Trauma Bonding, Being Friends with Your Ex & Importance of Attachment Styles | Thais Gibson DSH #333

what stage would you say most people are in?

Most people go dating, honeymoon, and then break up in the power struggle.

The power struggle is the stage of relationships where like the mask drops.

And the whole point of the power struggle stage, the rite of passage, is actually to move the needle more from conditionally based love when the mask is on and you're in your best behavior in the early stages into more unconditionally based love where you can say, here's my fears in a relationship.

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And here's the episode.

Welcome back, guys.

Today I have a very exciting episode.

You're going to learn about attachment styles, personalities, trauma.

Taiise Gibson, how's it going?

Good.

I'm excited to be here with you.

Absolutely.

So what you teach is very powerful.

I want to know how you got into all of this.

Yeah, thank you.

So essentially, I went through a really sort of chaotic upbringing, I would say.

Lots of like really extreme arguments, fighting, really long divorce between my parents, like 15 years in divorce court sort of thing.

And I think from a young age, I was a really sensitive child and I was like, what's going on?

Like, there must be another way.

And I think I was always curious about relationships and like how, you know, fighting has to happen so often and like there must be more solutions to this.

And so I grew up, I went through, I played soccer in university and then came out and was sort of like, okay, I want to work with people

and started in actually the field of like the subconscious mind.

So started doing a lot of things around hypnosis and was really interested in how the subconscious mind works because what you'll understand is the conscious mind can't outwill or overpower the subconscious mind.

So our subconscious itself is actually responsible for like 95 to 97% of our thoughts, our beliefs, our emotions, our decisions.

And so for me, I, you know, realized if we want to have real change, it has to exist there.

And going through like the traditional realm of school, I was sort of like, I feel like this is so limited.

I feel like there's tools, but not like real tools that are actually providing change in a reasonable period of time.

And I didn't really agree with like the model of talk therapy too much.

So I got really interested in like the subconscious and how it works, started off there.

And just over time, ended up being, you know, working on relationship oriented things with people.

And I spent a lot of time talking about subconscious core wounds.

So like each individual based on their traumas and experiences has these individual core wounds.

I'll be abandoned.

I'll be trapped.

I won't be good enough, I'll be betrayed, you know, all these sorts of core wounds that we basically have from how our experiences imprint the subconscious.

And over time, what ended up happening is I started learning about attachment styles and how they had these really unique patterns of core wounds and then really unique patterns of, you know, different needs that they have, different expectations they have in terms of like what a relationship should look like.

And I realized like all these things I was learning from a subconscious level fit really neatly into the different four attachment styles.

So then then I started thinking, okay, well, we're told by traditional psychology, this is your attachment style.

That's it.

Good luck.

And I started thinking, well, if you can recondition core wounds and you can recondition communication patterns and boundaries, why can't we just change attachment styles?

So I was working in private practice for about eight years and did a lot of work on the subconscious mind and people actually changing their attachment style to become securely attached.

Wow.

And then had a really long wait list for about two years.

And people were getting frustrated with me because they're going, hello, like it's in so long.

And so I was like, like, how do I just package it and put it online?

And started putting out like free YouTube content.

And then that started to, you know, grow fairly quickly and decided, okay, well, I'll just package this into courses and make it more accessible.

So that's sort of the long story.

No, that's incredible.

To be able to change someone's subconscious, not a lot of people have that power.

So that's an incredible story.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, I would definitely say like.

It's not like me changing.

I'll definitely give tools for people to do it themselves.

It's very like, I don't do the hypnosis model of things, but and I like to encourage people, like, it's them doing the work sort of thing.

Um, but that's where you see like the most results by far from.

Yeah.

And it seems like these days, I don't know if it's due to social media, but there's a lot of toxic relationships.

Yes.

Especially on the younger side.

Um, well, it could be both.

I'm not friends with older people, but it seems like people in their 20s, 30s, there's a lot of toxic relationships.

Yes.

And is that due to attachment styles, just the wrong styles matching up?

