The One You Feed - Understanding Attachment Styles to Build Better Relationships with Thais Gibson

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

In this episode, Thais Gibson shares her wealth of knowledge and experience with attachment styles and how they affect personal relationships. You’ll discover how to transform your relationships and deepen connections with others by learning powerful techniques to reprogram your subconscious mind. In this episode, you will be able to: Understand the impact of early childhood experiences on adult attachment styles Reprogram your subconscious mind with effective techniques for transforming personal relationships Differentiate between the subconscious and unconscious mind to gain insight into your attachment patterns Explore the role of core wounds in personal development and how they influence attachment styles in relationships Uncover the significance of understanding attachment styles in creating healthier and more fulfilling relationships To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Healthy interdependent relationships mean I can become a master of my own needs and self-soothing and feeling good in the relationship to myself and spending time alone, and I can become a master at feeling safe to rely on other people and to communicate my needs to others as well. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our

guest on this episode is Thais Gibson, a relationship expert that has been recognized by Bloomberg News, Psychology Today, and various other outlets for her revolutionary work in integrated attachment theory. Thais has worked with thousands of clients and helped them to positively transform their lives, relationships, and goals. She has over 30 million views across her social platforms and is certified in 13 different areas of therapy. Today, Thais and Eric discuss her book, Learning Love, Build the Best Relationships of Your Life Using Integrated Attachment Theory. Hi, Thais. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Eric. Excited to be here with you.

Yeah, we're going to be discussing your book, Learning Love, Build the Best Relationships of Your Life Using Integrated Attachment Theory. And we'll also be talking about your version of that, which is called Gibson integrated attachment theory. But before we get into all that, we'll start like we always do with a parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and

hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, they think about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent, they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I love this. So to me, honestly, a lot of, and I was telling you before we started recording that I've heard this parable and it was really influential on my own journey over a decade ago. And to me, it actually represents the ego mind. And I think the ego mind is something that, you know, research from the University of Southern California's Neuroimaging Institute says we think 60 to 70,000 thoughts per day, and roughly 50,000 of them are repeated from

the day before. And something that was so powerful on my own journey was to watch my thoughts and to recognize when I was thinking really negative thoughts about myself, putting myself down, beating myself up, really lacking self-compassion. And I really made a big effort on my own journey of healing to feed the wolf that was more about self-compassion, gentleness, not constantly trying to punish myself into being better or growing more. And when I actually made more of an effort in my internal dialogue to be kind, that was super influential for me. And so I think of it as like the thinking level,

the ego mind level and how we operate from that perspective. Yeah, I love that. Listener, as you're listening, what resonated with you in that? I think a lot of us have some ideas of things that we can do to feed our good wolf. And here's a good tip to make it more likely that you do it. It can be really helpful to reflect right before you do that thing on why you want to do it. Our brains are always making a calculation of what neuroscientists would call reward value. Basically, is this thing worth doing? And so when you're getting ready to do this thing that you want to do to feed your good wolf, reflecting on why

actually helps to make the reward value on that higher and makes it more likely that you're going to do that. For example, if what you're trying to do is exercise, right before you're getting ready to exercise, it can be useful to remind yourself of why. For example, I want to exercise because it makes my mental and emotional health better today. If you'd like a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits

that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. That sort of plunges us right into a core part of a lot of your work, which is talking about the subconscious. You know, different people have different definitions and theories, and I'm going to ask you for yours in a second. But we know, as you said, that a huge amount of what we think is habitual, repeated, meaning it's arising from somewhere and where it's arising from is what we might call the subconscious. I mean, all you have to do is sit down and meditate for a couple minutes to realize, and it may be one of the best insights for meditation is, oh, wait a second. I, as I think

of myself, am not generating these thoughts. They're just coming. So what does the subconscious mean to you? The subconscious mind is what is currently out of our awareness. It's really our programmed habituated self. Now people will often hear, you know, our conscious mind is our logical thinking self more associated, for example, with like the neocortex or prefrontal cortex regions, if we had to make that sort of analogy or link. And the subconscious mind is all of these programs that we have. So for example, if we grew up in a household where we were constantly criticized, then you might start criticizing yourself all the time in your own internal dialogue, because we take in that set

