Relationship Expert: If You're Anxiously Attached, Watch This | Thais Gibson
In a Nutshell
Thais Gibson explains that attachment styles form from childhood experiences and create predictable core wounds, emotional patterns, and relationship dynamics that operate through the subconscious mind. The solution requires following five sequential pillars: rewiring core wounds through emotional and imagery repetition, self-sourcing unmet needs for 21 days, regulating the nervous system, learning specific communication frameworks, and setting healthy boundaries. People remain stuck in anxious, avoidant, or fearful patterns until they complete this internal work first, because the subconscious equates familiarity with safety and will reject secure partners until the conditioning changes.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Everybody has an attachment style, and there are four of them. The concept originated from John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth at Cambridge University. The four attachment styles are: the securely attached style, which represents about 50% of the population, and three insecure attachment styles that make up the remaining 50%.
Securely attached individuals grow up in childhood with what are called approach-oriented behaviors from their parents. When a child is young, if they cry or get distressed, the parent is attuned, present, and notices it. They approach the child to ask what's wrong and attempt to soothe them and make the child feel better. This conditions a child to believe at a very young age that their emotions are worthy of being seen and heard, it's safe to rely on other people, they can trust that people are going to be there for them, they can communicate, and most importantly, they are worthy of love as they are on good days, bad days, good moments, and hard moments. This healthy conditioning leads to the type of patterning they bring into their relationships as adults. Securely attached people report not just having the longest lasting relationships, but also the most satisfaction in their relationships.
The three insecure attachment styles can be thought of as being along a continuum. At one end is the anxious attachment style. Anxiously attached individuals grow up with either real or perceived abandonment. Real abandonment includes situations like a parent passing away or leaving at a young age. Perceived abandonment is particularly interesting because neuroscience of trauma shows that small-t trauma repeatedly over time has quite similar impact to a singular big-T trauma.
Perceived abandonment includes situations where parents are very loving but really busy, always working, or always traveling for work. Children grow up in this environment experiencing love as present and then taken away repeatedly. This inconsistency causes the child to brace and deeply fear love being taken away. As adults, these individuals adapt by being charming, charismatic, and well-liked. They develop superpowers in winning people over, but they also people-please to the point of burning themselves out or self-silencing. Their big core wounds center around the fear of abandonment, being alone, excluded, disliked, rejected, and not being good enough.
Anxiously attached individuals need more validation and approval in relationships. They really like certainty, such as wanting to know when they'll see someone next if plans are cancelled. They often struggle with boundaries and put themselves on the back burner because they're so focused on making sure everyone else is good. They are very invested in and attracted to emotionally unavailable people.
Thais Gibson got into this work after having a turbulent childhood and becoming addicted to painkillers after knee surgery at 15. She struggled with about six years of daily opioid use and tried both inpatient and outpatient rehab. She was in school for psychology and felt like life and relationships were really hard. In a psychology class, a student told her that her conscious mind can't outwill or overpower her subconscious mind. This was powerful because she realized that all the times she said she was going to get clean, change her life, and stop doing painful things, but didn't, it wasn't because she was weak or powerless. It was because her subconscious mind was running the show.
Gibson originally started this work by getting sober and then becoming obsessed with learning about the subconscious mind, the ego, and how to transcend patterns and conditions from a spiritual perspective. She spent the first few years of her practice working not with attachment styles but with people's core wounds, helping them rewire triggers, learn their own needs and how to meet them in healthy ways, regulate their nervous system, communicate, and set boundaries.
When she met her now husband, they both had things they hadn't worked out in relationships yet. She started revisiting attachment theory, which she had learned at a high level in university. She realized that knowing somebody's attachment style tells you exactly what their core wounds are going to be, exactly what their needs are going to be, exactly what their emotional patterns are in relationships, how their nervous system is going to function, what types of boundary issues they're going to have, and how they tend to communicate in relationships. Original attachment theory didn't cover any of that detail, focusing more on temperament and behaviors.