Honestly, I think there's a few things.

I think for sure, like if you have a different attachment style from somebody, the analogy I often give to people is it's like having a subconscious set of rules for relationships.

So, if you imagine that, like you think of like a physical analogy, if you and I sit down to play a board game and you have the rules for Monopoly and I have the rules for Scrabble, there's going to be like all this confusion and friction.

And so, that's essentially what the attachment cell is.

It's a subconscious set of rules that you learn about love and connection and what it's supposed to look like and what each other is supposed to operate by in a relationship.

And so, with different rules, it's very confusing.

That's a huge thing for sure.

I would say conclusively, your attachment cell is the number one impactor of your relationship.

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Relationships.

But I also think we get a lot of bad messaging about relationships.

I think we're told a lot of things.

Like, I think there's a lot of division right now as well in the world.

Like a lot of like divisiveness between men and women, a lot of divisiveness between all sorts of places in society, unfortunately, largely due to like the mainstream media more than anything, I think.

But, but, um, yeah, I do think there's a huge impact from your attachment self for sure.

Yeah, it's easy to just follow advice you see on social media.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And some of it is like, you know,

you make your partner jealous.

A lot of it's game-oriented.

And, and I find that that's something that, you know, we have these six different stages of relationships.

As you and I were sort of chatting.

So we have your dating stage, which is like the vetting stage.

This is based on the work of Dr.

Susan Johnson.

And then we have the honeymoon stage.

And then you have the power, struggle, struggle, stability, commitment, and bliss stages.

And each stage has its own like kind of rite of passage.

And for you to, you know, play games in the dating stage and honeymoon stage might work for some people because, yeah, you know how to win people over or do these kind of like manipulative things to keep somebody's attention.

But that doesn't help you when you get into the real stages.

That doesn't help you in the power struggle.

It doesn't help you like last in a relationship and make things work and learn how to solve problems together and hash things out and talk things through.

And so that these pieces of advice you get are like here's the the way to date somebody and then you know a lot of the toxic sort of information out there ends up being things that are going to actually bite you when they

when you get into the power struggle stage yeah there's no like one fix-it-all relationship advice because like you said there's stages for everyone exactly and what stage would you say most people are in most people go dating honeymoon and then break up in the power struggle it's statistically like the biggest place people end their relationships and it's the hardest stage to get through and i think it's because the power struggle is the stage of relationships where like the mask drops.

So the dating honeymoon, you're kind of on your best behavior.

You see everything with like your rose colored glasses on.

And then in the power struggle, what takes place is that like people start feeling more comfortable with somebody.

So they'll be more authentic and they'll let their guard down a little bit.

But that's also where we'll show our fears, our flaws, our truth.

And the whole point of the power struggle stage, the rite of passage, is actually to move the needle more from conditionally based love when the mask is on and you're on your best behavior in the early stages into more unconditionally based love where you can say here's my fears in a relationship and we can be mindful of one another's fears here are my needs in a relationship we can be mindful of each other's needs and try to meet them we're supposed to show ourselves in that stage but the problem is there's so much in society that teaches us not to be vulnerable not to share these things and so people's growth in a relationship gets stunted there and if you are only showing yourself with conditions you can only be loved conditionally yeah and so that's the whole point of that stage and it's there for a really powerful reason But for sure, that's where people most often lose their relationship.

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I love that.

Yeah, so as men, we're taught in media not to show emotion.

Yes.

And how do you think women feel about that?

Do you think women want men to show more emotion?

I have had many, many discussions with people over the years.

And I think there's a big difference between what we think of as like healthy masculinity versus not being emotional.

And I think there's a lot of

information out there saying, be a strong man, be in your masculine energy, all these different things.

But that being a strong masculine figure does not mean being emotionless.

Those are not, they easily get like put together, but they're actually not mutually exclusive things.

So I think, you know, what it means when people talk about being like in healthy masculinity is being strong, being direct, being true to yourself, having that authenticity, having that sense of certainty that comes from, you know, knowing what you want and having sort of investigated yourself.

