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Part 1: The 4 Attachment Styles and How to Heal Yours with Thais Gibson

31m 31s

Part 1: The 4 Attachment Styles and How to Heal Yours with Thais Gibson

The podcast introduces attachment theory as a framework for understanding relationship patterns, defined as subconscious rules for giving and receiving love learned from childhood. The host, Sammy, shares her personal experience of using attachment theory to navigate a past toxic relationship and her journey to a secure, happy marriage. Guest expert Tais Gibson explains the four attachment styles: secure individuals, comprising about 50% of the population, enjoy fulfilling relationships; anxious individuals fear abandonment and often become people-pleasers; avoidant individuals fear engulfment and struggle with vulnerability; and fearful-avoidant individuals, often from chaotic backgrounds, oscillate between craving and fearing closeness. Gibson emphasizes that these styles are not fixed labels; through neuroplasticity and targeted work, people can rewire their patterns and achieve secure attachment, potentially in as little as 90 days. The discussion underscores that understanding one's attachment style is a first step toward healing, not a permanent identity, empowering listeners to transform their relational dynamics.

Transcription

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The following podcast is a deer media production. Hey guys, it's Sammy. And Sammy and welcome to Transform, your safe space to form the best version of you. There are going to be a lot of laughs and oh boy, a lot of tears. But we are so grateful to be alongside you and your journey to transform. Ooh, here we go. Let's do it! I am so excited that you are back for Transform. We have the one and only Tais Gibson here today. She's actually calling in from California. I'm here in Texas. We're so excited that you're listening. I personally found Tais through a personal endeavor of really needing to understand attachment theory and all the different attachment styles way back when. And this is when I was in a toxic relationship. I know we can all relate. And I remember feeling like there had to be a reason why I was feeling the way I was. And I used it as a time to not only learn about myself, but learn about an ex-partner at the time and really figure out so much meaning and value behind attachment theory. And there's different styles. Everyone kind of has their own and we'll get into all of that. But I've personally found attachment theory to be something that for me allowed me to level up not only in how I was perceiving someone else and who they were, but also more deeply understanding myself and learning so much about Tais' work. Maybe so excited to bring her on today. And who would have thought that all those years ago in that toxic relationship, I would be sitting here happily married, so freaking pregnant and so excited to tap into attachment theory. That's so sweet. I'm so glad to hear your back. Sorry. And thank you so much for having me. Yes. Welcome to Transform. So I'd love from the top for anyone who's listening who has not yet understood their attachment theory or even understands what attachment theory is. Give us the kindergarten example of really what this work does and how life changing it can be. Yeah. So your attachment style is basically the self-conscious set of rules that you've learned about love. So how to give and receive love, what your needs should look like when they're met, what expectations you carry into relationships and even how you communicate. And so when we don't understand that other people have a different attachment style than us and we're in a relationship to them, I always give people the analogy it's like sitting down to play a board game, but you have a different set of rules for how the board games are supposed to go. And no matter how much, like if you and your husband, for example, had a different attachment style and didn't understand these things, no matter how much we really want everything to work, no matter how much you want to have fun playing the board game, if you have a different sub-conscious set of rules, and it's like, is if you're sitting down to play monopoly and he's sitting down to play scrabble, and like there's just gonna be friction. There's just going to be unnecessary confusion and frustration. So, you know, originally learning but attachment styles is so powerful for people because it helps them do a couple of things. They first don't take other people's attachments out pattern. So personally, when they understand how other people work, more importantly, they can actually work through what they are bringing into relationships, what their sub-conscious patterns are. And then the body of work that I really, really focus on as somebody who has a background in hypnotherapy and neuroplasticity and how the brain actually changes more than anything, the original body of work of attachment styles was so beautiful because it said, here's four attachment styles. Every person has one, here's some things you can understand, but we went a lot deeper into these are the big triggers and wounds. People carry into relationships from their attachment style. These are the deeply unmet needs people have from their childhood, that they're bringing into their relationships and things that they're expecting. And here's how to rewire what's not working and keep what it's. So we really focus on how you can become securely attached, even if you weren't born into really healthy, you know, attachment conditions with your parents or did enough like the perfect upbringing of a child that we focus on, well, you can become secure anyways by leveraging neuroplasticity and you can do it as in as little as 90 days. And so that's the big focus is taking your attachment styles as that first step of understanding, but not hauling into the trap of just labeling yourself this attachment cell for the rest of your life and just justifying your patterns, but instead learning how to require them very easily. I love that you're referring to the labels of it