Anxious attachment themes include fearing abandonment, feeling not good enough, excluded, disliked, and rejected. These are big triggers brought from the past because the subconscious mind was imprinted with those experiences, and people project them into the present. The bear in the woods analogy illustrates this: if you see a bear in the woods and run to safety, the next day when you go back, your mind braces for the bear. Trees blowing in the wind become the bear. This is what happens with relationship baggage - feeling abandoned as a child leads to projecting abandonment as an adult.
At the other end of the continuum is the dismissive avoidant attachment style. They grow up with the overarching theme of childhood emotional neglect. This isn't necessarily extreme scenarios like being alone at three years old trying to find food. Most often, childhood emotional neglect means having structure and order, food on the table, being at school on time, but parents who are not emotionally available or attuned. Both parents are typically uninvolved rather than inconsistent. Children are wired for attunement, connection, to feel safe, seen, and special. When this doesn't happen, children adapt by repressing their attachment needs and minimizing their need for emotional connection. This gives them a sense of control.
As adults, this causes destruction in relationships because they've learned that their emotional, vulnerable self is defective or shameful. Expressing it too much would make them weak. Their big triggers include being very afraid of relying on other people, being helpless, trapped, or engulfed. They internalize a lot of shame from childhood because if you yearn for connection and keep getting rejected, as an adult you believe that if people really see you, they'll reject you too. Dismissive avoidants are very stoic. They start relationships great when everything is easy and light, but after four to six months when things get more real and serious, they jet, pull away, or retreat. They minimize their attachment needs and create space, becoming quite distant in relationships.
The fearful avoidant attachment style is characterized by more big-T trauma growing up, including more emotional chaos. This can include having a parent with narcissistic personality disorder, a parent who was an alcoholic, parents in active addiction, or a really intense divorce. While anxious attachment always wants more closeness and dismissive avoidant always wants more space, fearful avoidants learn that love is both a really good thing and a really hard thing. For example, if a mother is an alcoholic, one day she comes home after a few drinks in a good mood, loving and embracing, making love feel safe and good. Other days she might be drinking more heavily, angry drunk, cruel, mean, and unpredictable. The child learns that love is a really good thing but it can also really hurt, be harsh, critical, and cruel.
Fearful avoidants end up having competing associations about the same thing. Love is both really good and really bad. As adults, they are the hot and cold partner. Their core wounds include fearing abandonment when love isn't there, fearing being trapped and helpless if they rely on people, and having a huge core wound around feeling betrayed. The biggest wound from the new attachment theory perspective is always waiting for the other shoe to drop, always being on high alert for whether somebody is going to hurt them. Love feels like a very bittersweet experience. They fall in love and love the feeling of being in love and connecting, but the more they love, the more they're certain the person will hurt them that much more. Everything is inevitably going to be really bad and painful. Love feels so good but also feels like a threat, scary, causing them to say come get close and then get back, I changed my mind.
Fearful avoidants learn to be very hypervigilant. They learn to read between the lines, read every little micro expression, body language, and change in tone of voice because that's how they've learned to attach. Anxious people try to get close and people-please, dismissive avoidants try to keep space, and fearful avoidants try to notice every little thing about you so they can predict your future and know how to respond. This gives them a superpower, but jumping to conclusions about changes, abandonment, betrayal, or control makes for turbulent relationships.
We are attracted to people based on subconscious programming. The conscious mind is responsible for 3 to 5% of all beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and actions, while the subconscious and unconscious collectively are 95 to 97%. The conscious mind is logical and analytical, while the subconscious is the habituated self, programming, and conditioning. The subconscious mind equates familiarity to safety and thus survival. People are most attracted to what is most familiar to them, which is actually the way they treat themselves. Anxiously attached people, being externally focused on everyone else's feelings and needs, dismiss and avoid their own feelings, needs, and boundaries, so they are attracted to people who mirror that back. Dismissive avoidants are preoccupied with their own time and space, so they often invest in people who are very preoccupied with them.