I think there's a lot of healthy components there.

And, and being emotionally available and knowing what it is that you're feeling and experiencing and working towards that.

Not everybody has to be 10 out of 10 there, but doing the work to put your emotions into words to have healthier behaviors, that's still a healthy part of strong masculinity.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Sounds like you're all about just communication.

Like that's super important between partners, which some people don't do enough, right?

100%.

And I would say communication is how we bridge the gaps.

So if you imagine that analogy again, like you and I sit down, we're playing Scrabble with the Scrabble board and I have the rules for Monopoly.

You know, that's going to be difficult, but we could sort of reinvent the game together with new rules if we know, hey, these are my, this is what I have in my hand.

This is what I have available.

Here's what I have.

And if we can bridge that gap between communication, we can still have a nice time together.

And so, you know, people's attachment style, what it really is, is its rules.

Like dismissive avoidance, they tend to expect in relationships that everybody's kind of out for themselves because usually they had to be, that was their emotional training, right?

Like usually dismissive avoidance grew up with some form of childhood emotional neglect.

And so you'll see a dismissive avoidant think that like, okay, I'm going to take care of my business over here.

You take care of yours.

And that's not necessarily healthy or unhealthy.

But when you're paired with somebody who has totally inverted beliefs from that, that believes, no, no, no, I'm supposed to meet all of your needs and you're supposed to meet all of mine, then we have somebody who's operating from a codependent space and somebody who's operating from like a completely independent space.

And that bridging of the gaps can only really be fostered through healthy communication.

Right.

What is the most common attachment style you've seen?

Okay, so great question.

So there's four major ones for anybody who doesn't know which ones they are.

There's the securely attached style.

Statistically, about 20 years ago,

that was about 50% of the population.

Research shows it's actually coming down to about 30% in the past couple of decades.

And securely attached people, they grow up with a lot of healthy modeling.

So they grow up with like seeing their parents work through problems together.

Having parents, if they have a need, come to the child and

listen to their emotions, listen to their needs.

And I say to people,

a lot of parents will say to me, well, Thais, you know, if I have a child and they say I want candy at 11 p.m.

and they're four years old or five years old, You know, I can't do that.

And it's not about

giving in to every need.

It's not about always saying yes.

It's about being able to go to the child and say, hey, honey, I know you want candy right now.

I know that you love your candy, but you know, get your good night's sleep tonight.

You're going to be up all night if you have sugar this late.

Eat all your dinner tomorrow night and you can have a little bit of candy after dinner.

So it's not always about meeting somebody's needs.

It's about validating them, letting somebody know you hear their needs and then negotiating in a healthy way.

And so if we're taught that in childhood, and if we have parents who are

attuned, who are present, then we learn, okay, we can rely on each other.

We can rely on other people.

It's safe to do so.

So that's like the securely attached style.

Then we have three insecurely attached styles.

There's the anxious preoccupied who tends to have a lot of inconsistency in childhood.

So the inconsistency can be that they have really warm, loving parents, but the parents work all the time, for example.

And so they're with their grandparents all the time.

And inconsistency creates this feeling of perceived abandonment.

There can also be real abandonment, like a parent separates, doesn't come back.

But for those types of reasons, you'll see somebody who's

anxiously attached become very afraid of abandonment, sometimes struggle a little bit with being alone.

And they have a big set of sensitivities or core wounds around being excluded, being disliked, being rejected, being not good enough.

Those are like their big sort of challenges.

And what they need in relationships is a lot of reassurance, validation.

They need somebody to to be present with them.

Even if it's for small quantities of time,

quality of time will always overpower quantity of time for somebody who's anxiously attached.

And so a lot of that certainty is really important to an anxious person for those same reasons.

And then...

The other two attachment styles on sort of the far end is the dismissive avoidant.

And the dismissive avoidant attachment style usually grows up with some form of childhood emotional neglect.

And it doesn't have to be this like really extreme, overt neglect.