of programs and whatever we're exposed to through repetition and emotion is what really programs or patterns in the subconscious mind. Now, you'll often hear people use the words subconscious and unconscious interchangeably, but there actually is an important difference. And it's that your subconscious mind, you can quite easily retrieve information from. So you can look back and be like, oh yeah, you know, when I was a kid, I did feel not good enough. Or, oh yeah, three days ago, I did feel emotionally a little bit upset about something. So it may not be in your conscious mind's awareness, but you can pull up and retrieve. Whereas your unconscious mind is much more difficult to actually retrieve information

from. And it's why I spent a lot of time focusing on the subconscious because we can get a lot of insight from there. I had a therapist who referred to that as the pre-conscious in the way he would call pre-conscious what you're sort of calling subconscious, meaning it's available for retrieval. So let me ask you a question. So we're going to talk about attachment theory. And attachment theory is basically postulating that we relate to other people based on a lot of what happened to us when we were really young, right? Whatever patterns were happened there, they influence us in our relationships today. And you say that a lot of our attachment style is formed before we're the age of two, right? So that stuff is unconscious, right? Because I don't have any idea what happened to me before two. So say more about how that

aligns. Yes. So the original work of studying attachment styles was done by John Bowlby and later Mary Ainsworth. And that's something we've built upon now. But basically, there was an experiment called the strange situation experiment. And this is how they could actually observe children's attachment styles at such a young age. And so what they would see is they would leave a young child with a parent in sort of what looks like a doctor's office waiting room. And they would have the parent exit the room just briefly and then return to the room. And they could study and see based on the child's responses and behaviors what attachment type each individual was.

So the anxious attachment style, which is sort of the more needy or clingy attachment style, would really panic when the parent left the room. And they would have a stranger come into the room at the same time and just sit there for a moment and then have the parent return. And the anxious attachment style would be very clingy when the parent returned. And you could observe those patterns of behavior. The dismissive avoidant attachment style, when the parent returned, you could see they would actually try to minimize their own attachment needs. So they would see the parent and they would look away. And they wouldn't really make eye contact or posture in their body language towards trying to connect or attach. And then the fearful avoidant or disorganized attachment style would be very hot and cold, back and forth. Would kind of crawl towards the parent, move away.

Or if the parent would get too close, they would look away. But then they would kind of go back. And they were really all over the map in their behavior. And so you could see the original attachment style of that space. Now, what's really interesting is because of neuroplasticity, our attachment style can shift and change over time. So for example, you could have somebody who grows up in a securely attached home, but then see their parents go through a painful divorce, for example, at the age of eight. And because the subconscious gets programmed through repetition and emotion, then what ends up happening is somebody could suddenly become anxiously attached, for example.

So yes, our earliest set of attachment patterns and learnings does form at an unconscious age or an age where it's really the unconscious mind being programmed. But in order to retrieve information to see what patterns we are still carrying up into our adult lives, we can refer to patterns of different core wounds that we have or fears we have about relationships, which are our subconscious. We can refer to different dynamics in regards to unmet needs that we have or emotional patterns we have or ways that we communicate or set boundaries. And all of those things, we don't have to be able to go back into one and a half years old,

for example, to actually see what our attachment style is and our patterns are. We can actually observe that happening in our daily lives as adults. Yeah. I think something you're saying there is really important and I want to call it out, which is this idea of programming happens by repetition and emotion. And recognizing that that programming is ongoing. You know, it's not just what happened to us in ages of two to five or before the age of two. There's a lot of talk about that, right? And while it can be helpful to know some of your patterns, it's also, I don't think, helpful to think of yourself as being anxiously attached as a identity, right? In the same way you and I were talking before the show, right?

