Welcome to Sheeper Assisted. I'm your host Sadie Sutton, a 19
year old from the Bay Area studying psychology at the
University of Pennsylvania. Sheeper Assisted is the teen
mental health podcast made for teenagers by a teen.
In each episode I'll bring you authentic, accessible and
relatable conversations about every aspect of mental Wellness
you can expect. Evidence based teen approved
resources, coping skills including lots of DBT insights
and education, and each piece of content you consume.
She Persisted offers you a safe space to feel validated and
understood in your struggle while encouraging you to take
ownership of your journey and build your life worth living.
So let's dive in. This week on She Persisted.
I am a big believer that everybody's 100% responsible for
their 50% of the relationship. I think that sometimes we have a
lot of information on the Internet that's like be counter
dependent, which means everybody should just take care of
themselves and nobody should look out for each other.
And that's unhealthy. That's not how we evolved and
survived as human beings. But we have to draw the line
where we don't make ourselves responsible for that person's
emotional state or well-being because that's where we go into
codependency. And then we're not showing up
for the relationship to ourselves because we're so hyper
fixated on others. Hello, hello and welcome to
another episode of She Persisted.
I'm so excited for this one. I think you guys are absolutely
going to love it. We are talking about
relationships and attachment theory.
This is something that I think a lot of people identify really
strongly with. And hearing about attachment
styles, they're like, that's me. I am hearing these traits that I
myself have. And so I think you guys are
going to really have that experience when you're listening
to this episode. Today's guest is Tyuse Gibson.
She's a best selling author, counselor, speaker and founder
of the Personal Development School.
And we talk about so many different things, but we talk
about what exactly the subconscious is, how our
childhood experiences impact us, the four main attachment styles
and what they say about us. We talked about how you can form
a more secure attachment style, different needs and fears that
show up in relationships depending on your attachment
style, and also some challenges that come up when you're
specifically in that insecure attachment style bucket.
We talked about being on the other side of the table.
So if you're in a relationship with someone that has an
insecure attachment style, how can you navigate that more
effectively? We talked about codependent
relationships, conscious parenting, how siblings play
into this, which I think is really interesting, and also
birth order, which is a hot topic.
And then lastly, how you can figure out your own attachment
style and other resources. So I think you guys are going to
absolutely love this. I cannot wait for you to listen.
I hope you're having a good start to your semester if you're
a student. If not, I hope you're having a
good. Fall so far.
It is busy busy as I'm recording this.
I'm taking the GRE tomorrow and I have like 67 different
assignments due for school. So it's a busy, busy week, but I
hope you guys are doing well. And as always, make sure leave a
review, subscribe, share, send me a message about what you
think about the episode. If you post about Instagram
stories and tag me, you can be entered to win a Starbucks gift
card. So more information on that in
the show notes. But I really hope you guys love
this. And with that, let's dive in.
Well, thank you so much for joining me today on She
Persisted. I'm so excited to have you on
the show and dive into this conversation.
Thank you for having me. I think it's great what you're
doing. Thank you.
So to give people some background who are not familiar
with your history and your work that you've done in your career,
I would love to get into your context and how you got into
this area of the mental health space.
You are someone that a lot of people look to for advice and
guidance and an expert that speaks on so many things,
whether it's family systems or CBT and attachment therapy,
which I'm sure people have heard whether they've been to therapy
or they're on talk because these are very hot topics at the
moment. But to kind of go back, how did
you get interested in this part of the mental health space and
how did you get to this point? Yeah, I think a big part of it
was honestly just that I came from a household where there's a
lot of chaos and, and a lot of ups and downs and like a bit of
a roller coaster. And so I was always really
curious about the human experience and, and people and
human behavior. And so from a very young age, I
definitely, you know, wondered why people interact the way that
they do. And then I think by the time I
was a teenager, I was kind of going through my own big
challenges, just mentally, emotionally, coming out of a
household with so much chaos, just kind of trying to find my
way in the world. And I ended up doing a lot of
like deep inner self work around a whole bunch of different
things. And, you know, eventually that
led me to sort of revisit attachment theory.
And I was in school for psychology, but I was really
understanding and learning a lot about not just attachment
theory, but also the subconscious mind because at one
point I had somebody just who said to me like your conscious
mind can't out will or overpower your subconscious mind.
