How to Get a Girlfriend with Connell Barrett - “You’re Not Broken!” 3 Steps to Lasting Dating Confidence (with Attachment Style Expert Thais Gibson)

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

If fear of rejection keeps you from taking romantic chances—sending that text or approaching an attractive stranger—Thais Gibson has a solution. Gibson has helped more than 70,000 people build thriving relationships, both through her book, “The New Attachment Theory,” and as founder of the Personal Development School. Gibson joins dating coach Connell Barrett to share practical exercises to help you overcome rejection anxiety, build lasting confidence, and create healthier relationships.Episode Highlights:01:55: Why the “Perfect” Opener Won’t Fix Deeper Insecurity09:18: 3 Steps to Stop Feeling that You’re Not Enough17:57: How the 4 Attachment Styles Affect Your Dating Life27:13: Why Guys Panic When a Woman Doesn’t Text Back Right Away41:01: She Went Quiet? Here’s What a Securely Attached Men Does Next44:22: Do This When You Want to Go for the KissTAKE THAIS GIBSON’S FREE ATTACHMENT STYLE QUIZ: Attachment.personaldevelopmentschool.comLEARN ABOUT THE PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT SCHOOL: Personaldevelopmentschool.comFOLLOW THE PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT SCHOOL ON INSTAGRAM: @‌thepersonaldevelopmentschool

your attachment style has shaped your self-perception. And even if we have the perfect opener or we're armed with the perfect line, what's going to end up happening is if we have a big core wound where we felt rejected growing up or we felt not good enough growing up or unworthy, then we take that sense of self-identity that we've been conditioned with already from past experiences into all of our interactions. Welcome back to the How to Get a Girlfriend podcast. I'm your host, dating coach Connell Barrett.

helping you flirt with confidence, authenticity, and get a great relationship, find a great girlfriend, even if you are a shy introverted guy like I used to be. And I have a really exciting, cool guest today. My guest today is the author Tias Gibson. She's the founder of the Personal Development School and the leading voice in something you've heard a lot about. Attachment theory. Attachment theory is everywhere. And her new book is called The New Attachment Theory about how the subconscious as patterns that we learn early in life shape our love lives. And armed with a PhD, she has, and a deep knowledge of attachment theory, she's helped over 70,000 people build thriving relationships. And if you're curious about your own attachment style, you can take her

attachment style quiz at attachment.com to find out which of the four categories you fall into. Taise, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Connell. I'm really excited to be here with you. Thank you for joining us. And the average guy who's listening to this show often struggles with dating confidence. And a lot of men think, oh, I need better openers. I need to know what to text a woman. I need to get better at flirting. I'm curious. How would attachment theory explain a little bit about what's happening underneath the typical male daters sense of self-confidence? Yeah, I love that question. So really our attachment styles are subconscious set of rules that we have about love and connection. And I often give the analogy that if you sit down and you're trying to play a board game with somebody and they have the rules for Scrabble and you have the rules for Monopoly, because you have different rules for how the game's supposed to go, you're going to have unnecessary friction and confusion. And that's a great way of looking at things when we're thinking of long-term relationships. But if we boil it down a step deeper, your attachment style at the end of the day and It's very root is the relationship you have to yourself.

It's what you believe about yourself. It's the needs that you have. It's the way that your nervous system is regulated or dysregulated. And that's how you communicate. And so what this means is that your attachment style has shaped your self-perception. And even if we have the perfect opener or we're armed with the perfect line, what's going to end up happening is if we have a big core wound where we felt rejected growing up or we felt not good enough growing up or unworthy, then we take that sense of self-identity

that we've been conditioned with already from past experiences into all of our interactions. And now we can have the best line and the best opener. And that can help. And don't get me wrong. You know, there can be useful things in that, absolutely. And it's good to do exposure work on putting yourself out there and practicing those things. But if you always believe that you're going to be rejected, not good enough, or abandoned,

then you go into all of in your interaction. perceiving that and expecting that. And now it's like you're going in with a disadvantage to everything that you do because your self-esteem is already at a lower place to begin with. And now those core ones are going to come up and we tend to assume the worst. And 94% of communication is nonverbal. So you can have the best verbal line. But if your body, if your physiology and the way you make eye contact and carry yourself is rooted in a self-identity that believes you're always going to be rejected or not good enough, then that's what we're showing physically while we're communicating verbally. And so we can rewire and change those things. That sounds so powerful. I tell

my clients the same thing. I didn't know the number was 94%. Is that right? 94% is not the words. I think it's 93.8% to see. And it was a huge number. I didn't know it was that high. That makes total sense. I go out with clients here in New York City. I take them out approaching on their wing man. And I'll have a, I'll have a client see a couple of attractive women standing at the bar and he'll say, what do I say? what do I say? And I'll tell them, go over and say dinosaur. That's the line. Women love that. They're like, okay. And they commit to it. And it goes well. And they realize, oh, wait, it wasn't about dinosaur. It was about the confidence I felt because I thought I had the right thing. So there's an interesting, it really is not what you say. It's how you say it. Yes, exactly. And so it's so

interesting because there's a couple of things people can do to overcome their fears. And I bet you do one of these a lot, which is exposure work. Exposure work was traditionally used in people with phobias. Like if people had a phobia around a spider. And they actually used to do this in the 90s in like actual therapy. They would get people to, you know, day one of your therapy session, you go into the room and you see a spider in a jar across the room. And you just, the client would just stand there and look at it and be like, I am safe.

I can do this. I am big. The spider is small. And they would have to reassociate the fear that they had of the spider by exposing themselves to it, but not fully. and then seeing that they could do it and that they were safe. And then like day two of your therapy session would have been you go up to the jar and you look at it and you're standing right next to the spider. And so what you're doing is you're incrementally exposing yourself and seeing that you're safe and you can do it.

And I bet you when you go out with men and you're getting them because it's a great thing to actually do in vulnerability work when people have fears. You probably take people out and they're doing exposure work with you. They've got you there. You probably make them feel safe and comfortable and protected. And that's such a cool thing because it helps us rewire that that natural set point that we have. And then there's also a way we can rewire where you can rewire. You can find the identity that you have based on your attachment cell, your biggest wounds, your biggest needs. And you can rewire those things before you even go out there and do those things where you're doing the exposure work.