It can be that the parents are really good and stable, but they're, you know, never really around.

They're not very attuned.

So they're not able to be present and they're not able to help foster discussion about emotions with a child.

They're never like, hey, how is your day?

Or if the child's upset, they're not like, oh, are you okay?

Talk to me about it.

They'll sometimes have more messaging around things like, oh, children should be seen and not heard.

Or if a child is crying, they'll kind of distance themselves rather than approach to help soothe the child.

So this person grows up.

And what happens is when you're a dismissive avoidant child, you can't conceive of like, oh, my parents are emotionally unavailable.

Children are just wired for attunement.

They like really need that kind of connection.

And what ends up taking place is they don't have it.

And so a child at that age goes, oh, there must be something wrong with me that I can't get my needs met.

And so this child usually grows up.

And number one, they don't want to be vulnerable to somebody like that again because they're stored subconscious associations with that level of vulnerability is like this sucked, this is not fun.

And then on top of that, they usually have a lot of sensitivities to criticism.

and you would never know because dismissive avoidants you know tend to be very um stoic right they usually can sort of hide their emotions very well but if somebody is critical or harsh it really lands poorly and so DAs dismissive avoidance tend to want to keep distancing themselves from anything vulnerable or anything too emotional especially if things become critical or especially if there's conflict in relationships it really doesn't go well for a dismissive avoidant and so that's your da side and then you've got your anxious side and then the last insecurely attached style, this is what I was growing up, is the fearful avoidant.

So fearful avoidants grow up and they kind of share attributes of the anxious and the dismissive.

And fearful avoidants grew up in a lot of chaos.

So you'll see like lots of fighting or lots of like hot and cold kind of dynamics.

And so the fearful avoidant learns to have conflicting ideas about the same thing, which is love, right?

So for me, as an example, you know, I grew up thinking having really nice moments with my parents and having their availability and presence, but I also grew up seeing them being really destructive towards each each other and then sometimes taking that anger out on me and my sister.

And so for me, it was like, okay, love is good, but it's also terrifying.

And so the fearful avoidance is very hot and cold to people in relationships.

It's kind of like, come get close, come get close.

And then if people are too close, it's like, whoa, like get back, stay away.

Wow, I know people like that.

Yes.

And so you'll see that and they give off a lot of mixed signals.

You know, I did a lot of work on my attachment cell to become secure.

But my husband was dismissed of avoidant.

I was fearful of avoidant when we met.

And we did that work together and are both very secure now.

And it's been about nine years or so.

So, but we,

he said to me at the beginning of our relationship, like, you're very hot and cold all the time.

And I know that that's how I was with other people, but I would really want close connection.

And then when it got too close, I would sort of panic and swing the pendulum to the other direction.

Yeah, I think it's important for people to know their attachment style, not just for dating, but for business and life.

Yes.

Because it affects everything, right?

Literally everything.

It's the wildest thing.

So

you see it, you'll see that like, you know, I know for me as a fearful avoidant, I had to work through a lot of ambivalence with business, even like commitments in business.

I'd be like, oh, hold on.

I don't know.

And go really hard towards things and then sort of, you know, pump the brakes a little bit.

So it affects you in the workplace.

It affects your workplace relationships for people who work around a lot of other people.

Fearful avoidants tend to have like more trust wounds and that can show up there.

Anxious, preoccupied individuals can really be afraid of like getting abandoned or excluded from work.

And then dismissive avoidance can sometimes silo themselves out too much, where they can just want to like kind of keep their head down, do their own thing, and not ask for help, right?

So these patterns show up in our workplace, they show up in our romantic relationships, even our family and friendships.

They literally show up everywhere.

Absolutely.

Now, as someone that's been married for nine years, long-term relationship, do you believe you could be,

do you believe your partner can be friends with their ex?

I do believe that actually.

It's a great question.

So, so I've, so we haven't been married for nine years.

We've been together for nine years, coming up on nine years.

And

I think like the boundaries would matter.

