to meet them themselves. They have a regulated nervous system. They know how to communicate their needs and healthy ways to others and they have healthy boundaries. So we're just reverse engineering that by re wiring these five pillars at a subconscious level to ensure that people become securely attached. I love that.

Now I'm going to read you one question I have here. Okay, so what's the one belief about lover relationships that most people are holding on to that is quietly destroying the ability to connect. It's a really great question.

“It honestly goes by attachment style because if there is one belief for everybody I mean the one belief everybody shares this in securely attached is the belief that they're unsafe and manifest in different ways.”

And you just are afraid that they'll be unsafe with people leave them so they cling. If you're for the ones or just unsafe because they don't trust the environment or the world and they're on high alert. And dismiss the ones feel unsafe in a conflict so they push people away and stone wall and avoid things. But I would say the biggest ones per attachment style are the fear of abandonment if you're anxious the fear that you're shameful deep down and need to create space if you're defective. Or if you're dismissive avoidant defective core wound and the big fear of betrayal for fearful avoidance.

And when you look at what happens in your life when you believe this narrative that everybody's going to betray you. How do you show up right it's chaos or if you believe that everybody is going to see that you're shameful deep down when they see you. What do you do you make sure nobody sees you keep distance all the time or if you believe everybody's going to be going to abandon you. You try to cling so hard and so fast so that that never happens and so these things have this massive impact and I think what's really sad is that it's an injustice that we acquire these core wounds and it's own sense in childhood.

It means you went through something hard and we're getting conditioned all the time so it can also be in your adult relationships that you get a core wound if you go through something difficult. But it's a greater injustice that we are replaying these stories and the relationship to ourselves all the time and then driving they drive these behaviors that then cause those things to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Because when you think that everybody's going to abandon you you cling and then people are like whoa and they pull away so these things drive the exact thing that we're so afraid of until we learn to actually rewire them.

What do you think of AI being someone's now new therapist because people are like going into chat GPT or Claude and they're saying you know so and so did this to me. And then it's spewing out well they are somewhat a blah blah blah attachment avoidant or avoidant whatever attachment style and people are using this as their main reference point what do you think of this will. I think it's scary. I mean there's three reasons number one is that the AI loves to validate you.

I'll just say by the way that to me is the most scary yeah unless you say I learned to trick that straight up with me tell me the truth yeah like basically if I don't say.

“Don't sugar coat this tell me exactly the truth as someone would see it it will come back and say how wonderful I am how marvelous I am like you have to be so careful with chat GPT.”

It basically just blows you up to be the best thing some slice bread it's so unrealistic and it's on honest and exactly and so then so then you end up in a situation where it's validating. If you're in a difficult position in a relationship enough where you've to go to AI to type it out you may have some of your own part to contribute and if you're only seeing it through the other person side it's deflecting it's blaming it's validating you and it may stop you from number two having the awareness of what's going on.

That's the problem but if you do say something to AI like give me the hard truth don't hold back no sugar coating.

And so there's some degree of truth on the internet but there's also a lot of people like we were talking about who just call everybody the narcissist.

“Or who just throw around things and so now you're taking this basket it's almost like an ETF right you take this basket of.”

Of all the information on the internet and now it's giving you the sample of all the information will like do you want do you think that for anybody doing this do you think that.

The entirety of the internet is something that you think is a healthy resource for advice right now because that's the consolidated version you're getting through.

And so to me it's going to validate you it's going to cause a lot of shifting and blame and not allow you to really look at your own part which you do say don't sugar coat it tell me the hard truth.

“Then the third thing is that you get the basket of advice from whoever they're doing whatever you know I always I think that no matter how good AI gets.”

And it's a place of human connection and self awareness right like to me that's the most fundamental skill someone could have to be successful in any area of your life right.

If you don't have the ability to like self regulate and self control and like know yourself no die self all these tools are you might are just going to be running ramp it on you like they're controlling you you're not controlling it. I know not a grimoire and I love that you said that I really agree that like the knowing of self and self awareness and the ability like there's one of my favorite quotes is criticism is an immense gift for those who are interested in self realization. And and I think that there's a beauty like if you get criticized it doesn't mean that everybody's criticisms are correct somebody could say something because they're projecting but there's a beauty to being able to sit in people's criticism and say well is that true and to actively consider it because it can give self awareness and so.