And it makes the exposure work a lot simpler to start off with and less scary and less confronting. I love it. I call this exposure work when we're out talking to women and socializing in rooftop bars. I call it sacrificing the lamb, meaning there's this little ego lamb that we need to sacrifice it. so you realize that you are not this sense of ego. But I like facing the spider or maybe holding the snake instead of sacrificing the lamb. It's a little gentler, a little nicer for sure. Do you ever do, do you have any memorable client wins or successes where you use these exposure

techniques with a couple or a man or a woman and you help them face the thing you're afraid of? Oh, yeah, constantly. So I would work with people in this way. these are sort of like the seeds that I would plant along the way. So step one is that we have these wounds from childhood and we have these like deep rooted fears. And exposure work is is so powerful for people. But sometimes people are so entrenched in these painful core ideas that like they won't even want to do exposure work. Like there are archetypes of people like, I'm not doing that. I'm not going out and even doing that at all. And so there you really want to start with what we call core wound

reprogramming. So let's say we have this idea. And I know I think you were talking about. with this analogy earlier. I hope I don't spoil it by saying it. But whenever we have a core wound, it's something that's infiltrated our subconscious mind and we're trying to keep ourselves safe by believing it. So let's say somebody grew up and they had parents or an environment. Maybe they were bullied growing up. And because of being in that environment, they made that mean about themselves where they interpreted in store. That was, oh, I'm bullied growing up. So I am rejected. I am disliked and I am not good enough. And that is probably how. how they felt in that experience. But then we store this and it becomes a personal part of our

identity. And we hold onto it for dear life because we're trying to reproject it out and keep ourselves safe from it recurring. So the analogy I give that you sort of mentioned before is the bear in the woods. If you go into the woods tomorrow and you see a bear and you run away and you're safe, thank goodness, but you go into the woods the next day. Well, now you project the likelihood of seeing the bear onto everything. You're like, the bear could come. The trees move and you're like, the bear's here. And so we do this with our core wounds. If you get bullied and you make, make that mean, I'm rejected, dislike, not good enough, then you go into your adult life. And anywhere you go or anytime you interact with people, there you are projecting the likelihood of

that experience again. And so what ends up happening is sometimes people don't even want to get to that exposure work piece. And in that case, we start finding. There's only about 15 major core wounds people have. And we can break them down by attachment style, but we find their biggest core wounds that are blocking them from feeling comfortable and safe. You can't go into the woods the day after being chased by there and just feel safe. Like, it's not going to happen. So we have to reintegrate those experiences. We have to rewire those core wounds. And by doing that, then people get to go and show up without this painful idea they're caring about themselves to begin with. And now they can go and they want to do things like exposure work and they feel more open to it

because they're not already going into their interactions with those preconceived ideas about themselves that are going to show in their body and their body language and the way that they position themselves and their self-confidence. So if you'd like, I'm happy to share a tool for how people can find their core wounds and then rewire them if that helps. Fire away. Okay. So when people have their core wounds, the biggest ones that affect like dating and social interactions and things around rejection are usually the following. So the fear being abandoned, which causes people to people please and their interactions. The fear would be not good enough or unworthy. Rejected, disliked, excluded can kind of be one that shows up or disrespected. So these are sort of like our social

interaction wounds. People have other wounds that show up differently. People can have a poor wound of being betrayed or trapped or powerless. Those don't really show up in like our dating environment. So people can first hear like what are and a wound is just a trigger. It's something that you've happened to in the past. You've stored it. And now you see your world through that lens. And you do it to keep yourself safe. It's like just there to help you survive. But it's also really detrimental to our ways of interacting with other human beings. So step one is to hear which wound you have. Okay.

And if somebody's like, oh, yeah, I have a big fear of rejection or I have a big fear of being abandoned. And so I pupil please. So I avoid abandonment. You'll be able to really hear yourself in there. Step two is we have to find not just the core wound, but it's opposite. Okay. So like let's say, and you can look at a thesaurus for this.

It's a dictionary. You'll see like, I'm rejected. I am accepted. I am worthy. I'm unworthy. I am not good enough. I am good enough. It's very easy to find it's opposite.

Now, I do not believe in affirmations. I think affirmations are silly because affirmations is your conscious mind speaking to your conscious mind. And you can actually see that when we have these wounds, they're not conscious. Nobody wakes up consciously and says, today I'm going to choose to tell myself when I go up to look for women to meet tonight, I'm going to tell myself 300 times that I'm not good enough. Like, nobody's choosing that consciously.

Yeah, I mean, then you're Stuart Smalley on SNL saying, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough. people like me, but a flabby weak affirmation is not going to get you to step up to that total fox at the bar. Exactly. Exactly. And so an affirmations don't even land. Like the problem is at the subconscious level of mind. So the problem is that we have these imprints at a subconscious level.

And your subconscious mind is responsible for 95% of all of your beliefs, thoughts, emotions, and actions. So your subconscious runs the show. So step one, we find the wound in its opposite. So I'm not good enough. I am good enough. Now, affirmations would just keep us at step one, but that's not very useful. Step two is we have to speak to the subconscious mind in the language that it understands.

And the subconscious mind speaks in emotions and imagery. And you can actually see this because if I say to you, okay, whatever you do, do not think of a pink elephant. Like your conscious mind hears you do not, but you already flash an image of a pink elephant, right? So we have to speak to the subconscious mind in a language it can conceive of. So what we do is step two, how we leverage emotion and image areas we come up with memories. Okay. So times we actually felt good enough because every memory is just a container of emotions and images. So if you think of your favorite childhood memory, you might smile.