There are ways in which for me to think of myself as an addict is a useful identity. And there are ways that that becomes a hugely limiting identity. And I think things like attachment style or the things that happen to us as a child fall into that same category. They are useful to a point, but we also have to believe that that can change. 100%. So the way I really teach about this through our programs, for example, is first of all, your attachment style is just your subconscious set of rules for love. It's not this like personality disorder or this huge clinical diagnosis. And it's just a set of conditioned patterns and ideas about what relationships are supposed to

look like. So not only is it not static, it's not like we have this for life. When we understand our rules, we've broken attachment styles into five major categories of what's necessary to change to become securely attached. And I like to think of it as not a label for who you are or your identity, but a way to gain insight, almost like a window into your own patterns so that you can observe what's not working for you. And you can do the work very easily to recondition these patterns by actually leveraging principles of neuroplasticity to change and to become secure. So I definitely couldn't agree more with you that it's not this identity. It's not this diagnosis. It's actually just a way

to gain insight into your patterns and see what you need to change. Yeah. And I love that word pattern. I often use the word tendency when I'm talking about things like this. We have a tendency to be a certain way, but that's what it is, or we have a pattern of being a certain way. And I find that sort of a good middle road between not addressing or believing in the fact that our earlier experiences shape us, because of course they do, and also not being in a place where we feel like our earlier experiences are destiny, because they're not, you know. And so what we're trying for is that middle ground. I really like that word pattern as a way of describing it. We have

patterns, but patterns can be broken. I mean, there's this core Buddhist concept that we're all conditioned by life. And it's true. Like we're just constantly being conditioned and what can be conditioned can be unconditioned. Yes. It's so funny. I say this all the time. This is like one of my catchphrases that I say is I'm like, you're not born with an attachment style. It gets conditioned into you through repetition and emotion. And just by leveraging the understanding of how conditioning works, you can rec through repetition and emotion. And just by leveraging the understanding of how conditioning works, you can recondition your patterns. And I'm sure you and I probably both agree from having similar backstories and in different ways that like, it can be so limiting to think you are going to struggle with something for your whole entire

life. And I just don't see that as being the way I think that unfortunately, in some cases, we have like a Western medical system, which I think serves tremendously in very specific cases. But we sort of have the system of our world and culture in many ways. It's like, oh, when you are a certain way, you're going to stay that way. Your past is your destiny for your future. And I just so strongly disagree with that concept. Yeah. And I also think there are ways in which these ideas can be overused. I'll give you an example. There was a time where a really good relationship that I was in of about a decade ended very suddenly and unexpectedly and in a way I didn't want to have happen. And so the therapist I was seeing was talking about core wounds the whole time. And while I agree there is such a thing, and I do have some, at one point I said, let me

ask you a question. What if I'd walked in here and told you that my partner had died? Because that's what we're talking about, right? The sudden end of a relationship that was really important. I don't think you would start talking to me about my core wounds. You probably would be talking to me about grief and the process of grief. And so my point there being, I think it goes along with what you're saying, which is these are ways of thinking that can be really helpful. But like any lens, we want to be able to shift the lens around in a flexible way so that we don't

start to see the world through only one way of seeing it. Yes. Can I share a story with you though? Because I think there's a nuance there that's really interesting. So I have a background in like CBT, hypnosis, all these things. I tried to figure out how we can take core wounds from a CBT cognitive behavioral therapy perspective and actually rewire them. It's a big part of the work that I do. And the first time I actually saw this so impactful from an external point of view, because I did a lot of this work internally, I was in practice for about a year and I had two women that I was seeing. They were both new. So it was both their first day coming into session and both were coming to me because they were fresh out of a divorce. And they were about the same age

and they both had two children also about the same age. And they had both been married for a similar period of time. And I was reading their intake forms in the morning. And I saw one before lunch and one after lunch. The first woman came in and she said, this is going to be hard. I need some support going through this divorce. I want support on how can I can really help my children and assist them and make sure that they're okay. But I also know that this is for the best because our marriage really wasn't working. So we worked a lot on like her unmet needs that were going to happen, the process of grief in a healthy way, these sorts of things. She was stressed and upset coming into the session, but not anything, you know, out of the ordinary. I had lunch. I saw the next woman. And of course, having just been through this past session, sort of expected it to

be quite similar to the previous woman before. This woman came in and she had like stains all over her clothes. She was like completely disheveled. She was crying before she sat down on the couch and she was like 10 out of 10 distressed. And I asked her, I said, well, what are you making this situation mean? And she said, I was never loved. Otherwise he wouldn't have wanted to leave me. I'm going to be alone forever. I'm not good enough. I've always known I was unlovable and I feel like I just don't matter to anyone. Now, all of those things are core wounds. And what happens is core wounds when we have them from preexisting ideas we've acquired