You get a tool that's just taking that away from us if people are not saying don't sugarcoat then you miss out on this like massive part of life that allows you to grow as a person because there's a mirror and to you and you can become self aware also I think when a lot of it like to know someone else is attachment is very helpful to a point yes but to a point right because. You at the end of the day you can never change somebody else unless they want to be changed you can only change yourself so focusing yourself focusing that time and attention on you and why you do something and how you can be better is way more productive in a long run.

And so I think that's a little bit more than going and trying to figure out with chat GPT if this person is a you know unavoidin if this person is a fearful how that's going to like what's the attributes like it's I find it to be interesting just to know overall so you know you're dealing with kind of but at the end of the day you know like there's other variables also that you can't like account for.

“And also I always say to people look it's great to know that your partner might be a dismissive of one because you don't personalize their behavior right if you keep ending up with a dismissive of widens what is that thing about your condition.”

Exactly or what is that or if you're putting up with somebody you know it's unhealthy consciously you know that this is not okay I'm not happy I'm not fulfilled but subconsciously you keep saying. What do you need to be rewiring within you so that you give yourself permission to read what your pattern exactly what like because but you know it also I find is so weird is that you can be very self aware and still make the same mistake over and over again because a lot of times you are mistaken chemistry for can a chemistry and connection for love like there's a lot of things that you think are one thing but it's actually another thing like lust and love are very different like chemistry and love.

Very different 100% and to your point the reason we can be himself aware and keep choosing the wrong thing is because the difference between your consciousness subconscious mind. So conscious mind can say I know this is wrong I know I should leave I know this person's treating me unfairly I know what my patterns are but unless you're rewiring them at a subconscious level 95% of you it's going to keep running the show. Yeah 100%. So what how do we know when we when do we know can you give people some indications of when one thing is not what they when something's not what they think it is like there's something here I wrote down in my notes or someone gave me something and I looked at it.

What is limerence versus love. Great question so limerence is intense in factuation the point of like extremes of abandonment so limerence actually exist if we're getting really real about limerence it exists along a continuum with at the length of the far end of the continuum being like stalking. Oh yeah so not to get really really down the round all the way a lot of people experience limerence but if you look at it this way or needs are driving us in a lot of ways and our subconscious mind when it can't get its needs met in the present breaks off into fantasies of the future memories of the past as it means to get its needs met so for example if you see somebody feeling lonely.

And so and if you think of times you reminisce it's feelings in your body and it creates a neurochemical cocktail of like you feeling like those needs are kind of indirectly met and if you look at limerence a lot of it's about fantasy of a future so somebody in limerence they might need somebody after a first date and say oh my gosh we're going to travel here we're going to do this thing we're going to get married we're going to have a family and when they think those things in visualized those things that creates all these these feelings that create neurochemical reactions throughout their physiology and now they're in that space.

“So limerence a lot of what's happening is people fall into limerence a very prone to limerence when they have profoundly unmet needs from childhood and what happens is somebody comes along and needs the need.”

It's like fireworks go off in our brain and now all of a sudden somebody's like they keep thinking and feeling and trying to simulate that need being met in their brain again and it can lead them to doing sometimes irrational things.

So for example I had a client come in years ago and I worked in private practice and she was a supposed to get engaged and she came into meet with me and she said.

I'm sorry she was engaged supposed to get married and she came into meet with me and she said hey I'm thinking of calling off my wedding because I met a man in the coffee shop. And I spilled my coffee everywhere and he came and he sat and he helped me mop it up and he checked in with me and he picked everything up and he could tell us stress and he said are you okay and he asked about my day. And she was like I think it was love at first sight and I have kind of like I'm a little skeptical of things like that where it's like okay love at first sight that's usually limerence.

And so I asked her I said okay what was your childhood like what did what did this man make you feel and we landed on she felt deeply seen. And we looked in her childhood she felt deeply unseen by both of her parents.

And so felt like her parents were always unavailable we looked at her fiance and her fiance had all these wonderful qualities but wasn't the best of being present and made her making her feel seen.

So I said okay why don't we try this before you call if you're your engagement why don't we sit down for the next four weeks.

“And I want you to work on telling your partner your fiance all the information you need to feel seen.”

I'm more vulnerable talking about what your needs are asking him to be more present sitting down having these dinners together were like phones are off and you say that this is extremely important to you into something you're missing. And at the end of four weeks of that need is filled in your fiance relationship. And because what you'll see and this happens over and over again is exactly what happened so we sat down there. And at the end of the experience at the end of four weeks by like week three she was like oh I can't believe I thought I was thinking of calling off that wedding because we have a void of this need being that we're trying to simulate it meet it.