all because we'll get into the four different types of attachment. But at the top, I've found that let's say you're coming into this with a more challenging attachment style and you've labeled yourself that because of what you've been through through your childhood hearing, you say that you can actually do the work to get to a secure attachment style is really the intention and the goal of the conversation that we're going to have today. And I think I can personally relate in that way too of my childhood wasn't necessarily normal quote unquote. I had parents who got divorced really early on in my life. My mom was an alcoholic. I loved her as deeply as I could, but there were just like a lot of struggles and a lot of challenges and a lot of places where yeah, like I wasn't necessarily getting the healthy form of love that I deserved at that time as a young kid. And I definitely saw that come in with specific romantic relationships as I started to date as I got older. And what's interesting now, as I said at the beginning of this episode is I'm in a really happy relationship where I actually took your quiz earlier and I am a secure attachment style. So I am proof that you can change and that you're labeled doesn't need to be your identity forever. So I'd love to tap into what are these four attachment styles and how knowing those four attachment styles, how can we then figure out how to move to that secure place. Okay, so I'll go through them at a high level and then we'll go through these five pillars of healing because there's really five pillars of like how we can move to that secure place and that's the most important thing. So I think people really like hearing what their attachment cell first because they often feel seen and heard and they are like, oh my gosh, that's me. I definitely do those things, but I just know that that's not exactly to your point. It's not this forever outcome. It's something that we want to be able to work through and change. So four attachment styles, every person has one. The first one is the secure attachment set. Securely attached people make up roughly 50% of the population. And what's really interesting about this is that securely attached people, the percent of people who are secure moves in lock stuff with a divorce rate. So when the amount of securely attached individuals goes up, the divorce rate down and vice versa. When the amount of secure people goes down, the divorce rate goes up. Securely attached people as adults, they actually report being the longest lasting relationships. But more importantly, they actually are reporting the most fulfilled and happy in those long lasting relationships. So it's not just like I was sitting at there for the kids and people are miserable. It's actual true joy and fulfillment in relationships. Securely attached people basically, because a lot of our conditioning comes from early childhood, yes, our attachments can change over time. For example, somebody gets into an abusive relationship or a painful relationship later. That can shift you because we get conditioned by whatever we're exposed to through repetition and emotion. It's about fires and wires, those neural pathways in our brain. But securely attached people, most of us get our conditioning from childhood. So in childhood, secure kids get a lot of what we call approach oriented behavior. And what that actually means is that parents are very attuned to their children. And when the child is distressed, they approach the child to try to figure out why and to try to suit them. And it sounds like such a small thing, but it has really big implications because what it actually means is that parents make their children feel that it's okay to express your emotions. In other words, at the adult, you've already been conditioned to learn it's okay to communicate. My feelings are safe to be vulnerable about. I can rely on other people. I can trust that people will be there for me. And I feel worthy of love when I'm having my great days, but also when I'm having my hard days or difficult moments. And so these are deeply ingrained conditioned patterns that this individual grows up with. And of course, as adults, that's what they've learned to give to themselves. And so that's what they also can naturally and easily extend to others. And so they just have better harmonious relationships as a result of all that. Then we have three insecure attachment styles. They exist in a way along a continuum. At one end of the continuum is the anxious attachment style. An anxious attachment individuals they grow up with a lot of either real or perceived abandonment. But real abandonment is very obvious. Let's say parents separate and when parent just doesn't come back around or child grows up in a fatherless home like these types of scenarios are real abandonment. The parent is gone. Perseved abandonment are things like, you know, and I think it's really important to note here that small T trauma repeatedly enough over time has a very similar impact on the brain from a neuroplasticity perspective as one big T trauma. So if somebody has a lot of perceived abandonment across time, it creates the same types of outputs or outcomes. And in this particular case, our anxious attachment styles, they usually grow up with that perceived abandonment being things like parents are very loving, but they're always traveling for work. Or parents are very kind, but one parent's really available and the other parent's not that available. And so in these types of situations where that juxtaposition is there, it's like, oh, love is there and then love is taken away. Or love is there and love is gone. Or, you know, my parents are here, but they're traveling again. Right. So we have these dynamics where a child grows up to constantly brace for and fear, love being taken away. And as a result of this, because children don't know how to perceive things all the time, they don't know how to like give all that meaning to situations. They end up going, okay, well, it must be because I and the type of person who gets abandoned. I am the type of person who's always going to be alone. I'm