about ourselves through conditioning, through past experiences and how they imprint the subconscious mind magnify grief. So whenever we have grief, grief is also unmet needs. Grief is also a process of emotions and nervous system regulation and things we have to be present with ourselves for. But grief goes from pain of unmet needs to the suffering of our stories. The moment we give meaning to the situation based on past experiences, because what a core wound really is, is it's a subconscious idea we have about ourselves with all this pre-existing emotional storage because your subconscious mind retains everything it consolidates memories over time but we basically

experience the pain of the objective situation in front of us combined with all the times we felt not good enough unlovable alone these sorts of things in the past. And so core wounds are actually a really important part of processing grief, but we have to be able to also work on the needs, the emotional regulation, the nervous system work, the other parts of grief that are natural and going to be there. But it can be very useful and very supportive to strip those things back and actually work to recondition those ideas we have. That's a really nice way of saying it, which is that the core wounds can amplify grief. That's a really valid point because the core wounds, and we could translate that if you don't love that phrase core wounds, we could use the phrase core beliefs, right? Our core beliefs, like you said, are how we make meaning out of things that happen.

are how we make meaning out of things that happen. And the meaning we make out of what happens is a huge part of how we respond to that thing. Exactly. I always give people the analogy because it's important to remember that when we go through difficult experiences, our mind is also wired to hang on to negative things more than positive.

And the analogy I give to describe this is like if you're walking in the forest tomorrow and you see a bear and you run away from the bear and you're safe and it's all okay, but you have to walk that same exact route the following day, you're not going to be like, oh, I remember that beautiful flower that was next to the bear yesterday. You're going to be like, I remember the bear and its teeth. bear and its teeth. And so what happens is when we have painful experiences throughout our lives that we can't properly process or make sense of, we store it with a lot of negative emotion because on a biological level, we've been wired over time and generations to go, well, if I hold on to the negative, I can project it into the future and I can stop these things from happening to me. I can protect myself from them like the bear. But unfortunately, it doesn't really work that way

any longer because we're not in these ongoing survival situations on a daily basis in most of the Western world, at least. And so what ends up happening is we just project all of these painful ideas about ourselves. And the most obvious ones people can probably relate to from this core wound perspective are these ideas that if I was betrayed growing up, how I can never trust anybody, somebody's going to break my trust. Or if I was abandoned growing up, oh my gosh, I'm always going to be abandoned. Or I'm not good enough, or I'm unworthy, or all these ideas. And they're so useful to work on reconditioning because those are the exact things that often tend to cause a lot of sabotage and devastation to our lives. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who

figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you two? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about

Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I would also imagine that these things also fall on some sort of spectrum, meaning there isn't some line at which I'm suddenly securely attached, and a line before at which I'm suddenly securely attached and a line before which I'm not securely attached, right? In the same way that we don't think about addiction in the same way anymore, right? We think of it as on being on a spectrum. Absolutely.

Because one of the things that I've observed is that I feel like through a lot of work, a lot of the type of work you're describing, I did a lot of this in my early 30s, which was quite some time ago. I'm largely securely attached, except when the stakes get really, really high, at which point I tend to revert back a little bit to my previous types of attachment, meaning I will not get triggered by 90% of what used to trigger me. I'll just simply be like, all right, that happens, deal with it. But yet when the stakes get high enough, or when it gets serious enough, I do find that I'm no longer securely attached. I am back to the way I was before. So that's really interesting to me. First of all, I do agree very much that everything's on a continuum 100%. And that's why we do like. First of all, I do agree very much that everything's on a continuum, 100%. And that's why we do like a breakdown in attachment styles.

Oh, you're, you know, 60% anxious and 40% secure. You know, you've got those anxious tendencies that are dominant, right? Like I think there's a really important way to break it down. And then we work on the poor wounds and unmet needs and boundary issues associated with working through those anxious tendencies or patterns. It's interesting to me. associated with working through those anxious tendencies or patterns is interesting to me. And that's what I read into it first when you said it was, you know, there's a sort of dynamic about attachment theory, which is that your attachment style won't show up very strongly until you're actually attached. Now, you went on to differentiate that 90% of the things won't