The most important thing to do is learn to have a secure relationship with yourself first through rewiring insecure patterns. You can have a checklist of what you want in a relationship and know your needs, but you often find yourself not attracted to people who have all those things on the checklist. Secure people feel secure both consciously and subconsciously, while insecurely attached people don't have that same experience. Until the work is done to heal and become secure with self, people won't be attracted to the right people according to their conscious mind's evaluation.
Thais Gibson initially worked with people to rewire painful patterns rooted in childhood conditioning, but had not yet framed this work around attachment styles. After meeting her husband and recognizing that both needed relationship work, she revisited attachment theory and discovered that each attachment style carries distinct core wounds, patterns around needs, nervous system responses, communication styles, and behaviors.
This realization led to creating comprehensive work that addresses rewiring at the subconscious level, where all conditioning from past experiences resides in what she describes as our personal warehouse.
The work is organized into five pillars, with the first three focusing on self-healing and the final two addressing communication and boundaries with others.
Self-love is fundamentally a subconscious process. When love wasn't mirrored in healthy ways during childhood, people mirror unhealthy forms of love in their adult relationships with themselves and are attracted to unhealthy love from others.
The first pillar involves rewiring core wounds through a three-step process. Work on one core wound at a time. The three steps are:
- Identify the core wound (for example, "not good enough") and determine its opposite ("I am good enough")
- Create repetition of emotions and imagery rather than using affirmations, since the subconscious mind speaks in emotions and images, not language
- Record yourself saying the new belief out loud, then listen back during suggestible states when the brain produces more alpha brain waves
Suggestible states include after meditation, the first hour after waking before coffee, the last hour before sleep, and after intense exercise or breathwork.
Neuroscience research indicates that doing this practice for 21 days builds strong neural networks that are highly likely to remain. A survey of 60,000 people who completed the 21-day practice without missing a day reported a 99.7% success rate in rewiring their wounds.
After rewiring these patterns, Gibson noticed a significant reduction in internal emotional drama. Instead of constant thoughts about abandonment, trust, and control, she experienced mental space to design her life, create, and be present.
The second pillar involves learning one's own needs and meeting them in relationship to self. This draws from Gabor Maté's distinction between trauma as things that happened that shouldn't have happened, and trauma as things that didn't happen that should have happened—the neglect, lack of safety, feeling unseen, unprotected, or not deeply known.
People audit their biggest unmet needs from childhood using a comprehensive list of needs. Common unmet needs include not feeling parents were present enough, protected, able to learn from a parent, deeply seen, known, or attuned to.
People typically fail to meet in their relationship with themselves whatever needs went unmet in childhood. For example, someone who wasn't validated growing up often struggles most with self-validation while validating everyone else first.
For 21 days, people practice actual actions and practices to meet their deepest unmet needs within their relationship to self. This becomes their new baseline and set point through repetition, emotion, and imagery that reaches the subconscious mind.
A common pattern is attempting to resource from others the things one struggles to self-source. Anxiously attached people may pressure partners to constantly soothe them. Fearful avoidants may demand 100% congruence and zero white lies. Dismissive avoidants may expect partners to understand them without communication.
Self-sourcing is learned through mechanical repetition that eventually becomes natural. Gibson uses the driving analogy: initially learning to drive feels mechanical with conscious attention to steering, mirrors, and signals, but eventually becomes automatic while listening to podcasts or music.
People receive a list of major needs with three or four healthiest, most direct ways to meet each need. They actively practice these for 21 days. Self-validation, for example, might involve writing three wins daily, big or small.
Healing happens when people become their own parents, giving themselves what they couldn't access through their parents, who are human beings doing their best.
The third pillar involves learning to regulate one's own nervous system, completing the internal healing work before moving to interpersonal dynamics.
The fourth pillar focuses on communication once needs are understood. People often communicate hurt without knowing what they need, leaving partners unable to solve for the problem. The communication framework involves three steps during conflict:
- Both parties communicate what came up for them and validate each other's emotions
- Each person states what they actually need
- Each person paints a picture of what that need looks like specifically
A couple worked on the wife needing more support. The husband took out trash and did dishes, believing this demonstrated support, while the wife wanted encouragement, words of affirmation, and recognition of her hard work. This illustrates the necessity of painting a clear picture of needs.