the type of person who's not good enough and rejected and just liked and unloved and excluded and these become their biggest core wounds. And whenever we have these painful events that imprint our mind, as adults, we always project them onto everything. We're always going to go, "Oh my gosh, somebody's pulling away. It must be that it's me. I'm the one that always gets rejected." Or, "It must be me not being good enough." So I need to try harder. I need to be better. And so a lot of these individuals, as adults, they become extremely people-pleasing. They burn themselves out. They have superpowers. They're becoming really charming and friendly and sweet with people because they work on that side of their personalities so much. But the flip side is that they say yes to things that are no for them. They derive their sense of self from relationships instead of learning to have a strong sense of self internally. And they often end up in situations where they feel resentful because they choose unavailable people. And then when that person's not pouring into the relationship the way they are, they're obviously left feeling more burned out or hurt. So that's a range. Very other end of the continuum is a disenvisible point. Disenvisible wooden attachment cells grow up with childhood emotional neglect being the overarching theme. And some people hear that and I think it's this really intense neglect. But a lot of times it's very covert. A lot of times it's that a child grows up in a stable home or food on the table and kids are at school on time. But there's a dynamic where that child just isn't getting a tool. And so because children are wired to feel safe and to feel special and they need to be seen, if parents are constantly dismissing them or rejecting them when they have emotions, a child internalizes that deeply and they're like, okay, this part of me is shameful. It's emotional vulnerable part of me is shameful. And so they actually work to diminish their attachment needs from other people as a way to stay attached. So they have this deep conditioning where they go, okay, if I'm too vulnerable or I'm too emotional, I'm going to be weak, I'm going to be disrespected, I'm going to be seen as not good enough, I'm going to be shameful. And they're really scared to be trapped in a relationship where they can't get their needs met, the mirrors or childhood. So they have these big fears of being trapped or engulfed, big fears around being helpless or powerless. And as adults, this leads them into relationships where they never really let their guard down. And as soon as they start to get really afraid and often want to run. And so they often have commitment fears in their adult life. They struggle to really warm up easily to people. They struggle to let people in. They're a lot more comfortable talking about their philosophies or opinions and ideas rather than like their emotions and their feelings and actually connecting with people in a more meaningful way that way. And often are very misunderstood. And then last but not least, we have our fearful avoidance. I'm going to guess that's probably what you were. For the snapshot you just told me about your childhood. Let's see. Let's hear it. I'm in. So you're full of avoidance. They go through a lot more chaos and childhood. And so that can be things like a big divorce or really bad divorce. Especially if a child's caught in the middle, but it's so interesting, like honestly, the analogy I often use is having a parent who's an alcoholic. It's the most common type of output where you'd see a fearful avoidance. But if you look at a whole series of cases, let's say either a parent's an alcoholic, a parent has a really serious mental health issue, but parent isn't any type of addiction. A parent has narcissistic personality disorder. Like these types of bigger tea traumas, even things like a really bad divorce from kids at a young age are like being told all the drama of both parents all the time. These types of scenarios cause a child to be like, okay, sometimes, and I seriously use this example. I think it's the clearest analogy. I hope it's okay. Yeah, it's around with it. Let's say for example that like somebody's mom is an alcoholic, you know, one day mom might have some drinks and she's actually in a good mood. She's kind of friendly and nice and sweet and the child feels like safe and kind of loved by her and they like that. And so they're like, okay, love is a good thing. And then another day mom said some drinks and she's either passed out and the child's scared and doesn't know what to do or she's mean and she's cruel because sometimes drinking a lot can make somebody really angry. And now she's being cruel to the child. And the child ends up growing up in this environment where they're like sometimes love is a really good thing and sometimes it's a really scary thing. And I do all we know which one it is and I can't decide. And so when the anxious attachments I'll learn to just maintain proximity and cling as their attachment strategy and the disinness of avoidance learns to keep distance and keep space as their way to stay in control. The fearful of wouldn't learn to basically protect other people's behavior because they grew up in such a confusing environment. And I've had people say things to me like, oh, I could tell the way that, you know, I'd be at home from school. I could tell the way that when my mom closed the door when she got home. I knew whether or not to like run to my bedroom, Jordan, shut it or to leave it open. And so you have these individuals who grew up in this environment where you just never know what version of somebody you're going to get. And it causes this individual to end up feeling that they need to just be super hypervital and they really deeply notice micro expressions and body language and tone of boys changes because they've had to. They have this anxious side to their attachment. So a lot of fearful ones originally think they're anxiously attached because your anxious side is much more obvious and loud. So they have these wounds, these fears of being abandoned or alone or rejected. But