If it's you playing at the beach, you might see the images of the waves and the sand bucket and the sandcastle. So we can leverage old memories to actually speak to our subconscious mind, which is where the wound exists. So step two, what we're doing is we're coming up with 10. times we were good enough. It doesn't even have to be directly about dating. It can be. It can be be about times you had a great interaction with a woman or you hit it off or you had a laugh or you had a good friend or whatever it is. But we just want to come up with times in general that we felt good enough. It can be like I was a good friend three days ago because I showed up with integrity. And you know what? Women like integrity. They respect that. Or it can be I was good enough because I

got this award at work. And if I can show up for something hard at work, I can show up for something hard in my dating life. So we want to come up with 10. pieces of evidence, of times we were good enough. And now we're leveraging neuroplasticity to get repetition, emotion, and imagery. And that's actually what fires and wires neural networks in our brain. And then steps... This is fantastic. I'm only jumping in because I can hear my my guy listening and writing down every word you're saying. So step two or level two would be specific memory, not people like me, but the time at the birthday party, everybody patted me on the back and said, what a great guy I am or some kind of specific memory. Is that what I'm hearing you

say? Exactly. Because then what we get in the memory is, let's say somebody who's patting you back at the birthday party. Yeah. You see the images of that happening and you feel the little bit of pride that's in that memory or that feel good feeling. And so now it's like actually extracting emotion and imagery, which is now legible to your subconscious mind, which is the one that has the does that make sense? Yeah, I love that term. Legible to your subconscious mind. That's great. Yeah. And so, so thank you. So now we go to step three, which is neuroscience tells us if we are in a suggestible state, which is when our brain is producing more alpha brainwaves, which is when we are in the first hour when we wake up or the last hour before we go to sleep, when you're kind of in this foggy state, you're waking up, you're slower moving, you're really relaxed. Our subconscious mind actually picks up information better. So in step three, we've taken those 10 memories. We record ourselves saying them out loud. And in step three, we listen to this first thing in the morning. And our job when we're listening back to this is we're going to stay present. It takes two to five minutes to hear yourself saying these memories.

And our job is to stay present and to see the images as much as possible and feel the emotions in our body. And now what we're doing is we're in this suggestible state where a subpoenas of sponge up this information and this old set of neural networks that's like, oh, I'm not good enough and we tell the story or always get rejected and we tell that same old story. We're like, actually look at the times you've got accepted. Here's a bunch of memories. It's real. It's evidence-based.

And now it's getting all the way down to your subconscious mind. And now you're actually picking up on it. And this is exactly the neural sense of what fires and wires new neural networks. So now you're shaping your sense of belief system about yourself to remove the things that were blocking your sense of self-esteem or self-confidence and now imprinting your own subconscious with your conscious mind doing this. in a way that allows you to feel differently about yourself. And it's extremely successful for people.

Tais, where were you when I needed you? July 2009, the first night I ever went out to approach women. This is the opening chapter of my book. And before I could go talk to a single woman, I'd never approached a woman before. I went into the bathroom stall at 2.35th Avenue, a rooftop bar here in Manhattan. And I had a panic attack. I started shaking and I started vomiting. I wasn't drinking.

I was just having a panic attack because I now realize I was focused on all these stories of rejection equals not good enough, unworthy of love, as opposed to all the memories I could have called on to say, hey, wait a minute, no matter what happens tonight, I've had one or two girlfriends. I've had some really interesting women like me. Nobody has power tonight to make me feel bad, but that's not what my brain was doing in the bathroom stall.

So gosh, I wish I'd had you there. That would have been amazing. Or had the access to your knowledge. Yeah, and it's such a hard story, but it's such a beautiful. I mean, how cool is it that what you do for a living is to like you walk that talk and come through the other side of it? And now you share that with people. I just think that's so beautiful to hear because by the point where you're having panic attack to the point of getting sick to your stomach is like, that means you had some deep, deep wounds there. So it's beautiful that you showed up for those and worked through them.

But yeah, this is the easier path. It makes things way easier as the starting point. So then when you want to go and do exposure work on on communicating to people, you're seeing it through a different lens or at least through a more neutral lens, right? Like just that. And neural pathways are kind of like, you know, I'm Canadian and you see snow because you're from New York and Ohio. But you know when you go sledding and you see like those little somebody's sledding already and there's this little trail that's cut out in the because somebody sled has gone down it. And so when you go sledding, if you catch that same track where somebody sled has been down,

and you kind of give into that divvy and your sled follows down that same path that's already been carved out. That's like neural networks in our brain. Like if we felt rejected and it was painful and it's imprinted us in the past, we're just so quick to go back to assuming that. But when we start building these new neural networks, now we have different paths our sled can catch on to. And now we open up the possibility going forward of having totally different experiences. Let's walk through these four attachment styles.

Many listeners know them. Some don't. I was learning about them. I took your quiz on your website. I definitely have some secure strengths. I definitely have some dismissive avoidant things going on. I might get a tattoo this week, lower back tattoo, dismissive avoidant. I'm proud of it.

But can you walk us through the four attachment styles? And so the audience can think, hmm, I wonder which one I am before they maybe go and take the quiz. Absolutely. So there are four attachments cells. Everybody has one. 50% of the population is securely attached. And securely attached people end up in longer lasting relationships. And they report being more fulfilled in those longer lasting relationships.

So they have very adaptive qualities. They usually get raised in healthy homes. They learn healthy communication. Their parents are present and attuned to them. And so they learn to feel their emotions. If they do express emotions, somebody comes to them and tries to figure out what's wrong. Their parents are attuned and try to sue. them so they learn, oh, I can express vulnerably to people and that's safe. I can trust. I can rely on

people. And as they get older, they learn to communicate and they understand their needs and boundaries are healthy. Then we have 50% of people who don't get that conditioning. They don't get that upbringing in the same way. And they fall into one of three categories. So on one end of the continuum, we have our anxious attachment style. Anxiously attach individuals get more intermittent reinforcement growing up. And intermittency can be that they, for example, on one hand, have very loving parents, but they work all the time. So it feels like love is there and then love is taken away. Love is there.

Love is taken away. And that wires them to constantly fear love being taken away. And it also is part of how we get addicted to things. I mean, gamblers get addicted to intermittent reinforcement. And it's part of why you hear anxiously attached individuals being referred to as the love addicts. And so what happens? And it can also be like you have one loving parent and another parent who's more aloof, right? It's like the intermittency.