Behind every criticism is a need. Negative branding like "You don't care about me" causes the other person to shut down, bracing for punishment as they did in childhood. Instead, convert criticism into needs: "I felt hurt because I didn't hear from you as much as I hoped. Can we do a 15-minute call every evening before bed?"
After validation, the other person can express their needs and the pair negotiates a workable solution. The mindset is "feeling, need, feeling, need"—knowing one's feelings and needs and communicating them clearly.
The 90-day framework begins with 30 days rewiring core wounds, then 30 days self-sourcing needs. This reduces pressure on partners and makes requests more reasonable. Jumping to communication before completing self-work can result in asking partners to meet needs that should be self-sourced.
The subconscious mind equates familiarity with safety and survival, often leading people to believe external solutions will resolve internal wounds. Completing the first two pillars first creates clarity about what needs are realistic to request from partners versus what needs internal work.
The main reason anxious attachment needs so much reassurance is because the subconscious mind only receives what is familiar, equating it to safety. When someone seeks validation like "tell me I'm good enough," there is often a hole in the bucket - the reassurance feels good initially and provides a dopamine hit, but then leaks out because the two foundational pillars are missing. This explains why anxious attachment styles need constant reassurance - they struggle profoundly with the first two pillars, which creates confusion in relationships. When requests come from lack and imbalance, they put too much pressure on relationships and become problematic.
Without doing the work in the proper order as the pillars are being developed, people will never actually request something in a healthy way. Requests coming from an anxious attachment style are often feared to push someone away because they probably will, as they stem from imbalance rather than security.
The last pillar is learning healthy boundaries. Healthy boundaries are not about separation - every boundary is a joining because a boundary is an authentic expression of true yeses and nos, representing the whole human being. Each attachment style has unique boundary patterns.
Anxious Attachment and Boundaries
Anxious attachment styles tend to be boundaryless. They struggle with boundaries altogether and end up people-pleasing into oblivion. They get scared to set boundaries because they believe boundaries will lead to abandonment, dislike, or rejection. This is another reason why core wound work must be done first.
Dismissive Avoidant Boundaries
Dismissive avoidants set boundaries that are too strong. They are scared to make compromises because they equate that to vulnerability. Instead of setting small boundaries like "I've had a long week, I'm tired, can we stay in and watch a movie," they create huge boundaries like "canceling, not coming over, sorry, not going to be there" because they don't know how to co-regulate and communicate needs appropriately.
Fearful Avoidant Boundary Cycle
Fearful avoidants have a boundary cycle where they start boundaryless and people-please, being very generous and overgiving while under-receiving. Eventually they feel taken advantage of, get triggered by their core wounds, become angry, and set boundaries from anger or frustration, often saying things harshly or critically. Then they feel terribly guilty and go back to having no boundaries, creating a loop of no boundaries, frustration, anger, guilt, and back to no boundaries.
Boundary work must be done in order. Even after reading boundary books and learning about boundaries intellectually, people often clam up in real situations because they haven't addressed core wounds around boundaries. The conscious mind says "set a boundary" but the subconscious mind says "no, I'm going to be unsafe" because past experiences equated boundaries with punishment or unsafety.
The process involves three steps:
- Step one: Know your boundaries by auditing them in the seven areas of life - career, financial, and others
- Step two: Identify what you're afraid will happen if you set a boundary - "I'm going to be abandoned," "people will reject me," "they'll think I'm a burden"
- Step three: Rewire the fear of setting boundaries using rewiring techniques, then practice exposure work starting with small boundaries with trusted people rather than high-stakes situations
Setting one boundary per day builds repetition and emotional rewiring. The key insight is that unless boundary work is done at the subconscious level, intellectual knowledge alone will not create change.