they also have a very avoidance side to their attachment. So I'll whether they're also really scared to be trapped or helpless and powerless because if you relied on somebody who was scary at times and unpredictable, then of course you're scared to rely on people as an adult. And fearful of wouldn't have a unique set of wounds where they're afraid of being unworthy because unfortunately in a chaotic environment, you always have to earn love and earn your worth. Like, oh, I get laughed from mom if I'm taking care of her. But necessarily because mom's a tuned to me and in a healthy place to give healthy love for no reason. And so, you know, there's a lot of messaging indirectly about okay, you're always going to be betrayed. You always have to wait for the other shoe to drop or be on high alert. And so there's some betrayal trauma in there. And then also this sense of like, I have to earn worth everywhere. I have to like overachieve and over perform just to be loved at all, just to be accepted as normal. And so they have this sort of dynamic where fearful ones are usually very deep people. They, you know, as adults, they're very deep. They're often quite intense because they've had to be. They do very well outside of their comfort zone. They're good at being entrepreneurial and rolling with the punches because like, hello, your childhood, you trained for it. But then they have this anxious side and this avoid inside and they tend to pin back and forth before doing the work. So they might be like, oh, my gosh, you don't get too far away. Come here. Get close, get close. And then you're close to them and they're like, get back. Get back. This is your too close. You could hurt me. So through this experience of having the almost experience of falling in love being this bittersweet is the process where they feel like love is a really nice thing. They love falling in love. But then the more that they love, the more they're just assuming they're going to get hurt. So the more scared and threatening that also feels simultaneously. And they're often caused them in relationships to be hot and cold or a little bit confused and kind of flip flop a lot between should I stay and should I go. So those are some of the overarching things you'll see for all core attachment files. And I think if you were to look up fearful of what it in the dictionary, you would see a picture of my face. Like not to make this all about me, but we're going to go there for a minute. I have never heard something like, I don't know if you saw my head just going up and down the entire time you were speaking, but holy shit, you just hit the nail on the head in such a deep way. And what's so interesting is again to how I kind of cut us up at the top of this episode that gives so much of what I went through and so much of what my life was, so much meaning of why I am the way I am. And I've absolutely become that overachiever. I've absolutely become that like deep intuitive that like has to talk about my feelings and that you know, like there's so many things that you just said that are me truly so defined. And what's interesting that I wanted to ask is when I took your quiz earlier, I did get a secure attachment, but I think that's because I was reflecting on my marriage and maybe not necessarily like my family relationships and my friendships. So my question within this for everyone listening who could be having an experience like I am of like holy actually like that is me to a T or that sounds like me in this relationship, but this actually sounds more like me in my marriage or whatever that might be. Can you be multiple different attachment styles at once just in different types of relationships? Yeah, that's a great question. So generally you're not going to be like and far as of the continuum. So you I'll see a lot of things because at the end of the day attachment styles are continuum right. It's not just like you are exactly this exactly fitting in this tiny box, but you'll see things like somebody secure leading a little anxious. They have some anxious edges. For somebody is fearful of waiting that they lean, especially fearful of one, so you'll see yourself be a little bit more fluid because fearful ones have this anxious and avoided inside. So it's fearful of going to look like I'm really anxious in some relationships and usually you get polarized. So if you're with somebody more disinvasive, you'll move into your anxious side because they're pulling away. So then you feel the feeling of abandonment more, but also vice versa. If you are with somebody much more anxious, then you'll become more avoidant. And you'll see that. But when we're talking about just before anybody's done the work, the same types of relationships are the same types of people. In those cases, what's really interesting is a lot of it has to do with conditioning. Conditioning is something that's happening to all of us all the time. It happens the most deeply in childhood because our brains are producing more alpha brain waves. So we absorb a lot more of our patterns born to profoundly at a young age. conditioning is happening in the sense of like you always hear people say things like You're the sum of the five people you spend the most time around. Yeah. Well, you know, it's true. And so what you'll see is if in friendships, like I can use myself as an example. So I got into this work largely because I was a fearful avoid myself. So I understand. But I wasn't only child until seven and a half. And then my sister came along. My one parent in particular is very controlling of me and childhood. So I wasn't like around friends growing up a lot or things like that. So I'm, you know, before doing the work, I was like fearful avoidant in relationships, but in friendships, I was just kind of dismissive avoidant. Like I just kind of, you know, did my own thing didn't like communicate a ton or super frequently was more independent. And that's because my conditioning in friendships at a young age was that I didn't have as many interactions. I had a lot more kind of been neglected in that area if that makes sense. So it's really where your