And so I was having this experience a lot of times in my
own personal life of like telling myself I was going to
change my behaviors, but not really seeing the change.
And that was very validating for me because I was like, oh, it's
because my conscious mind intends to, to change my
behaviors, but my subconscious mind has basically other
motives. And what I learned is that your
subconscious mind is actually responsible for 95 to 97% of all
of our beliefs or thoughts or emotions or decisions.
And your conscious mind is just three to 5%.
So basically when we get into the situation of having these
like ups and downs or these push pull patterns and we want to
change them, so much of it is because of our own internal
conditioning. So really set out on a journey
to understand like, well, what is mine?
What are my condition patterns? What are my beliefs and my
thoughts and my emotional patterns and what is serving me
and what's not? And how can I actually rewire or
recondition what hasn't been serving me?
And then I found that that's fit very neatly into patterns of
attachment styles and how we can really reshape those things too.
I think what's really cool about the sheep assisted audience is
that a lot of people haven't done all that self work yet.
They haven't completely explored like what their subconscious
belief systems are or what patterns have emerged from their
family of origin. And if they're listening,
they're really interested about understanding this more so they
can approach this from a much more educated and informed
perspective and hopefully less trial and error and more kind of
going into it with more confidence and support.
And so for people that probably have heard of the subconscious
or I've heard about these patterns that we make but aren't
necessarily being intentional about, can you explain that a
little bit more? Like what kind of compiles that
subconscious? And then what experiences lead
to that, whether it's our families of origin or
relationships or certain age demographics that have a really
big impact on that? Can you kind of explain that for
people that aren't familiar? Absolutely.
So basically what happens is our subconscious mind, you can think
of as being like a giant warehouse.
It stores all of your memories over time.
Now it does consolidate those memories.
So sometimes we can slightly misremember things or remember
things more by emotional association.
Like if we think of times we felt really frustrated or
trapped, you may have all these sort of specific memories coming
flooding forward. And so we'll store things often
by association. But you can basically think of
your conscious mind as being your logical thinking self.
You're part of you that you identify with most of your sense
of self, the rational part, the one that thinks through things
or sort of analyzes things and you're subconscious is basically
your program self. So if you get in your car every
day, you know how to drive a car.
You don't have to consciously think about it like, OK, make
sure I move the steering wheel left and right or make sure I
hit the gas and the brakes. Like these are programs you've
learned how to do things over time.
Now it's not just our programs for how to ride a bike or how to
drive a car. It's like all of our programs
ever about what we believe about relationships, for example, what
we believe about ourselves as a person, what we believe about
things like trust or connection or what we fear.
And so we have all of this, you know, huge, huge storage system
of all of these different belief patterns.
And you can think of that subconscious mind as being the
lens that you see and interact with the world through.
So if you have a lot of like fear based beliefs about
relationships, because perhaps in your family of origin, you
had a lot of scary times in your household growing up, then
you're going to see those same fears play out or you're going
to assume those fears onto your current environment.
And I'll give some like really concrete examples that people
probably will relate to. If you ever had an experience
where you felt like people weren't there for you enough or
consistently enough, and maybe you felt this kind of fear of
being abandoned or, or felt feelings of abandonment.
Chances are very high that as an adult in your romantic
relationships, you know you're going to move into a space where
you're like, oh, I'm gonna be abandoned and you're gonna
assume you are past onto your present and future experiences.
By the same token, if somebody's ever hurt you by really breaking
your trust as a child, when you go into those early adult
relationships as a teenager or in your early adult years,
you're gonna find yourself going, oh, I can't trust people.
And assuming that onto relationships or if you grew up
feeling like you needed a lot of space and you didn't want to
feel trapped and that's how you felt, you felt smothered or
engulfed or trapped as a child. Well, then you're gonna, if
you're that in your adult life. So basically what happens is
there a subconscious mind is the big collector, the big warehouse
of all of this information? It's our programmed self.
And it's all the things that we do without thinking, all the
natural things that will project onto our environment and
whatever we were exposed to in our upbringing that was
repetitive and that also created an emotional output.
So, you know, feelings of of happiness repeatedly or feelings
of sadness or frustration repeatedly, whatever was
repetitive and emotional are what fire.