I don't know which parent I'm going to get. Is love going to be there or is it not going to be available? And so we have anxiously attached individuals, and as they grow up, they basically end up in dynamics where they become very clingy, very afraid of love being taken away. And so they hold them super tight and they people please and they compromise on their own needs and standards and boundaries just to avoid the abandonment. And their big core wounds are the fear being abandoned, alone, excluded, disliked, rejected, not good enough, and unlovable. And those are their big. Anxious or dismissive? Anxious.

Anxious. Okay. Got it. Yeah. And so that's their big fear. And they will often kind of do backflips and somersaults to try to avoid that abandonment. Now, they deal with these wounds by always trying to get closer. So when they have these wounds and they're like, oh, somebody could abandon me.

They're like, no, let me people please more. Let me try harder. Or somebody could reject me. Let me earn my approval from you and change who I am so I get accepted. And then we have people on the other end of the continuum who are to say. dismissive avoidance. And they grow up with less attunement. They tend to get more childhood emotional neglect. And dismissive avoidance, they end up going through life feeling like, oh, my needs just aren't going to get met anyways because they're a little bit neglected emotionally as a child.

And parents can be like safe and loving and have food on the table and kids can be at school on time. But there's just no attunement and there's no emotional exchange really happening. In fact, if a child grows up in this environment and cries a lot or is sad, they're told like children should be seen and not heard. Get out of here. It's going to be okay. And they get repressed a lot in terms of their emotion. So dismissive avoidance end up having wounds around fearing being seen as shameful or defective if they open up, feeling being, fearing being weak if they're vulnerable. And they have huge wounds of fearing being trapped or helpless or powerless if they're, you know, too connected to somebody and then somebody could trap them or take their power away. And they feel very unsafe is another big wound for them.

if they are fully themselves or they are seen too deeply. And so they cope with these fears by often constantly what we call deactivating. So anxiously attached people, they try to get closer all the time and they try harder. And dismissible wins are like, I need more distance. I need more space. So even if they have a wound that's about, and they can also fear being not good enough or rejected, those can be fears for them too, less intense, but still there. When they have those, their big thing is they're so used to deactivating. They're so used to be like, oh, somebody could hurt me, let me pull away. Whereas anxious people are like, somebody could hurt me, let me try harder. And so we have somebody who tries to cling and somebody who tries to shut down and dismissible avoidance often

spend a lot of time alone. They often are very independent. They often push people away or keep them at arm's length if they are in a relationship with them because they haven't really, and they sometimes breadcrumm a little bit in their emotional relationships because that's what love was for them. They were breadcrummed in childhood essentially. And so that's Dating could breadcrumbing possibly come from somebody who's dismissive avoidant? Absolutely. It's one of the biggest things that you'll see in dating with dismissive avoidance for sure. That's a dead giveaway.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And in longer term relationships or attachment cells shows up more, you're less likely to see it until we actually attach. But in longer term relationships, dismissive wouldn't start to shut down as they feel vulnerable and too close. Like once they get really attached to somebody, anxious attachments are people pleasing more and clinging more, the more attached they feel to another person. And then our last attachment style is the fearful avoidant. And they grew up with more big T trauma, more like parent who has narcissistic personality disorder, parents, an alcoholic.

And they get these really polarizing experiences about love. Love one day is like a really good thing. The parent love bombs. Another day, the parent is mean and cruel. And so these really conflicting ideas about what love is. And it causes them. They're sometimes referred to as anxious avoidant. it causes them to like one day want closeness so badly.

And then if somebody actually gets close, they get really afraid of it and they push away and they shut down. And so their attachment strategy is to become hypervigilant, to read between the lines, to notice every micro expression, body language change and always be on high alert and walking on egg shells. And they're the partner in relationships who's a little more volatile, a little more hot and cold,

fights a little bit more, has kind of more dramatic events take place in longer term love. And they have both an anxious and avoid. inside. So they fear abandonment, but they also fear being trapped. And they tend to pinball a little bit back and forth. And their biggest fear is the fear of being betrayed. Okay. Wow. You're creating so many, helping me align so many stars with past men I've helped. I worked with a guy last year, I'll call him Terrence. And Terrence came to me. He told me about how when he was young, his parents said, you're not good enough for anybody. No one's ever going to want you. Like they

literally in those words, according to Terrence. And it got so, he was in so much pain and craving a connection, that he was, for lack of a better word, he was dating a doll. There was an anime doll. He would take to the park. And he wasn't having an episode. He knew it was not real. But he said, this is the only being I can connect to. And now I'm thinking, gosh, I wonder if Terrence came from a fearful avoidant place. Yeah, for sure. And this, you know, it's so interesting because you actually see the anxious and avoidance side in that, where it's like the anxious side of wanting connection so badly that he would take this doll around. But then the avoidance side of like probably being too scared to put himself out there and

really connect to other people because those core wounds run so deep. And hearing, like, they're just going to end in pain anyways if he tries to be vulnerable. So you get this like, and it's very common for fearful of ways to do these things where they end up, we call them creature comforts. So they like, they'll try to binge things or do things that get them closer to connection without having to be vulnerable. So for example, if you look at our first associations of food, food, when we're first being conditioned with food, food is first experience as being breastfed. And breastfeeding, it actually produces a

tremendous amount of oxytocin between the mother and child, which is the bonding neurochemical. And so the doll is like one example, but then you'll see a lot of these really common things like people who binge eat food all the time, who are fearful of avoid because what they're actually binging is this oxytocin high that they're associating with food because their first experience of food was I'm being held and cradled, I'm connected, I'm safe, and restating is oxytocin producing in general. So food for a lot of people is wired in as those things. And sometimes you're full of wits will just be binge eating a lot or struggling with a relationship to food. So you'll see it come out in all different ways.