conditioning happens. But beauty of that is that it also flips sides, right? Which means let's say you're fearful avoidant. You're in this marriage where you love this person. You're pregnant. You have this beautiful life on the horizon. I'm going to guess since you have a podcast called Transform that you've also probably plugged in and done a lot of the work. And so you might see something like, oh, I actually am really secure in my marriage because I've done the work. I've been working on myself. I have been in self discovery and introspection. I've learned to communicate with my husband. I've worked through hard things. And maybe I just haven't really gotten to that work as much in friendships or family relationships. And so I may have little remnants of that in these areas. But where we do the work, we also re-condition. And that's a really important message. So I want to get across to people is that so often, people are like, I'm just the anxious. And that's why I do these things. Or I'm just the avoidant. And that's why I'm the way I am. And it's like that is such a profound disservice to self-understanding. These are just rules that you were conditioned about what love is supposed to be. And we can change those things and change the ways that we inhabit things. And as a result, our relationships will change dramatically. And you can have a truly truly happy marriage in future. Even if you had a hard and rocky childhood and so re-conditioning, it's something we can do over a long period of time because we plug in and do the work. Or if you really plug into the subconscious mind work, it's a lot quicker. It's a lot simpler. It doesn't need to be this really long drawn out process. It's so interesting because my co-host and I just recorded a episode on friendships. And I actually used an analogy that was a very vulnerable share. But just something that I've reflected on in more of the recent work I've done within my friendships. And that's not only did an alcoholic raise me, but she was also very narcissistic. And she talked a lot about herself. And I didn't really get a lot of the attention or affection that I was looking for. And what I've realized is when I feel that in a friendship, I become very avoidant. Like when I feel someone is kind of showing those same signs that I dealt with for so long, it really pushes me away. And that's my specific example. But I am curious for anyone who can relate of maybe any specific type of trigger that they were conditioned to in childhood that is coming up either in a friendship, a romantic relationship, or maybe their manager at work. Let's go across the spectrum of all the types of people we interact with. How can we recognize that and then give ourselves the meaning of all of the work that you do that really allows us to understand? No, this is why I'm having that reaction and that response. Yes, okay, so really amazing question. So I like to use the acronym BTEA. And I think when people hear this, they'll be like, "Oh, my gosh, I'm a human. No wonder that happens." You know, stands for belief, thoughts, emotions, actions. So when we go through life, when we go through hard experiences, as a way to try to adapt to them, our mind stores them very deeply. And I use the analogy often for people that if you're in the woods and you see a bear and you run away, thank goodness, you're safe, you're good. But then the next day you have to go back into the same woods, well, what is your mind to do? Well, like the trees move and you're like the bear, like you're raising for the bear. And so our brain actually gets imprinted very deeply through strong emotion, especially negative emotion. We hang on to negative things a lot more than positive things to survive a lot of temptation. It's like if the bear is chasing you and you get away and you tell your friends, you're not like, "Oh my gosh, I saw the prettiest tree next to the bear while it was chasing me." Like, you don't remember that. You remember the bear's teeth and its claws. Like, we remember the big, bad, scary stuff. And so it imprints our subconscious mind. Then we store it. And then we see our whole world through that lens or that filter. Or in other words, we re-project it back out. Just like if you go into the woods the next day, you re-project out the likelihood of seeing the bear again so that you can survive, so that you can protect yourself from it. And so what we're actually projecting back out is a belief, right? Like the bear's in a coma, I'm going to be unsafe. Now in childhood, the core beliefs tend to fall into those sort of categories. Like the anxious attachments also are that abandoned alone, excluded, disliked, rejected. The dismissive of a wind jar like, "I'm going to be seen as shameful or de facto. I'll be trapped, helpless, powerless, weak." And the fearful wind kind of have both sides of that a little bit originally. And okay, I'm going to be betrayed or I'm unworthy. And oftentimes too, if your violence is a big, I am bad, core wound. They don't think that they're bad people consciously, but they, if you get punished a lot for things that like you spilled something and you get severely punished, these innocent human things, which is a sense of like people always going to think I'm bad. And I have to over-explain myself a lot and things like that that often come from that kind of dynamic. So what happens is we have these beliefs. And each attachment solves like eight to 10, maybe 11 major core beliefs for just really like straight up honest terms. Those are our baggage. That's our relationship baggage, right? That's what we carry from the past. We bring into this the presence and future. And those are very solvable problems. You're not born with those beliefs. You can can't recondition them in 21 days. Like it's not even hard to do. And it takes two to five minutes a day. I can even like go through an exercise at the end. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah. - It's very, very solvable. But what happens is those beliefs lead to patterns of thoughts. So let's pretend that somebody says, "Has this core belief I'm not good enough?" And they go into a room full of people like a networking event. They might go into that room and they're like, "Oh, I'm not interesting enough. I'm not funny enough. I'm not exciting enough. They have all these thoughts. Almost like the belief is the tree trunk. And the thoughts are all the tree branches. All the types of things that spring off with the tree trunk. All the types of thoughts and stories we could tell ourselves. And then our emotions are like the tree leaves, right? So BTE for emotions. So we have all of our experiences are colored. It's just like a tree is colored by leaves. All of our experiences are colored by our emotions. All of this process for the vast majority of the time is subconscious. We're not even consciously aware that this is happening. Right? This is just happening beneath the surface. And I think it's really important to note here that 95% of our beliefs, thoughts, emotions and actions on a daily basis are subconscious. We're not consciously aware very much of it. And so we have these beliefs lead to thoughts, thought leads to emotions. Emotions lead to actions. So neuroscience is actually proven that every action we take is based on our emotional state. And even people who think they're extremely logical rational thinkers, they are just making emotionally-based decisions at the tipping point. And then they just rationalize through a lot of right after. So even those very rational type of people, they're still making emotionally-based decisions. So what's interesting is all of these things are not conscious. And so when somebody comes into your world, just like if you go into the woods the day after the bear chase you and you hear the trees move, you're like, "Oh, trees move, equal bear chasing me." So when we have these experiences, like if you had somebody who was very difficult to grow up around, very unpredictable and narcissistic, well, if you learned that when I was around that person as a child, the way that I learned to cope was too shut down, was too pull away because I couldn't do a whole lot fighting back. I couldn't go out and flee the home at seven years old and get a job and pay the bills. You probably learned, "Okay, around this person, I shut down." And I retreat. If I can't retreat physically, I'm going to retreat internally. And so then what takes place is as an adult when somebody reminds you of those tendencies, our subconscious mind is this giant warehouse of all of our conditioning and also an association making machine. So your subconscious goes, "Oh my gosh, what do I know about this?" "Oh, okay, I know that this person makes me feel like I am bad. I am unsafe. I could be betrayed. I could be abandoned." "Okay, I can't trust this person." So we think all of these thoughts, we feel a certain way and then we retreat almost automatically or immediately because those are the pre-conditioned ingrained coping mechanisms that we use to adapt to our environment growing up. And so that ends up being how you end up participating those relationships later on. This just makes so much meaning of so much of my life. I could talk to you forever and I love that you have so many actionable steps around really what this reconditioning can look like because I love giving some of the opportunities to change. And I think we all deserve that opportunity of saying just because this is what I was born into and this is what I was brought up around. It doesn't mean that's the way it has to be and the fact that you have developed so many ways to recondition to get us to that secure attached style. That's where I want to go in here of, I mean, you just take the wheel and take us where we need to go. I want to make sure that everyone listening feels like they have the tools to really get to the place that they want to in their relationships. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's so funny when we started the podcast. I was thinking and I was like transformed. I was like, I thought you were fearful of winning. And it just said, like, "Wait really?" "Oh my god, you're like a psychic around attachment styles." You know. You know. Well, yeah. I mean, are listeners definitely know too? in this part one with ties we broke down all four of the attachment styles and how our childhood really shapes them. If anything clicked or felt a little uncomfortable, that's actually just your awareness really setting in. This is not about labeling yourself. It's all about understanding the why and for me, that was so empowering in this part one. And then also knowing that all these patterns can change. So I really want everyone listening to feel like they have those real tools, tools to get the kind of relationships that you are totally dreaming up and so deserving of. So part two will be this Wednesday and that is when we are going to get into the how with Ties. I will see you in a couple of days. Thank you so much for being here. You listening to this episode is you saying yes to living the dream life you absolutely deserve. We release new transform episodes every Wednesday. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss a thing. So we would love to hear from you so leave us a review. And if you include your Instagram handle, we might even reach out and gift you a complimentary form membership. You can also follow us on Instagram @transform and then @samispalter and @samiclark. We love you. Please note that this episode may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products and services. Services on the show may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to in this episode.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Attachment theory explains how early childhood experiences shape our subconscious "rules" for love, communication, and needs in relationships.
  2. There are four attachment styles
  3. Attachment styles are not permanent; through understanding and neuroplasticity, individuals can rewire patterns and move toward a secure attachment.
  4. The host shares her personal journey from a fearful-avoidant style, shaped by a challenging childhood, to a secure attachment in her current happy marriage.