And why are these neural networks in our mind that
actually form this subconscious space that we are programmed
from? That's literally how the
programming forms as a whole. And so that's how we end up
interacting with our environment and where we literally assume
our future will be so much like our past.
Yeah, it's so interesting and especially how attachment styles
play into this because like you're saying, we have a lot of
expectations for things and then we also subconsciously follow
similar patterns. So when people hear about
attachment styles for the first time, you're like, Oh my gosh,
it's describes me to AT it's almost like astrology where
people are like, yes, I'm exactly that sign, or that's
exactly what happens. But it's like you're saying,
we're pulling so much from these past experiences that we fall
into that familiar pattern and there's less of that active
choice happening that when we're in these situations, we're kind
of just doing what we know. We're not necessarily trying new
dynamics or putting ourselves in situations that are completely
foreign because as humans, that's not what's comfortable or
what's like safe emotionally or physically.
So for people that aren't aware of the attachment styles,
especially from the subconscious perspective, can you explain
that to the audience a little bit?
Yeah, definitely. So, so I love how you said all
of that. So there there are four major
attachment styles. The first one is the secure
attachment style. And basically they grew up with
a very secure upbringing. In other words, there's a lot of
healthy patterns modeled to them.
So a lot of their subconscious is storing these patterns in the
way that they see relationships in a very healthy way.
So you'll see, for example, that there's a lot of what we call
approach oriented behaviors in childhood, which means all the
way as a very, very young toddler, you, if you cry or
express emotion or go through something difficult, you'll
actually see that your caregivers approach you.
They come towards you, they try to figure out why you're upset
and they make an attempt to really soothe you and be there
for you. And So what happens is the child
grows up seeing those behaviors model to them and thinking, OK,
I can trust people. It's safe to rely on people
emotionally. It's safe to let my guard down,
to let people in. My emotions are worthy of being
heard. And when they are, people come
and they tend to me and it's safe and it's healthy.
And so they basically have all of these healthy programs for
how they're going to do relationships as an adult now,
much less at this point of the the population is actually
securely attached. Original reports looked like it
was around 50%. It looks like that's on the
decline. We have three other insecure
attachment styles #1 is the anxious attachment style.
Anxious individuals tend to have feelings of loneliness in
childhood, feelings of being unloved or abandoned.
And it can be that they have very loving parents, but the
parents are inconsistent, like they're not around all the time.
They work a lot. Or it could be that there is a
real abandonment that takes place in childhood.
So a parent leaves and there's a, a divorce or separation and
the parents not really in the child's life any longer in the
same way. And So what happens is that kind
of collection of things that we'll hold on to ends up being
like, oh, I'm going to be abandoned.
And So what happens is as a young adult or going into adult
years, when we start having relationships, we end up feeling
like, Oh my gosh, I'm going to be abandoned at any moment.
And so again, we assume our past experiences on to our present
and future. And the anxious attachment style
will often present as needy or clingy in their adult life
because they have a lot of these fears of people pulling away,
but they tend to cope with these fears by holding on more
tightly. On the flip other end of the
continuum is the dismissive avoidant attachment style.
And the dismissive avoidant usually grows up with childhood
emotional neglect as the overarching theme.
In other words, there's often a lot of you know that that child
not having their emotions be able to be expressed and have it
positively validated. So it could be even negatively
validated. There could be shaming or like,
don't be a crybaby, get it together, be quiet, stop, you
know, fussing so much that there could be a lot of this judgement
or shaming of somebody's emotions or there could
literally just be a dismissal of it.
Like it just gets ignored. And so basically this person
grows up to feel like I don't want emotional closeness to
somebody because I'm not accepted when I'm vulnerable.
I'm not connected to anybody when I'm vulnerable.
And in fact, having a lot more space from people is actually
what makes me feel more safe and more comfortable.
And so this is our dismissible boyden.
And as adults, you'll see that these individuals tend to be
very afraid of too much closeness and they can leave a
relationship all of a sudden. They can sometimes be
emotionally unavailable and they can really want to pull away
from somebody the moment things get too real or too serious.
And then last but not least, there's a fearful avoidant.
Fearful avoidance basically share in the anxious and
avoidant side of the attachment continuum.
And why this actually happens is because fearful avoidant
children grow up in households where there's a lot of extreme
associations on either side of what's happening.