Pornography shows up a lot for different people. But you'll see it as like people will try to get closeness without having to actually be too open because that can just feel so scary and so confronting. What about this guy? There's something a lot of men have struggled with. A guy gets a woman texting him. Maybe he gets a match on a dating app or gets a phone number out, but they haven't met up yet. And he sends the text and two hours past, no response. Three hours pass, no response. And he's watching his phone like watching a pot, not boil and getting very in his head, worrying, assuming he's getting ghosted, rejected, when it might just be that a few minutes for a few hours have passed by. Does that suggest to you a given of these three, quote,

lower styles? Yes. So this would be anxiously attached through and through. Now, you could have a fearful wood and I'll explain the differences. But imagine that analogy of the bear in the woods. Like, you get chased by a bear. You escape your safe. Thank goodness. You go back into the woods the next day, it's like you're standing in the woods. I mean, most people's mind is going to go, if you have to stand in the same woods that you got chased by the bear in the day before, you're going to stand in the woods. And if you have to stand there and wait, you're going to be like, where's the bear? Where's the bear? Where's the bear? And you're just waiting and your whole body's reacting and your physiology is responding. And so that's his version of the bear in the woods is that

if he felt abandoned a lot or not good enough or rejected, he's, okay, I put my vulnerability out there. And now a subconscious mind goes and reprojects the bear. And it's like, I'm getting rejected. They're ghosting me. They're doing. And what's so interesting is when that core wound comes up and that's why I believe so much in doing that exercise, the three step exercise for rewiring because our core wounds are like so painful and devastating.

But when you have that come up, you're thinking all these thoughts from that poor wound. And then your whole body is reacting as if you're living in the reality where that's the truth. And sometimes somebody's just busy and then they text you back three hours later. But you've just spent three hours in the reality where you were the ghosted. Jack, you want good enough human being at your core, and it's so devastating. I, gosh, I talked to a woman once. We never had a date, but we talked a couple times in the phone. She told me this story.

She's a neurosurgeon. She had a date lined up with a guy on a Monday night, and she goes in, and she's literally in surgery from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. And she's, her phone is nowhere to be found. And she checked her message, and they had like an 8 p.m. date and she checks her phone at 5 p.m. And she has all these messages. 9.30 a.m.

Hey, just making sure we're still on for tonight. 10.45. Did you get my message? 1155. Hello. Are you blowing me off? 12.30.1 p.m. I won't repeat the words, but you effing this.

How dare you ghost me? And she was just a woman who is in surgery trying to heal somebody. And there's just so much, and yet these wounds can turn into sometimes it's inward, sometimes it's anger, resentment. It's just a whole toxic stew. 100%. And the rude is that somebody at some point in their life got hurt deeply, stored it, and now they should have a bear chasing them all the time in the background.

And that's all coming up. And so it's in people's innocence. They don't mean to be like that because they're in so much pain. But also, often our wounds become self-fulfilling prophecies. Because now you've got this idea of the bear in the woods. And now in the person's version as I'm being rejected, you know, disliked, not good enough. And then they think, oh, this woman who's not answering my text is the one making me feel like this. Now, anxious people tend to people please their way through it.

They'll just keep clinging and trying and clinging. And fearful avoidant who have an avoidant side. They're the ones to then, they'll initially be a little anxious and then they'll push somebody away really strongly. And they'll be like, oh, because they will also deactive and push away. and they're the ones that may be a little bit more harsh and mean and difficult with their words. And like they become self-fulfilling prophecies. They sabotage themselves because they want love so badly. But then they project the fears and then they're reacting to their own fears instead of the objective reality a lot of the time.

And then that causes them to go into these activating or deactivating mechanisms that either push somebody away completely or clings so tightly that the person gets overwhelmed and then gets pushed away as a byproduct anyways. whether it's a single person you've coached or somebody in a relationship, what case studies come to your mind of any of these four, especially the three that are imperfect, right? I assume we're trying to get to secure. Most of us want to get to secure, right? Do you have any favorite wins, successes for men or women you've coached that you'd like to share? Yeah. I, so I worked in client-based practice for like the better part of a decade and then moved into our online space. So I moved into just teaching and writing courses and then just teaching classes to help people rewire their wounds and get into understanding their own. And just it was a little more efficient that way.

And so, but I loved working with people. And one of the most beautiful stories that always comes to mind is a student from our school. And she came in and people can come into, so it's like people take courses that are self-paced and then they come into daily classes that I teach. And she used to come in and people can come in on like anonymous names. And so she came in and she had like a, you know, I thought her name was Rochelle for the first, quite a few years or quite a few months. And, you know, after a few months, she changed her name to what it really was. And I won't say her personal information just in case, but she, but she changed her name.

And she messaged one day in the chat and she was like, oh, this is my real name. And I was like, oh, I didn't know. Like she was like, I was Rochelle, but I changed my name. And then eventually she came in and she started coming on camera in the classes because you can be on or off camera. And then she started asking live questions. And she had been through so much stuff. I mean, she had been sexually abused growing up by her father and just went through an intense trauma. And, you know, was so private.

And she was dismissive avoidance. So she was so scared of like putting herself out there opening up. And by the end of it, she not only was like speaking up and sharing, but she had so much healing from doing a lot of poor wound work and nervous system work. She actually got a master's degree in psychotherapy, went and became a psychotherapist. And now what she does is for the past few years she works with people and she's in client practice. And so she was just such a beautiful success story, somebody who did the work so deeply and just really embraced it and came so far out of her shell and like would share the most open things

on camera in front of all the other students and she made all these friends in there and it was just such a beautiful, beautiful thing to do to see. And like, that's always one of my favorite stories for sure. Fantastic. I love it. So, and I want to be clear because when I first thought, okay, these four attachment styles, which one am I? It's not like love languages, right? It's not preferences. It's we're all trying to get secure, right? Do I have that right? Exactly. So the goal is to become secure and the goal is to reverse engineer those steps. But the first part is to meet yourself where you're at. Like the first part is to recognize these are my subconscious set of rules. So I came into this work because I was a fearful avoidance. So I was the hot and cold. And I had a lot