So the reason I say this is my husband is actually not friends with any of his sexes at all.

I don't think it would bother me because I have so much trust for him now.

But the reason I'm actually like okay and open to that idea is I saw so many people when I was doing counseling and coaching where

people had truly like they they would build connections with people let's say they had a friendship for eight years and they decided to date the person

And then they dated the person and then it didn't work.

Do you just delete the person from your life after that?

And there's about 50% of people I would say are like, I will not speak to them again.

They're my ex for a reason.

That's it.

It's over.

And another 50% are like, I'm actually okay with being friends.

Now, of that 50% who's okay with it or wants some sort of friendship, the boundaries will then matter.

That's the real issue, right?

If, if, let's pretend my husband was friends with his ex and he was calling his ex every day,

you know, I would be like, hold on a minute here.

But I think to have like a leave on good terms, chat once a month or something like that, for me personally, I would totally be okay with that at this point.

But if you asked me when I was a fearful avoidant, I would say absolutely not.

Right.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So anxiety is a big thing in today's culture, right?

And we're trying to identify like what's causing it.

Do you think it's caused by the subconscious?

Oh my gosh.

Yes.

I mean, you can technically have anxiety that's being produced at a conscious level, but you have to think when we think consciously, I'm, I'm, conscious mind is sort of like the mind of choice right it's logical analytical choosing so like to be anxious consciously i would have to be like sitting here going i'm going to choose to think about things right now that will make me feel anxious right and so your subconscious is where everything really exists and a lot of our anxiety as a whole actually comes from a few core places number one if we have a lot of core wounds so how the subconscious works is it stores everything it's like a big warehouse and it let's say that somebody as a child let's pretend for argument's sake that you as a child um have an experience where you're made to feel really really unsafe.

And for whatever reason, maybe it was around other family members.

And so you feel this sort of sense of unsafety.

You store that.

And then your subconscious is kind of like the lens you see the world through.

So you'll store that feeling of unsafety.

And then, you know, whenever you are around something that triggers it, like those family members or people who remind you of those family members, it can really be anything.

The subconscious mind's like an association-making machine as well.

So anything where there's a close association or a close tie to something, then that's going to trigger that core wound that's there.

And it's going to cause you to feel those relived feelings of unsafety.

It's how, you know, if the anxious preoccupied has this perceived abandonment, something that reminds them or is associated with abandonment, they're actually experiencing the present moment discomfort combined with all of this subconsciously stored emotion that's unresolved from past experiences.

And so that's how we, when we get triggered, if you've ever, I had a big I am trapped wound when I was a fearful avoidant and I would sit in traffic and be like eight out of 10 pissed, like

frustrated.

And it's like, well, that's not a proportionate reaction.

But when you look back at some of the childhood experiences, it's like, well, I felt trapped all the time.

I was really trapped in a lot of different cases.

So I'm reliving that stored emotion because the traffic's triggering something within me.

And so that's what all of our experiences are when we're triggered or uncomfortable, anxiety included.

It's like one of the big root causes is that you have core wounds.

The second root cause of anxiety is when we have unmet needs.

So people think like that emotion's bad or emotion is scary.

Emotion is your best friend.

It's only ever giving you feedback.

And a lot of the times we think it's giving us feedback about like the external world.

It's giving us feedback about our internal world.

So if I were to, for example, go to a new country as somebody who has a big need for love and connection, if I were to go to a new country, not know anybody, I might feel a little bit of loneliness.

And I definitely wouldn't say I'm a lonely person or experience that a lot, but I would go there and I would feel that.

And that would be good because that would be telling me, hey, go make friends.

Go get your needs met.

Pain is there to help you adapt emotionally.

And so what happens to a lot of people is we go, oh my gosh, I don't want to feel my pain.

Let me push it away.

Let me numb it instead of listen to it so we can solve that underlying mechanism.

So anxiety is actually largely, it's either the core wounds being triggered or it's unmet needs that we have.