So sometimes they'll feel like, OK, closeness is safe and it's a
good thing and and there's love. And so they'll fear that
closeness being taken away because they've often had the
polar opposite end of that spectrum.
But they'll fear abandonment as a result.
And they can have that need to cling and hold on tight.
But at the same time, they've often had really painful
experiences around connection. So they also fear getting too
close. And some really obvious examples
or analogies would be something like having a a parent who's an
alcoholic and maybe one day mom is drinking and she's in a good
mood and she's nice and you're like, oh, I want that closeness.
Another day she's drinking and she's had too much to drink and
she's really mean or harsh or cruel.
Other days she's sobering up and she's in a good mood.
And other days she's sobering up and she's detoxing and it's
really hard and scary. And so it's like you never know
what you're going to get. And this can also be things like
having a family of origin that fights a lot where there's a lot
of extreme arguments, really bad divorce.
Children are parentified. It can be things like a parent
or parents having mental health issues.
But basically there's going to be this overarching theme of not
being able to trust, not knowing what you're gonna get, and also
constantly feeling like you're in this push pull pattern of
wanting closeness. But as soon as it gets real or
too close, you wanna pull it away.
And then when it's pushed away, all of a sudden it's like, wait,
I want that closeness again. And so there can be a lot of
this hot and cold intermittent reinforcement or really mixed
messaging and relationships with a fearful avoid an adult.
I think this is so interesting and I think that people become
really aware of their attachment styles as soon as they're more
independent and going more into high school and college.
Because instead of your relationships being defined by
like who your family's around or who you're interacting with
because of your environment that's largely defined for you,
you're kind of figuring out who you're attracted to.
Like we know energies attract. And so like you're saying, these
family of origin lived experiences really start to
impact what our relationships and what our world looks like.
It can look really different really quickly.
And you also have so much more autonomy when it comes to
building those relationships and maybe reinforcing those patterns
or making newer, healthier ones, depending on what your goals
are. So I would love to kind of get
your thoughts on what the next step is.
If you listen, you're like, OK, maybe I'm anxious, maybe I'm
avoiding, maybe you're like, I'm secure.
This is great, this is perfect. No more work to do.
But is it about setting boundaries?
Is it about filling your life with certain people?
Is it more rewiring bring that subconscious?
Where do you go from that initial starting point of being
like this is my attachment style.
These were my lived experiences after you kind of cultivate that
awareness. Yeah, that's a great question.
So there's basically five key pillars that if anybody's
listening and they're like, OK, I'm insecurely attached.
I'm one of those 3 insecure ones.
It doesn't, it's not like this is like a formal diagnosis, like
you have a personality disorder or something like that.
It's basically just a subconscious set of rules that
you've learned about love that you're just storing like we
talked about in that warehouse and reprojecting back out onto
the world. And so we cope from those big
fears of those wounds. So basically the first thing we
want to do is those big fears. So like the anxious attachment
has the big abandonment fears. They also tend to fear being
disliked, rejected, not good enough, excluded.
Fearful avoidance have those abandonment fears, but also fear
being trapped or not being able to trust or being in the wrong
relationship with somebody and feeling unworthy or like they
could be betrayed. Dismissive avoidance.
They fear being shamed or engulfed or criticized or being
helpless or powerless if you're being weak, if they're
vulnerable. So hopefully people can start to
hear like, OK, those are my big relationship fears.
And one of the first things that we do is we actually rewire
those fears because you're not born with these fears and these
fears get conditioned into your programming through repetition
and emotion over time. As we established earlier,
that's part of what programs is subconscious.
And So what we want to be able to do is recondition.
And I'm happy to share a tool in a little bit for how to do that.
So that's the first thing. The second thing is we need to
learn to meet our own needs, especially when individuals are
in high school in in university, it's such an important time for
individuating. It's such an important time to
really learn who you are. And I think a lot of what
happens is we have this society or this outside world that's
constant kind of pressuring us to be this mold of like what
societal or cultural expectations exist.
And I actually think that high school and university are very
sacred time for taking the actual time out of your day or
week to plug into like, who am I and what do I really want?
And learning to make decisions from the inside out.
I think it's actually one of the antidotes to like, you know, I'm
in my mid 30s and have so many friends who, because I know your
audience is in high school or university.