But it fantasizing with the guy on the coffee shop gets the new met in the marriage instead and actually one of the biggest reasons people cheat out of 100% 10% of people cheat for pathological reasons narcissistic personality disorder sex addiction these things 90% of people cheat because they've deeply on men needs in their relationship.

They don't know how to communicate them and bridge the gap they then feel resentful of their partner because the partner supposed to meet their needs.

Somebody comes into their life externally happens to meet the steeply unmet need causes some degree of limits in their brain. Fireworks going off on my gosh. Then they fantasize about that person constantly because they're actually fantasizing about the need in trying to gain proximity to it at a subconscious level because your subconscious needs meeting machine. And now they're chasing after somebody outside of the relationship and they're highly likely to cheat. And what we get people to do I spent a lot of time with people doing this who are thinking about cheating or having marital issues.

What are they in the fantasy of cheating what needs are being met sometimes it's to feel more seeing more protected more wanted more prioritized to feel special again. And when we start implementing those needs in the marriage itself with people through healthy communication and consistency people don't cheat anymore or they don't think about cheating and that comes out of the relationship because that's the subconscious root of why those things happen.

“That is so like spot on when I think happens. That's amazing you just described it though perfectly like that whole that whole pattern.”

Yeah, yeah. So who is there a particular attachment style that does it? All in securely attached to Alzheimer's slightly more likely to cheat than secure people because secure people communicate their needs openly and consistently. And you're saying attached individuals are more likely to emotionally cheat and marriages because they have deeply unmet emotional needs a lot of the time. Just miss some avoidance and fearful avoidance may dismiss a voice or more likely to cheat without emotional connections so for for physical reasons.

Usually because they want to feel a sense of something outside of their relationship, but yet they don't like to be too vulnerable and fearful avoidance are the ones most likely to cheat for both. But again, cheating is a symptom. It's a symptom of deeply unmet needs in a lack of communication when you bridge those gaps as long as the person's willing to work with you in that relationship. Sometimes people who think about cheating or even in certain cases and this is a touchy subject for like we can do a whole podcast about this one, but I spent a lot of time working with people who had cheated in relationships.

And I'll be the first person to say like if I was cheated on, I would probably just exit like I and I dearly love my husband, but that's always been kind of a non-negotiable for me since the young age.

I spent a lot of time working with people on addressing the root causes of cheating and there's a very long process to go through it's on easy, but sometimes I would work with people on this because they get to the roots of these deeply unmet needs and sometimes they rebuilt an entirely new relationship that was much better off than it was before. Because if there's this cheating symptom, generally there's multiple parties, both parties have completely unmet needs in their relationship for usually a long standing period of time.

Have never figured out a bridge of the gap in communication.

They're carrying this chronic resentment and then by getting to the roots of things and doing that underlying work, they rebuild from an entirely new place and they actually see and connect to each other for the first time. That's incredible. I mean, so you work with people like you have a private practice. So I did for years and then I moved everything to online programs because we had a really big wait list and I couldn't get to enough people. So now I take people to online programs and we do group.

So people come through courses, they get these processes and exactly what to do and then after that, I'm in their three days a week with people so they can come ask me questions all that kind of stuff. How much is it? $67 a month. That's it. We're going to make it accessible for people that was my number one goal doing all of this. Wow. Yeah. I was going to ask you something that's also a big, you know, social media highlight love bombing.

“Who love bombs? What type of attachment style love bombs the most?”

Great question. So interesting attached individuals love bomb the most, but for reasons that are very innocent. It's because they naturally see themselves as having to win and earn approval, so they're in the pit. They put it to people on a pedestal more easily. So their love bombing isn't with the intent to manipulate. It's with the intent to get close to somebody because they think they're so amazing. Okay. So that's natural for them. If you're full of winds often do the same thing. They also see people as being on a pedestal compared to themselves dismissive of winds or the least likely to love bond because they don't really engage in that kind of behavior.

You're going to feel comfortable to say for them. But the one that's malicious is narcissists because narcissists love on with a different intent. It's let me get to know and they're so good at getting people into liners because they're so good at finding people's deepest childhood on that needs. Building into those and then when they've loved bombs and got you hooked, now the devaluation phase begins. So they love bomb with the intent to manipulate you because they're conditioning how you see them and then they've a lot of control over you long term.