And, and that system is there to let us know, hey, sort of poke at us until we pay attention, discover what those needs are for us individually, and then actually pivot and adapt to go get the need met.

Wow.

Yeah, that's good to know because some people get triggered so easily.

Yes.

And you just changed my point of view, but I used to get mad at them, but now I'm realizing it's deeper than that.

Like they have some deep traumas they're dealing with and they probably can't control it.

Exactly, exactly.

Whenever somebody is really triggered like that, it is just a trauma response.

And so, you know, the, the, the line in the sand becomes, you know, I think that we can go, okay, toughen up, shut it down, you know.

And some people, that is their way of coping and some people are really good at that.

Other people, they actually didn't build that patterning.

So they sometimes they try to express it over and over as their way of sort of dealing with it.

And everybody sort of, how they respond to their, their, their coping behaviors is what they are are different.

And so my line in the sand for people is like, express all you want, but go do the work.

Yeah.

Right.

Like I'm here and I'll be present and do all these things and support you.

But if you're only doing the expressing part and not doing the underlying work, then you're keeping yourself in that pattern.

Then if I'm here supporting somebody in that, then I'm also like enabling them eventually.

Right.

So when it comes to the underlying work, when when it comes to healing trauma, healing anxieties, what steps do people need to do to start doing that?

Great question.

So first thing is awareness, right?

First thing is just having context for things is so useful, right?

If you just feel terrible and you don't know why, then that's really difficult.

If you feel terrible and you know, oh, I have this core wound or I have this unmet need, well, now you actually have tangibles and context helps actually diminish anxiety.

When we're like, oh, it's this wound that I have kicking up, then you're not just feeling lost in the sea of frantic emotion.

You're like, oh, I understand what's going on.

So awareness is first.

Second is subconscious reprogramming.

I think that this is something that is not talked about nearly enough.

And the problem is that you can't heal a subconscious wound at the conscious level of mind.

You can't just outthink these wounds.

They're going to keep coming up in different forms.

So what I always try to get people to do is like, there's something called auto-suggestion.

And I'll share the tool briefly for a second.

Essentially,

your subconscious doesn't speak language.

Okay.

So if I were to say to you, for example, Sean, think of the pink elephant.

Whatever you do, don't, sorry, change it.

Whatever you do, do not think of the pink elephant.

Okay.

You think of it, you can't help it.

I kind of ruined it for you because I said I even knew that and tried not to, but I still couldn't.

And so it's because your subconscious is speaking emotion and imagery.

So your subconscious sees the pink elephant.

Your conscious mind hears the language.

So we do a lot of things like affirmations, like, and that's useless because I'm going to say, let's say I have a wound of I'm not good enough.

And then I try to say, I am good enough.

I am good enough.

I am not speaking to my subconscious where the wound is at.

I'm not seeing anything and I'm not feeling anything.

So what we have to do when we're trying to reprogram our subconscious is we have to leverage that emotion and imagery and we have to repeat it.

Because when we use repetition and emotion, it fires and wires neural pathways.

So for argument's sake, let's say we're working on the core wound of not good enough.

All we have to do is say, okay, what's the opposite?

I am good enough is the opposite.

We can't just say an affirmation because that's just the conscious mind.

We instead have to come up with pieces of evidence.

so if people come up with pieces of evidence this is the the hack that gets you around it is that if i think of like you know i graduated from this place i think of walking across the stage if i think of the evidence okay i'm good enough because i did abc

Every memory we pick up as evidence is a container of emotion.

So if you were to sit here and close your eyes and tell me your favorite childhood memory, you'd probably smile because memory is a container of emotion.

So when we find memories as evidence, then we all of a a sudden have emotion.

And then if we can come up with 10 pieces of evidence to counteract this original core wound, then we've got the repetition and the motion.

This is how neural pathways get fired and wired.

So one really simple tool called auto-suggestion is you get people to pick their big wounds, the abandonment wounds, the not good enough wounds, the unworthiness wounds, the betrayal wounds, the feelings of being trapped or shamed, you know, criticized.