And, you know, I have so many friends who at this point in
their life are like, oh, I want, I have to go back to school for
a totally new career because I'm in a career that I'm really
unhappy with. And when we have honest
conversations, they're like, I always knew I was never going to
be in this career. I just didn't know what else to
do. And I don't think that we don't
know what else to do. I think that we don't take the
time to actually, like, find those things out, to do that
introspective work. And so part of, you know, pillar
number two of these five pillars is US learning who we are in
regards to our needs. And every person has needs.
Every person is run by those needs in a really big way.
For some people, they need more reassurance or validation or
acceptance. For other people, they need more
freedom or autonomy. But it's us.
Actually tuning into like what makes me feel like I'm in the
most fulfilled version of my life when which needs are met?
Do I feel the best? Okay.
And so only you can actually learn what our own needs are.
You know, I'll, I'll share them by attachment style briefly, but
anxious attachment styles tend to need a lot of that
validation, encouragement, reassurance, certainty is really
big. They need to work with people,
collaborate, they need open communication.
So those tends to be really important there.
Dismissive avoidance need that like freedom, autonomy,
independence. But they actually also respond
relationally really well to acknowledgement and appreciation
for small things that they did like, hey, I noticed you took
out the trash. Thank you.
Like just these sort of everyday things.
And they also respond really well to empathy, support and
acceptance and fearful avoidance, basically share in
both sides of those. So you can sort of hear yourself
in there. But they also need like depth or
novelty. They need challenge and growth
and they need that that connection and, and intimacy as
well. So when we know our relational
needs, we can start to understand, well, these things
really define the relationship we have to ourself.
And so when we can sit down and be like, OK, well, what do I
need and how can I meet these needs in the relationship to
myself first? Like if I need validation,
actually being more encouraging or kind to myself in my internal
dialogue, like when we can start doing that work.
It's a really important form of self soothing and really
building out a relationship to ourselves.
So we reprogram core wounds, we learn our needs and how to meet
them. We regulate our nervous system,
which is its own beast of a topic.
It's really about like being able to spend less time in fight
or flight mode and really make sure we feel comfortable being
in our body. And a lot of that's through like
meditation or breath work or nervous system regulation habits
like light exercise, yoga, things that are actually going
to anchor us into our body and attune us to like what it feels
like to be with ourselves and be more present.
And then we go into having healthy boundaries and learning
to communicate properly what our needs are to others.
And if we can really do those five things, I know that sounds
like a lot, but when we actually break them down into 5 sections,
it's not that difficult to go through each one.
But that's where we'll move the needle on going from insecurely
attached to securely attached. Today's episode is brought to
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in the show notes. I'm curious, you've worked with
so many people and obviously had this conversation with so many
individuals and explained the attachment styles and I'm sure
had back and forth discussions about this journey in this
process. Are there certain parts of those
five steps that people get really hung up on or find really
challenging? Whether it's like that initial
awareness, maybe it's the self soothing, maybe it's moving from
others meeting your needs to doing that yourself.
What are those typical challenge and pitfalls that people kind of
come up against when they try and go through this journey?
Yeah, I think the biggest one is depending on your attachment
style. So like a big part of healing
when it comes to needs is for anxious attachment styles to
really learn to meet their own needs.
Which if you don't like spending time alone and you're terrified
of being alone or not maybe terrified but don't love it,
kind of find yourself have having this aversion to it, then
that can feel really challenging at the beginning.
I think it's really important to note that it takes roughly 21
days to really recondition our programming.
So it takes 21 days of firing and wiring new neural pathways
over and over again until they actually start to feel
comfortable and familiar and then we feel safe.
So what you'll generally see is that for the first like 78910
days for an anxious attachment style, when they sit down to, to
start meeting their own needs, they're like, it doesn't feel
good to validate myself or encourage myself or do these
things. But over time, when there's that
repetition and emotion, they'll actually start to receive from
themselves. They'll actually start to feel
comfortable, safe, familiar, giving to themselves and filling
their own cup. And it'll actually be associated
with more positive emotions over time when we do that.
So, you know, part of it can be like, it's not going to feel
comfortable because it goes against our initial programming.
So we need that repetition for that 21 days.
Dismissive avoidance, on the other hand, tend to be in a
position where they don't like being vulnerable because that
goes against their programming. So much of their self protective
mechanisms are like keep people at arm's length to stay safe.