When one partner is anxious and the other is avoidant, the anxious partner clings while the avoidant pulls away. The solution is not to will yourself through it or self-silence. First, do the rewiring work. When one person doesn't want to do the work, recognize that different needs don't mean mutually exclusive needs. An anxious partner wanting more time together and a dismissive avoidant wanting more space can both be met through the feeling-need framework.
The feeling-need framework involves each person stating what they feel and need specifically. Anxious partners often fear worst-case scenarios like abandonment, while avoidants fear being consumed. When they paint a picture of specific needs - "two nights a week and 15-minute phone calls" versus "Sunday afternoons and Monday, Tuesday evenings to myself" - both realize the requests are reasonable and feasible.
Deeply anxious and deeply secure partners rarely stay in long-term relationships because their subconscious comfort zones reject each other. Securely attached people eventually pull away from excessive emotional burden when the other person isn't self-regulating. Attachment styles exist on a continuum - if someone is slightly anxious, movement is possible, but the advice to "just date a secure person" doesn't usually work out as expected.
When a slightly anxious person is with a really secure partner, the secure person will set boundaries and communicate needs, saying things like "I'm going to be here for you, but there are times when I'm struggling at work and need you to practice being okay on your own." This provides an opportunity for the anxious partner to practice self-soothing.
Being 100% sure about a partner is a fallacy. People should feel highly certain, but like being 100% ready for kids, a new job, or moving across the country, complete certainty is unrealistic. The bridge shouldn't feel insurmountable - it should feel like a manageable leap of faith.
Certainty gets stronger over time because relationships are tried and tested through experience. There's no substitute for time because people change, grow, and evolve. The wedding vow "till death do us part" carries inherent risk because you don't know what life's going to look like or who your partner will become in 5, 10, 15, or 20 years.
Real love is built most in the power struggle stage because that's when masks drop and people aren't on their best behavior. The power struggle presents both crisis and opportunity to communicate needs, feelings, and pain points. Moving from conditionally based love to unconditionally based love happens through deeper conversations and doing the work together.
Early relationships are like fragile saplings that windstorms can destroy, but meaningful conversations build deep roots where partners know each other's biggest pain points and are mindful of them. This depth makes fears about changing minds or outside attractions seem frivolous and laughable. Love isn't just given - it's grown through meaningful conversations and real connection work.
Stay with the person who feels safe because there are more green flags, then build mutual excitement into the relationship. A rite of passage from the rhythm stage involves building novelty, spontaneity, and chemistry into a safe relationship. Safety is healthy and good, but excitement must be cultivated to keep the spark alive. It's easier to add excitement to a safe relationship than to build safety in an exciting relationship.
The caveat is that you must actually feel attracted to the person and like them. Sometimes being constantly on edge stems from painful dynamics, especially if the other person isn't willing to do the work.
Follow the chemistry as long as both people commit to doing the work. Chemistry reveals three things: someone expressing repressed traits (requiring integration work), someone meeting deeply unmet childhood needs (creating early spark but later pressure), and someone treating you the way you treat yourself (requiring personal work). The excitement should be followed, but vetting that someone will do the work is non-negotiable.
Best love advice received: Learn to be compassionate and gentle toward yourself.
Worst love advice received: Try to change other people if they're not willing to do the work.
Can you ever change someone: No. People can choose to change themselves, but you can only show up, lead by example, and observe how someone responds.
What the spark really means: The spark means someone is expressing your repressed traits, meeting your deeply unmet needs, or mirroring how you treat yourself. Extreme sparks always indicate one of these three things.
How people push away the love they want: People try to make someone else fill everything, complete them, and do it all for them, when really everyone is supposed to do half that job for themselves. Otherwise, they can't receive love properly and put too much pressure on the relationship.
One law for everyone: Everyone should learn about their own subconscious conditioning and how to rewire it. Without dealing with things at the subconscious level, people set intentions and make plans but often feel defeated when they don't follow through.
Keep Jay Shetty Podcast in your library
Save the videos and channels worth coming back to, and find them again in one place.