And we get them to come up with the exact opposite.

And for 21 days, if you've heard 21 days to break a habit, 21 days you come up with 10 pieces of evidence to counteract that wound.

So I am not good enough.

I am good enough.

10 pieces of evidence across 21 days.

And it doesn't have to be the like new evidence every day.

We can actually record it, listen back to it over and over again.

But what it's doing is it's firing the subconscious mind to uptake or to sort of bring up its emotion, its emotion, its imagery, right, in our memory.

as well.

And then we do that repetitively.

And this is how we're actually reconditioning the subconscious mind or rewiring it.

Wow.

Sounds like a lot of what you're teaching is manifestation too.

To certain degrees.

Well, it's interesting.

I was really into spirituality for a long time.

I still like meditate every day.

I'm, if anything, kind of like most interested in Buddhism.

But, you know, when I started learning about manifestation, I started thinking like maybe more than this being, like, I do believe there's like an energetic, everything is energy.

We know that.

But I also think that there's just a part where we manifest more subconsciously than consciously.

I mean, how many times have you seen people be like, I'm so afraid of ABC because it's a core wound that they have.

I'm so afraid of not getting, you know, this person's approval, or I'm so afraid.

And then they end up recreating these scenarios for themselves because our subconscious mind is the one running the show.

That's the one we're, we're always manifesting on autopilot.

Yeah.

And usually it's according to whatever we haven't worked out yet or figured out yet.

I'm so careful with my words these days.

Yes.

Like so careful because my parents were both pessimistic growing up.

So it rubbed off on me for a while.

And I just thought that was normal because I was in my environment.

So it took me years to break out of that mindset, honestly.

Good for you.

But that's reprogramming.

So just having that like conscious attention to it all the time, it's slower than something like auto-suggestion where you leverage the emotion and the imagery and all the things your subconscious speaks.

And but if you have a daily repetitive pattern over and over and over again of literally making sure that you are mindful with your words, you're reframing things, you're changing how you do things, that's still repetition that has the emotional impact.

And over time, that can become your new set point.

So you're, you've changed that for yourself.

Absolutely.

So addiction is another problem right now.

Alcohol, drugs, whatever it may be.

What have you seen there in terms of what causes it and how to fix it?

This is a great question.

So I actually was addicted to opiates as a teenager.

So I played soccer.

I had knee surgery my 10th grade year and

just got addicted to opiates.

Literally, like I was like, wow, whatever this is is making my life way easier.

And

really went through like a rabbit hole of a struggle with that, which is actually, you you know, a very long story, but it was part of what got me so interested in the subconscious as well, because I was in a psychology class.

I was pretty high functioning, still went off to school, struggled though.

Like my outer world maybe looked okay.

My inner world was like chaos.

And I was sitting in a class in first year and I was like on the verge of like dropping out of school.

I didn't know if I could handle anything, like just I was not in a good space.

And

one thing about me is by the time I got addicted after surgery,

I was in a place where I was going like, what happened to me?

Like, what am I, like, where am I?

Like that this is my reality.

And there was this girl who was a year older than me that I would go get them from.

And I would be at night, like journaling, like, I'm not going to do this tomorrow.

I'm going to delete her phone number.

I'm going to avoid her.

Like, I was trying everything to get out of it.

And

so I was in a psychology class one day, years later, still on my, I went through about a six-year journey of really struggling.

And I tried inpatient rehab, outpatient rehab, all the things.

Nothing was working for me.

And as with many people, right?

And I was in a class and somebody was sitting in front of me and he said to me, oh, your conscious mind can't outwill or overpower your subconscious mind.

And when I heard that, as somebody who was like, like,

I don't know if you've seen people personally who are struggling with addiction, but it's like, it kind of tortures you a little bit.

It's a very, it's almost its own traumatic thing to go through.

And he explained to me in one sentence, this battle for me every single day where I would be like, this is the last time.

I'm not doing this again.

I'm going to get clean.

I'm going to change my life.

And then I would fail.