But as we start communicating our needs very consistently,
slowly but surely, we don't have to tell everybody everything
about our whole inner world all at once.
But as we start opening up slowly but surely, chunk by
chunk or piece by piece, what we'll start to find is like, oh,
it actually does feel nice to share with somebody else and to
soothe with somebody else as needed or to open myself up till
being seen more, being understood more by people around
me. And we may even find that it
like gets positively reinforced in terms of, oh, like people
actually show up and they're kinder and more considerate than
I realized. So a lot of it's based on
attachment style. I guess the biggest overarching
hard or difficult part is just that like we're going against
the protective measures we've built in relationships to begin
with. But if anybody can observe
consciously and look at their relationship patterns and say,
hey, these have not been serving me, these are not the way I want
to be for the whole rest of my life and experience, then you
know, we can do that 21 day repetition to actually change
and rewire these old outdated habits or patterns that are no
longer serving. I am curious about how this
shows up in relationships, whether you have like a friend
or partner or family member and you're like, they're definitely
anxiously attached or they are avoidantly attached.
Are there ways that we can support individuals that have
these different attachment styles?
Or is it better to kind of come from that position of being
securely attached as much as possible and not like cater to
these ineffective ways of of interacting?
What are your recommendations there?
I am a big believer that everybody's 100% responsible for
their 50% of the relationship. I think that sometimes we have a
lot of information on the Internet that's like be counter
dependent, which means everybody should just take care of
themselves and nobody should look out for each other.
And that's not healthy. That's not how we're wired.
That's not how we evolved and survived as human beings.
But what's also not healthy is the other extreme, which is
like, I'm only ever going to look out for your needs and
you're only ever going to look out for mine.
And we're never going to care for our own.
And usually, unfortunately, when we're codependent, there's a lot
of like something we call covert contracts where we keep
thinking, oh, I'm going to do all these nice things and then
you're going to owe me and you're going to do them back.
Or we have a lot of mind reading where we think like, if somebody
loves me, they should know my needs.
But because we have such unique and different programming, those
become extremely maladaptive strategies for connection and
for healthy relationships. And so instead, what we really
want to be able to do is have healthy interdependence, which
is that middle ground. And that means that if you are
sitting here listening, any of your listeners, if they're
listening and they're like, Oh, my friend is for sure anxiously
attached, for example, you can know that your friend probably
needs a lot of like certainty and inclusion and validation and
encouragement. And you can give those things to
your friend because we talked about, hey, that's the anxious
attachment styles needs. And so you have this dynamic of
being able to like feed into that a little bit, which is
great. And that's you being supportive.
But we have to draw the line where we don't make ourselves
responsible for that person's emotional state or well-being
because that's where we go into codependency.
And then if we're not showing up for the relationship to
ourselves because we're so hyper fixated on others, then we end
up usually being resentful or then we go into that mind
reading covert contract kind of forming.
So I think it's great to have like this ability to extend
ourselves to people, but healthy interdependence really boils
down to I will contribute and I will extend myself to others,
but I won't do it without also taking myself into consideration
so that I'm never giving from an empty cup.
So I know what I can actually give and I can, you know, be
validating or reassuring or all these different things, but in a
place where I'm also centered and rooted in my own space and
my own life. And that really becomes where we
get into secure attachment because securely attached
individuals are interdependent. They know how to look out for
themselves and and look out for others as well and really do
their best to take both sides of that into equal consideration.
We do have a lot of parents that listen to the podcast, and I
think what's really interesting about the attachment styles
conversation is one of the most common examples people use as
sleep training. And they're like, OK, so like
the parents feel this way and it's challenging, but like the
child never really knows what to expect and they're always
distressed the entire time. I feel like that's the most
common example I've learned, whether it's in social media
videos or classes or whatever it is from a psychology
perspective. But as you're describing the
cycle of like emotions and response, I think that those
teenagers would be really impactful because you are having
really intense emotions and you're talking about
individualization. And that's a time when you're
really trying to do that and build these new relationships
and understand yourself. But there still is that fish and
pole and kind of like more integration of the family
system. So I'm curious what your
thoughts are on navigating attachment styles from a
parent's perspective, especially during that time period when
it's not just kids and they're not just showing up with
consistency and validation, but there is a little bit more
nuance and and open dialogue there.