Okay. So when an anxious attachment or a fearful devoidant does the love bombing, what happens next?

“So when the anxious and fearful devoidant's love bomb anxious attachments, they'll basically keep love bombing through a lot of the relationship.”

Because they always put this person on a pedestal and they're trying to people please engage in proximity, fearful devoidants frequently love bomb.

Then they when somebody gets too close to them, triggers are avoidance sign. And then they feel like oh my gosh, and fearful devoidants are also very much in mesh and they feel like they lose themselves in relationships. And they can only do that for so long before they set a big wall and deactivate and so a lot of times fearful avoidance will get into these dynamics. And then they will love bomb at the beginning and then they will eventually get burned out and feel overwhelmed. And then completely fall off or really retreat.

This is so interesting. I love all of this is so interesting. I love this up too. I had one other question that was so like, oh, co-dependence. I wanted to ask you about co-dependence. When is like, I would imagine anxiously attach people are very co-dependent.

Yes. And that's when the problem starts with the avoidance. How can someone fix something? How do I say this in a nice way?

“How does someone who's co-dependent stop being so co-dependent to make the request to actually stop being so co-dependent so they don't destroy the relationship?”

Great question.

So number one thing that happens is that we get into co-dependent dynamics because we've never learned a healthy sense of self.

So people are a co-dependent or trying to find their identity through others. And so they usually have a couple of things happening. They don't know their own needs and they don't know how to meet their own needs. So they don't know how to actually self-suit. That's a huge part of self-suit.

So they see with externally through others. And then they usually have also been conditioned with these beliefs that say you literally are responsible for other people's feelings. If you don't take care of them, you're a bad person. If you're not sacrificing all the time and being selfless, you're also a bad person. So a bad person. So they get conditioned beliefs that are actually moving them towards being more co-dependent.

And they also don't know how to source their needs outside of relationships. So now they have a perfect storm. And so what ends up happening is ancient attachments also are highly co-dependent. Distanceable winds are highly counter-dependent. They're actually trying to constantly create distance.

And fearful winds oscillate between the two extremes going back and forth. And healing co-dependency and overcoming it is rewiring the beliefs that are keeping you co-dependent. And things like if I'm not with somebody 24/7, I'll be abandoned, if I'm not taking care of everybody's feelings. I'm not good enough or a bad person. We have to rewire those ideas that we've been conditioned with that we're not born with that got conditioned into us.

And on the flip side, we have to learn who we are.

“Start to meet our own needs halfway so that we have a healthy sense of identity and self.”

And decide what we want in the different areas of our lives to discover who we are in the career area around money. Mentally, there are hobbies that things we learn about emotionally how we regulate or grow and introspect. Spiritually, physically, in all relationships that's a part of it. Like keep friends, keep families. So we have to learn who we are across those seven areas of life.

And then we need to learn to build good habits. So we have a strong sense of self.

And then we rewire those wounds, we're meeting our needs.

And we know who we are and that's the antithesis to codependency. Wow. So there's an action plan. Yes.

“100% I am such I love that you said earlier that you like actionable things.”

That's like my thing. Yeah. I mean, I'm so not a person or interested in just like woo woo. Like, you know, manifestation without an action plan or like just like thinking something into existence doesn't really happen. Or intellectualizing information.

Here's here's codependency.

Here's what is here's how it affects you.

Or just go on reading another. Yeah, like just thinking about reading another blog, but then don't do anything about it. Exactly. Right. Because that's what we're doing.

“We're just consumption or just consuming information without having any like, like, execution.”

Like execution exactly, you know, and that's where that's the 90% of it. 99% is execution. 1% is what inspiration, and no, yeah, 1% is inspiration, 99 perspiration. Oh my gosh. Okay. I like love this podcast. I know I got into, I got to wrap it with you. You are, this was really interesting. This was so fun. It was so interesting. Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays, Tays,

It goes through their assessment, gives all their bonus, their needs, all that good stuff, too. - I'm gonna do that. I didn't even know you had one. I'm gonna do that.

That's a great test to have you have your own knowledge. I appreciate the, like, again, action. - Thank you so much. And this was so when I really enjoyed being here and chatting with you.

- Thank you, me too. You can come back next time. - Yeah, I would love to. We could talk about cheating on all the things. - Oh, but I'm getting into the real time.

- I mean, there's so many we could do the whole series of this stuff. I love this stuff. - All right, thank you. - Thank you so much.

- Bye. (upbeat music)