Every single day, I would repeat the same pattern over and over again.

I'm going back to it.

And so finally somebody in that moment said to me, like,

oh, it's not that you're weak.

It's not that you're not capable of overcoming this.

It's not that you're doing it all wrong.

It's that you literally like you're, this is how your subconscious mind works.

It's supposed to be like that.

And so for me, I became like obsessed with learning about the subconscious after that, because what I realized for me is I had a lot of unresolved pain from childhood and so for me painkillers were things that opiates were things were like literally numbing emotional pain for me making it easier to deal with all of these feelings i was feeling that i didn't know how to like process or work through and all these core wounds that i had and it just like dimmed them it made them like less intense and so what i realized after learning about the subconscious is okay well I am, my conscious mind says, get sober.

My subconscious mind says avoid pain, take the painkiller.

And instead, I have to learn what that emotion is.

And I have to go unpack it and I have to work through it.

And by doing that, that's actually going to be the place that I can deal with my own pain, not by using something external, but by, you know, fixing my inner world.

And so the same thing, like when it boils down to addiction, what we have to understand is that every single thing our subconscious mind does is because it perceives more benefits than drawbacks.

So our conscious mind can have all the ideas and say, this is bad.

This is terrible.

We can judge ourselves.

But like at the end of the day, your subconscious is getting needs met.

And so for me, I was getting the needs met for safety, for comfort, for escape.

And I had to learn that okay if I can get those same needs met through healthy attributes through healthy things then first of all my subconscious won't have all of this this relationship fostered with painkillers so that's one thing the second thing is then you have to rebalance your emotional associations so I had to actually sit down over and over and over again while I was not sober yet and write out and I'm not saying by the way if people need to go to rehab and things like that I'm not saying do this at home like you know do do what you can but um I would sit down and and I would write out every day the costs of painkillers, the cost of opiates, because I knew that the balances in my subconscious mind saw painkillers as so much more exclusively positive than negative because they had helped me and they had made me feel lighter and freer and like life was easier.

So I would sit down and I would write out the cost, the cost, what are all the negative things.

So now my brain is rebalancing through repetition and emotion, the negatives of opiates.

And then I would write out the positives of getting sober.

And so as I was doing that, you know, you're rewiring the emotional associations.

You're then learning to get your needs met in new ways because addiction for every single person who's an addict is meeting needs.

And that's why we don't want to let it go.

And that's why we get so terrified of not letting it go and so obsessed with chasing after it is because we're obsessed with chasing after these needs that we're really struggling to meet without that external thing.

So for me, that became the path was to really like reprogram my subconscious mind's relationship to this stuff.

And ultimately for me, that was what led to getting sober is learning to process the core wounds that unresolved pain, learn healthy boundaries, learn to communicate about stuff better.

And that was my personal journey to start.

How long did it take?

A while.

It wasn't like the type of thing you would see that was like, go to rehab for 90 days.

But I tried that path and it wasn't working for me personally.

And then I would say for about nine months on and off, I had a couple of times I relapsed, but eventually I got out of it.

And when I did get out of it, I had coping mechanisms for the rest of my life.

Like it's funny, I had my appendix out like three years ago, four years ago now.

And, you know, that was the first like time I had to take painkillers for something.

And I was like, oh my gosh, what will this be like?

And brought them home, took them for one day.

They're probably sitting somewhere in a cupboard still.

Like, don't even think about it.

And it isn't this fear-based relationship I have to that anymore.

Amazing.

Incredible story.

You've inspired many.

Thank you.

Great episode.

Where can people find you?

And are you promoting anything?

Yeah, thank you so much.

So you can find me at www.personaldevelopment school.com.

On there, we have a free attachment style quiz.

So if anybody wants to take it, find out their attachment style.

You also get access to like a whole free report about your attachment style, your coping mechanisms, challenges.

And then I put free daily content on YouTube as well.

Amazing.

Thank you so much, Thais, for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me.

Of course, thanks for watching, guys, as always, and I'll see you tomorrow.