of like kind of bigger T trauma growing up. And I was like relationships are so hard. You know, I had an easy time meeting people. But then in relationships, I really struggled. And because I would get all my core wounds would come up. And I would want to be all in one day. And then I would want to run away the next day. And I was very, I'm sure, difficult to be in a relationship with when I was much younger. And so I did a lot of the deep rewiring work because I didn't want to let my childhood keep driving my adult life and did that. And the very next relationship after I did that work was my now husband, which we've been together for 12 years. And, and, you know, like, it was just so profoundly life-changing. And that's a big part of how I got into teaching this is it was like,

oh my gosh, we don't have to constantly live in this bear in the woods thing all the time and have our nervous systems panicking and stressing and going through all these strange coping mechanisms as an adult to try to soothe. And so, yeah, that's a big part of where this came from. And the first goal is to understand yourself so you can have some grace for yourself and realize, oh, I am this late because I went through hard things. And then to understand that people are going to have different ways that they cope according to their attachment cells. So first is to get the sort of layout in the roadmap because now you can talk to people with different sets of rules. But then ideally we're doing that core wound work. And there's a couple other

things, some needs work and communication work to actually become securely attached at the core. And then once we're securely attached, relationships are so much easier. It's like the whole veil gets pulled back and now you not actually know how to share and connect and just like it's way more easier as a result. I love that. What I love about this framework, this, this deeper psychological truth is that it's not you're broken. It's not there's something wrong with you. This is just where you are in your attachment journey and growth, hopefully toward being more secure. Maybe you feel like, oh, don't leave me. But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. You don't have to settle. You can work on yourself and become more secure. If you're dismissive

avoidant, you can work on yourself, understand it. And it's understanding that. It's understanding the internal mechanisms that allow us to say, great, what do I have to do next to become more secure, right? Exactly. That's exactly right. And nobody's broken. It's on a personality disorder. It's like, hey, you've been through some hard things.

These are some of the imprints of how your nervous system and subconscious mind would have adapted to it. It's super solvable. You can plug it into a 21 day exercise on your wounds and you can do some things to rewire. And that will improve not just the relationship to everybody else, but the relationship you have to yourself because so much at the end of the day is what we believe. We will happen because of who we believe we are.

I'm the rejected person. They're not good enough person. But when we change those underlying beliefs, it also improves a relationship to ourselves in a really big way too. And when you were going through the four styles and you mentioned anxious, to me, that is just screaming, oh, this is the single person who settles. The single person who says, well, I don't want to be alone. So I will settle for this person.

I did it. I was married once for nine weeks. She settled for me. I settled for her. It was a whole lot of settling. And I now realize, oh, neither of us wanted to be alone. So once you can get out of that, you can decide to find the right person for you and not settle. Yeah?

Absolutely. And you know what? It's good that you got out and knew it was wrong. But a lot of times people settle and then they continue to settle their whole lives. They keep saying, oh, it's fine that they don't show up for me. Oh, it's fine that they're always out every evening without me. Oh, it's fine. And they keep telling these stories.

because they're so afraid of that abandonment wound, they keep choosing the eight out of ten of ten pain of the bad relationship and the ten out of ten wound of fearing abandonment. And now it's driving all their decisions and that continues to decrease their self-esteem and it's a cycle and just it becomes really difficult. So rewiring goes a very long way. Well, how about this? I'd love to run a couple hypotheticals by you for the kind of guy I coach and the kind of gentleman is listening to this.

And then if you want to share, it could be a tip or it could just be an insight into what you see going on through your lens for any advice you might want to share. Are you up for it? Yeah, I would love that. Okay. So the single biggest problem men come to me for is they say Connell, I want to approach women. I want to go out and meet them in real life, but I'm afraid. I'm basically it's I'm afraid of rejection. What they tell me is I don't know what to say. But what I think they're really saying is I don't know what to say that will keep me from feeling rejected and the bear will eat me. So for the man who has what we call in the world of dating coaches jargon, approach anxiety, what would you say to that gentleman, basically me 17 years ago?

I love that question. So here's how you can actually find what your real fear is. And this is a cool exercise you can share with your clients. So they say, I'm afraid. And what I say is, okay, and what do you make it mean about you if you do approach a woman or what's, the worst case scenario that can happen. And you rotate that question a few times because they'll first say, well, she won't like me. Okay, good. And then what does that then mean about you? Or what are afraid happens next? Okay, then she doesn't like me. And then I just am left feeling rejected and alone. And it's like, okay, that's your real fear. So you say, I'm afraid or you say, oh, I don't know what to say. Let's actually boil down to what's underneath. And that's actually how we find the core wound.

And now that you found it, you can now do that three step rewiring exercise. And you can, somebody you could totally just do a ton of exposure work, slowly, incrementally exposing, exposing, approaching, approaching in really small doses over time. And that will help. But it, and it will work, ultimately. But you could just shortcut the process so much faster by doing the three-step exercise of rewiring first. Now your fears are gone. And now you may have a little bit of like, oh, I'm not used to approaching people. And it's like riding a bike for the first time. It's a new skill. And you have to get used to it. So there will be a tiny bit of discomfort because it's something new, but it won't be like feeling petrified and so afraid.

Butterflies. Yeah. Terror. Yeah. And you're not even butterflies. Maybe just a little tiny bit of awkwardness. Just a little like, oh, I'm not used to this. It's a new thing.

But then the terror is usually a sign that there's a huge core wound there beneath the surface. Okay. Great answer. Next guy. He is really into this woman. Haven't met yet. They've been texting and she goes quiet.

By goes quiet, I mean four or five, six hours. maybe 10 hours. He texts her at noon, no answer by 8 p.m. And he is looking at his phone. And he's thinking, oh, great. Reject it again. What's your advice for that, gentleman? Okay, so I'm going to give two parts this time. First part is Corboun first because it makes you not just jump to the conclusion. So we always want to do that three-step reprogramming goes a long way. Second step is we want to actually communicate our needs. It's a huge part of being secure. And so, you know, and women really respect this. Women like, when men are like, hey, this is what I'm looking for and they stand behind it because they're owning their truth and women respect men that respect themselves. So if a man doesn't hear from you

and then, you know, you haven't heard from them all day, you maybe send a message if you have plans or something, hey, what's the plan? Something short. But when you meet that woman next or you see her or you talk to her on the phone or whatever it might be or even when she responds eventually and then you text her back, the goal is after you've rewired, the woman, so you're not panicking in the meantime. You're okay with somebody not giving you a text message. You might be looking at it without the core wound as, oh, I'm looking for somebody who's more consistent with me.