Yeah, it's such a beautiful question.
So I think to your point, like people's teenagers is one of the
most sensitive times. And I think that because, and
this is just really honest for if there are parents listening,
yeah, I'm sorry in advance. But I think that that there's a
lot of parents who have their own attachment wounding.
And what ends up happening is when they see their children
individuating at a subconscious level.
For those parents, sometimes they have their own fears that
get projected onto the relationship with their child.
And so sometimes it can be like, oh, their child's becoming more
of an individual or rebelling in certain ways or trying to carve
out time and space for themselves.
And that can trigger a parent's own unresolved abandonment
wounds or fears of something bad happening to the child and the
child being unsafe. Or, you know, there can be their
their own fears that they project onto the relationship.
And there's this really wonderful body of work called
conscious parenting and it talks about how basically everything
that triggers you in your relationship to your child is an
opportunity for your own growth and healing.
Now it doesn't mean don't have boundaries with your children or
don't, you know, make sure that you're accountable and
protective and looking out for them and that it's very healthy
to say, hey, there's consequences to actions and if
you do these unhealthy things, there's going to be not great
consequences and that's fine. But I think that honestly, when
it comes to the parent child relationship, each person has
their inside job 1st to take care of.
And I think that when that is being done effectively, then
there's a lot more room for proper and secure connection to
take place. Because if I'm connecting with a
child, let's say he was a teenager.
And if I have, let's pretend I'm anxiously attached and I have my
own unresolved abandonment wounds and that child like
trying to stay out every Friday, Saturday and do all these
things. I might have my own fears like,
Oh my gosh, my child's getting to that age where they're not
going to be around as much. And then I may find myself
controlling or you know, becoming too strict about their
time because I actually have my own things to work on.
So I really want to just highlight that first.
I think that that the relationship really exists in
steps. And I think that when a parent
is emotionally regulated themselves and they're in their
happiest and best version and they're much more fun and open
person to connect with when they're around their children.
And you'll usually see the connection stabilized in the
parent child relationship when someone's a teenager, if that
parent has really taken care of their own inner work first.
I think the second piece is to keep that open channel of
communication. And that can really happen by
honestly, if you see that one of your children is insecurely
attached by meeting their attachment needs.
So if you know that your child's anxious like be a little more
encouraging or validating. If you know that your child's
dismissive avoidant, you don't have the time and space to
respect their freedom or independence Oregon autonomy or
to be acknowledging of the things that you see them doing.
But that doesn't have to be at the expense of what number 3 is
here, which is to also advocate for your own needs.
As your child becomes an adult, you start having an adult to
adult relationship. And so in that particular space
and time, you are going to have your own needs.
And while you may like, let's say, for example, have a fear of
your child growing up or leaving and that could trigger the
abandonment fear as you work through that abandonment fear,
that's not a call to say like, hey, just let your child run
free and who cares? It's a call to say I'm going to
approach my need for connection with my child from a regulated
space. So I'm going to work through my
own abandonment fears, but then I'm going to tell my child that,
hey, I really care about this relationship.
I know you're busy and you have a lot of things you want to do
with your friends, but can we have like an every Sunday
evening we do dinner together and we spend time together just
being present or hanging out? Like you can still advocate for
your needs in that relationship, but it's just going to be most
effective to somebody going through their behavioral stages
of individuation if you're doing that from a regulated place
first. One more question I have about
the family system side of things is siblings, which we talked a
lot about, like your family of origin really impacts these
attachment styles and how those show up in adulthood.
But can siblings have different attachment styles?
And how do things like emotional sensitivity or our inner
dialogue, will that also impact attachment styles?
Or it's just like everyone in the same environment kind of
developed the same style? I hardly ever see it's funny
because it's such a good question.
I wasn't laughing at your question.
I was laughing at how it almost never works like that.
Like I rarely see kids in the same household have the same
attachment style. There are so many reasons to
play into this. You could make an argument for
birth order. You can make an argument for
genetic predisposition still being slightly different in
certain ways. But honestly, what I've seen
over the years, having been in private practice for a long time
and then through our programs, is that what actually happens is
children are just treated differently because the parents
in a different headspace with each of their individual
children. Like generally the first child
parents are really overprotective.
They could be more controlling, a little bit more strict.