Summary:

The podcast introduces attachment theory as a framework for understanding relationship patterns, defined as subconscious rules for giving and receiving love learned from childhood. The host, Sammy, shares her personal experience of using attachment theory to navigate a past toxic relationship and her journey to a secure, happy marriage. Guest expert Tais Gibson explains the four attachment styles: secure individuals, comprising about 50% of the population, enjoy fulfilling relationships; anxious individuals fear abandonment and often become people-pleasers; avoidant individuals fear engulfment and struggle with vulnerability; and fearful-avoidant individuals, often from chaotic backgrounds, oscillate between craving and fearing closeness.

Gibson emphasizes that these styles are not fixed labels; through neuroplasticity and targeted work, people can rewire their patterns and achieve secure attachment, potentially in as little as 90 days. The discussion underscores that understanding one's attachment style is a first step toward healing, not a permanent identity, empowering listeners to transform their relational dynamics.

FAQs

Attachment theory explains how your early experiences shape your subconscious rules about love, affecting how you give and receive love, communicate, and what you expect in relationships. It helps you understand your patterns and those of others.

The four attachment styles are secure, anxious, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant. Each style reflects different patterns of relating to others, rooted in childhood experiences and conditioning.

Yes, you can change your attachment style through self-awareness and work, such as leveraging neuroplasticity to rewire subconscious patterns. It's possible to move from an insecure style to a secure one, often in as little as 90 days.

A secure attachment style, found in about 50% of the population, involves feeling safe to express emotions, trust others, and rely on people. Securely attached individuals often report the most fulfilled and lasting relationships.

An anxious attachment style stems from fears of abandonment, leading to people-pleasing, deriving self-worth from relationships, and often choosing unavailable partners. Individuals may feel resentful or burned out as a result.

Dismissive-avoidant attachment arises from childhood emotional neglect, causing individuals to suppress emotional needs, fear vulnerability, and struggle with commitment. They may avoid deep emotional connections to feel in control.

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