And so she's probably not a good fit for me either. And you're more neutral about it. What you can then do is you can communicate what you're looking for. So if she then texts back the next day and you're starting to meet her or get connected to her in person, it depends on you're dating somebody. But if you're dating somebody for a little period of time or you're getting to know them and haven't met up yet, you can tell somebody like,

I like consistency and relationships. You can let that be known the next time you spend time with her. And if you tell somebody, yeah, consistency is a big thing I'm looking for. You put yourself out there. You're not saying you need to meet my need for consistency because you haven't been dating them for longer. I think you said they haven't even met yet. But it's your duty as a man to say, this is what I'm looking for.

And it actually is very attractive to women when men say, this is what I'm looking for. It puts the woman in a step of like, oh, so am I that? Should I be that? And it puts that power back in the man's hands by owning his, his, his, needs and actually sharing what it is that he's looking for in a long-term relationship. And when men lead like that in a relationship, women end up responding by trying to meet that need, but also by feeling like they can communicate their needs too. And that's a really big foundation of how we build secure relationships long-term,

is people feel comfortable sharing their needs and then they try to meet each other's. Those are six really powerful words you're telling men to say to women in the right moment, this is what I'm looking for. why is that so important for women to hear and for men to say? Because number one, women generally like a man who's transparent, women like a man who is taking the lead a little bit. And it doesn't have to be in like an aggressive way or something, but just who are putting themselves out there.

People respect people as a whole. Women especially respect men who are going to say what they mean and who are going to really be owning their truth. And so when a man saying like, this is what I'm looking for. He respects himself enough to just take up space, to lead the way in communication, which is actually a very powerful thing. It's like, hey, we're here to communicate with each other. And there's a sense of, hey, this is who I am and I accept myself enough to share that fully openly with you. I'm not afraid of people pleasing my way into this sort of connection

with you. And so there's a lot of really attractive traits in that. But what I love about that is it's not just attractive traits. It's secure traits. It's people who are willing to, to open up, be communicative, be consistent. And that's actually what builds a really secure foundation. So not only is it attractive, but it's also really healthy to do relationships in that way. One more. First date, two hours in, it's going pretty well.

And he knows he needs to go for the first kiss because his dating coach, Connell Barrett, told him to. Or Connell's podcast did. But he's thinking, oh no, what if I kiss her and we'll go for the kiss and she turns the cheek or she's not into me? I don't want to get rejected, but I know I need to make moves.

Ah, Taise, help that guy. Okay, so if he has effort, if he's really scared, like if he knows, okay, I have to go for a first kiss tonight, and he's like nervous leading up to the date, first thing I would do is if he hasn't already, I would try to do a little core wound reprogramming or at least questioning that story. Because what's actually happening at the root

is rather than just moving naturally in the relationship, the wound is making more from fear than from truth. So the projection of your fear, is determining her behaviors. And core wounds determine a lot of our behaviors. So that's why the first foundational piece always, like, change the core wound. Because when that's out of the way,

well, now we can move more from our truth. So that's the first thing. The second thing is I get people to do this exercise when they know consciously they should do something, but subconsciously they're getting blocked. I call it cost benefit. And if they don't have time to do like their 21 days of rewiring because the dates tonight,

they can write out 10 or 15 costs of... Ooh, very smart. Get associated with the consequences, right? Yes. And it's recalibrating your emotional associations to it. So you can write out the cost of like, what are all the costs if I don't show up, don't go for the kiss, don't make myself vulnerable, you know, and write out all the costs. And then what are the benefits, both to my own self-esteem and to the potential for the relationship

by doing it? And it just helps us rebalance the way we're perceiving something. And then again, you're moving more from that balanced, more open, neutral space, which allows us to be more natural and more like our self. I was with a client who came from Minnesota. I'll call in Mickey. Mickey flew in from Minnesota to work with me. I do these things called Wingman Weekend or I think this is so cool that you do this. I think this would be so fun. I have the coolest, I have the coolest, weirdest job in the world. And Mickey flew in from Minnesota, mid-40s, 44, 45. And he flew here to work with me

and approach women. And we're in this bar called the Ripple Room, fancy, cool venue here in New York City in the Lower East Side. And I, there's a three or four women sitting over the corner. And I said, go over there. Approach them. He said, I'm afraid. And I said, what do you have to lose? And he said, what?

And he started giving me all these abstractions. I said, no, literally, what do you have to lose by walking over there? He was like, he couldn't think of anything because he had nothing to lose. And I said, and if you don't go over there, what might you lose? Yeah. Maybe not a phone number. maybe not a date, maybe just self-courge and feeling good about accomplishing something hard, which is a very man thing to feel good about, right? I did the hard thing, which is great. That's how we

change approaching from win-lose into win-learn or win-win accomplishment. When-win, yeah. And he was a great exposure therapy guy because his big thing was, I'm too old. So I had him literally walk up to women saying, hey ladies, I'm 45 years old. I love that. That's such an exposure. Yeah. And they're like, oh, you look great.

You look 35. He's like, oh. And also, 45 is never too old to meet somebody. That's crazy. It tells you the stories that we carry and how they, we see the world through that lens. And now we're interacting that way and it changes our self-esteem and our perception. And yeah, it's so beautiful to get someone to the other side of that. And then this was amazing.