Yeah. And so you're probably going to
actually see that there's a little more lack of freedom and
autonomy. And then they're actually can be
like the overcompensation of that for that that child as they
grow up. You'll also see that like in the
birth order context, not the way that we traditionally look at
birth order, but like if you have a child who is, let's say
two years old and the next sibling comes along, that can
actually trigger that. The biggest times they see
jealousy being an issue for people in their adult life is
when they have siblings very close in age in their early
upbringing. Because literally jealousy is
actually the survival mechanism that we feel like, Oh my God,
our needs aren't going to be met.
How are we going to survive if this person is taking away from
us who's meeting our needs? And when there's another child
that comes along right after that first child, it can feel
like almost this survival threat to the attention being split.
And especially if there's many children after or things of that
nature, there's so many other things that play into it.
In a big family, you'll often see the elder children be
parentified. They may play a caretaker role
for the younger siblings. Like there's so many parts of it
that affect our attachment styles.
And it can even be things like, you know, parents being in one
headspace when one child is born and then four years later, if
the next child's born, they've now saved some money and they're
less financially stressed. And one parent can be around
more, be more present, or there can be the opposite end, which
is we see a dynamic where parents are quite loving, but
unfortunately one of the parents just lost their parent at the
time of their child's birth. And so now they're emotionally
unavailable in those early formative years, and they're
going through their own grieving process in various ways.
So there can be so many different things that really
play into this. But that overarching theme is
that you're very actually less likely to see that children of
the same households are all just the exact same attachment style.
You'll generally see variations of it unless you have children
close in age, very chaotic household, very disorganized
dynamics that are going to be more likely to produce if you're
full avoidant attachment style. Because there are these extreme
cases that those are always going to be the overarching
themes. That's so interesting.
My last question for you is about resources that you
recommend because there are so many different directions you
can go after this conversation, whether you have a specific
attachment style you're interested in or there's the
parenting side of things, there's the psychology
perspective. So it's for people that are
interested in learning more about attachment theory.
What are your recommendations? Yeah, I definitely think start
by taking a quiz. You can decide what your
attachment style is. We have a free quiz on our
website at personaldevelopmentschool.com.
You can go in there and it will actually give you like a full
report to your e-mail that will say this is your attachment
style. This is the percentage
breakdown. This is your most likely core
wounds, your biggest needs and relationships, probably the ways
you have boundaries and communicate or maybe lack
thereof. And it will help give a
breakdown. And then, you know, we, we also
have a lot of resources in terms of courses.
We have a conscious parenting course.
We have an attachment style healing course.
We have a lot of that. But there's a lot of things for
anybody who's like not trying to go fully, fully down that path.
You can start by taking the quiz and then you can watch content
like I put daily content on YouTube at personal development
school Dash Chaise Gibson. There's a lot of other great
resources as well, like the original work of like John
Bullby and Mary Ainsworth is is around.
There's some interesting experiments you can watch on
YouTube that are like the strange situation experiment to
help you really see how a child actually exhibits their
attachment style at a very, very young age.
So there's a lot out there, but I would definitely say just
learn your attachment style 1st and then that will give you a
really clear picture of the things that you can work on
next. I love it.
It's so funny. I work in a lab at Penn and we
have 3 and 4 year olds coming in and we're looking at
relationships and attachment and we're mainly looking at Cal's
trades. But of course then you have a
5050 breakdown so you can understand both sides of the
picture. And one of the things we do is
the strange situation. And so one of us comes in like
with a mask on and a hat, and we're like, hi, do.
You want to play with. This toy and it's so funny to
see how they react because the parents in the corner and some
kids are just like, yes, I want the toy and others are like,
there's a weird person in here. And so it's fun to see it from
both sides. That's so cool that that's what
you get to do. That's super interesting.
It's really hard to not laugh and I'm sure the kids are like
they don't find it funny, but from an adult's perspective to
like no emotion 'cause you have to like keep the variables
consistent. So it's a funny position to be
in for sure. Oh, that's so interesting.
Well, that's really cool that that's what you're studying and
that's what you're doing. That's amazing.
Yeah, well, this was absolutely incredible.
You mentioned your YouTube but if people want to follow on
Instagram as well, where can they find you?
Yes, at personal development. Under Score School.
Amazing. Well, thank you so much.
This was absolutely incredible.