He walks over and nervously shaking. And then he does the approach. it goes really well. All of a sudden, he's standing taller. He's escaped the bear. And he approaches another group. He walks over with all this confidence and says, hey, look, it's a, it's hot girl corner over here. Like a ball and quagger. It's amazing. I love that. Good for him. And then that starts to build. And then what's so cool, which would be such a cool exercise for them, is when people have their wins, get them to focus on their wins, take them home, record themselves saying them out loud, collect them. And after a few weeks of practicing it, to just listen back. And they're going to be

like, oh my gosh, yeah, sure, these things happen over here. But our brains are wired with a negativity bias. So we more likely hang on to the negatives and the positives and we feed ourselves with them. Like I always joke with people. If you get chased by a bear, you don't go home and say, oh, my God, when I was being chased by the bear, the sky was so blue. and the clad. You're like the bear had big teeth and claws. Like we remember all the bad stuff. So if you get them to balance it out with all the positives and listen back and feel

about them, that just like imprints the sense of like, yeah, these can happen, but I can do this too. And it shifts people's focus in a beautiful way. You have a new book out. The new attachment theory came out, I believe, last month. Can you tell us a bit about it? Yeah. So basically it's about people first going through.

and it's really interactive and understanding number one, what their attachment style is. So there's an assessment. Number two, from the assessment, they then go into understanding their profile. So what their core wounds are, what their needs are, which most people don't know. And so in longer term relationships, they don't know how to communicate what they need. Because if we don't know the language of it, then we're just going to feel less fulfilled and our needs won't be met. And then helps people to regulate their nervous systems, learn to communicate better.

And so we go through these deep pillars of doing the inner work and the actual rewiring exercises to get there. So that's what the book is about and for, and people will be able to find their attachment style, do the rewiring and really come out through the other side. Fantastic. And let's end with a fun little, I have a fun little idea here if you're open to it. Question for you. Are you more of a movie lover, TV show lover or both or neither? Totally TV shows over movies. And I have some weird thing that is like I don't know what it is. But I have a hard time with like. like things that are made up. Like I have a hard time with, oh, somebody wrote a movie and they made up the ideas.

It's not real life. So like I really don't like movies or television that's not real life. And so that makes me like, I kind of like reality television a little bit. Certain ones, but they have to be about like people's interactions. I like that stuff. Okay.

Or documentaries. But movies, I don't think I've actually sat through a full movie like for two hours in like 12 years, maybe. Okay. What are two? What are two or three of your favorite TV shows ever? Favorite TV shows ever?

Okay. I honestly, I mostly just sit and watch documentaries with my husband. If we go watch all these documentaries, I like a good conspiracy documentary. Even if I think they're a little crazy, I like a good conspiracy because I like the like maybe everything we believe isn't necessarily the truth. It's a little bit mind opening. So I like that stuff. I like health documentaries. I'm like obsessed with health documentaries.

You ever seen shows like the office, Seinfeld? Yeah, I've seen them. Okay. I was going to name TV characters and have you decide, okay, here's their attachment theory, but you haven't seen a no TV shows. I won't even. We could do like public figures maybe.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm probably the worst person to do the TV show one though. I'm so sorry. That's fine. That just means you have a life. I'm like me. all I do is watch movies and TV shows when I'm not helping men talk to women. Okay.

How about I'll just throw some like politics, celebrities, culture. What are you? Yeah, we can do that. I watch a lot of, on YouTube shorts, I'll watch people giving like little clips of interviews or things that they say or do. Ken Burns. Ken Burns. I don't know who that is.

Oh, okay. He's a documentary maker. I thought maybe that's why. Okay, okay. Sorry. How about Oprah? Oprah. Oprah?

you know what Oprah I would probably say is like securely attached but leaning avoided and like obviously I'm speculating you seem very secure I know she's financially secure yeah very secure um but she I think what she actually seems is very regulated very grounded but I think she has a history being out of relationships for a long time which is actually usually indicative of somebody who's avoided and people can be very secure in their workplace relationships in their um uh friendships but then if they're usually alone for a prolonged period of time. And again, I could be wrong because I'm not super up to date on her life, but I think she hasn't really been in a relationship long term.

And that usually leans us more romantically avoidant. And I also know about her. I did watch a short clip of her once, and she said that she had a really hard childhood. And sometimes that causes somebody to be, you know, we can be secure in a lot of places, but our romantic area shows her inner self the most. Okay.

Because it's where we feel the most vulnerable. How about the, go ahead anyway so that's it that's all I was going to say is that would be my guess again I don't know for sure by any means what about the prime minister of your great country Canada Justin Trudeau yeah what is his style everybody wants to know what is his style okay handsome carney's are current prime minister but Justin Trudeau's like our long standing one that everybody knows and I think he probably met him um oh my gosh I you know I'm not a big fan of him Um, but I would say maybe anxiously attached, maybe a little people pleasing, but, what politician isn't. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I don't know enough about his personal life.

I know he was recently divorced, but he seems to be like, one thing I noticed about him a lot is he would change his sense of personality based on what he thought people wanted to hear. Like in one interview, he'd say one thing. And another interview, his story would totally change and that people pleasing chameleon-like structure probably is just. a politician, but it can be indicative. Somebody who's going to change themselves a lot and say they're this way one day. And then that's a people pleasing anxious attachment style because they want to win that

approval. And that's their highest priority. That's great, great analysis. Tais, for anybody who wants to watch you, listen to you, you have a podcast, you're on Instagram. Where should people go to find out more about you and hear more from you? Thank you for having me, by the way. This is really fun.

Sorry, I don't know many public people. I didn't give you much to work with with the characters. But I am on YouTube, which is Taise Gibson-Person-Personal Development School. I'm on Instagram at the Personal Development School. And people can take that free attachment quiz and assessment at personaldevelopment school.com as well. And thank you so much. This is a blast.

I had so much fun chatting about all these stories. Personaldevelopment school.com. Exactly. Yes. Okay. Great. I took it today. It was really interesting.

It takes five minutes. It was really fun. It's fun to find out. where do I fall and I need to do some work on myself. That's what I've learned today. Well, it sounds like you have overcome so much and it's beautiful. I always have a lot of admiration for people who go through their own intense things, come out the other side and then are the best mentors for other people. So I think that's really cool to hear your backstory. Thank you. Thank you, Tice Gibson, for being here. And thank you for listening.

And don't forget, the right woman is out there for you. But she's going to have to meet the real authentic you. Thank you for listening. Until next time.