trigger you, but 10% will, and you're always going to be a human being. Becoming securely attached doesn't mean I am now a robot and I don't feel emotion. But, you know, for people who relate to that first statement you said, but not the second, for anybody who goes, yeah, I'm really good, you know, at the beginning of a relationship, but only once I really develop feelings, then I suddenly have these dismissive avoidant tendencies or anxious tendencies. that's probably your overarching attachment style, because we don't have that experience until we really have those feelings and feel that degree of vulnerability towards someone. Yeah, I was certainly attached. And again, the therapist I was talking to at the time, because I had a moment of what happened, I have done all this work,

why am I back here? And he basically posited that theory. He said, look, all that work that you're going to do is going to make you better able to handle more and more and more and more. And then there is a point, though, beyond which things are not fully healed. And that's where you'll go when it gets that extreme. Absolutely. And I think that it's really important for for listeners too, because I know you know this, but to distinguish between like a trigger versus a painful life experience, like just because you're securely attached, like if somebody passes away in your family or something like that, you're still going to have those deeply unmet needs

from grief. You're still going to be affected by that human experience. It doesn't mean you never have like a painful reaction to something. It's just that when we become secure, a lot of those patterns that were maladaptive, those things like amplifying a painful event, like let's say somebody doesn't call you back. Rather than that being a nine out of 10 abandonment core wound triggered and you're panicked and then you're calling back that person multiple, multiple times, you're going to that person multiple, multiple times, you're going to see, okay, that's still uncomfortable because it doesn't meet maybe the needs or expectations I had in that moment. And that can make me feel a negative way, but I don't see myself get extremely triggered, you know, at the eight, nine, 10 out of 10 scale. And I don't see myself feel that I have behaviors in response to that that become out of my control.

Things like, oh my gosh, I know I shouldn't keep calling them, but I keep doing it anyways. Or I know I shouldn't shut them down and ice them out, but I can't help it. And so that's where you're going to see a lot of that needle move. Yeah, that makes sense. So let's start to talk a little bit about the process of working with these subconscious beliefs or core wounds or attachment styles in a way that we can start to change them? Where do we begin here? Yeah, so I like to cover five main topics, and we can go through them in deeper ways. But just so people have an overarching theme, the first one is reconditioning those core wounds. And we can talk about how to do that in just a

moment. The second thing is we have to learn to meet our own needs. So when I think of healthy interdependent relationships, I don't think of I get so good at the relationship to myself that I ignore everybody. And I also don't think of I become so good at controlling people's reactions outside of me that I only focus on other people. Healthy interdependent relationships mean I can become a master of my own needs and self-soothing and feeling good in the relationship to myself and spending time alone. And I can become a master at feeling safe to rely on other people and to communicate my needs to others as well. So what you'll actually see as I go through these five things, three of them are internal, like we have to do the work ourselves. And two of them actually become external, like in our interpersonal interactions.

So we start with the reprogramming core wounds. Then we learn to meet our own needs. It's a big part of how we self-source and self-soothe. Then we do some nervous system regulation. All three insecure attachment styles generally are quite dysregulated from a nervous system level. They spend a little more time in sympathetic or fight and flight mode rather than parasympathetic mode. So we do work there. And then we move into learning to communicate more effectively to others and actually receive our needs from others and to do some healthy boundary work. And when we can actually recondition any maladaptive patterns in those five major categories, that's where we'll see somebody have the behavioral patterns of somebody who's securely attached. So if you'd like, I'm

happy to go into like a tool, for example, for how we can actually recondition core wounds. I want to pause for a quick good wolf reminder. This one's about a habit change and a mistake I see people making. And that's really that we don't think about these new habits that we want to add in the context of our entire life, right? Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit in the life that we have. So when we just keep adding, I should do this, I should do that, I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't really thought about what we're not going to do in order to make that happen.

So it's really helpful for you to think about where is this going to fit and what in my life might I need to remove. If you want a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. I wanted to follow up on something you said, which was secure attachment, still being attached. That word is in it. Because I think for a while there was, and maybe there is still to some degree, but I think if we're not careful, healthy is presented as this, I'm just not affected by what other people do kind of person, this island almost. And I don't think that's what we are talking about. We are talking about still being attached, about being interdependent on what other people do matters and is important to us and affects us. But also, as you said, not being so far out there, you know, being secure in that attachment.

100%. I mean, I think there's unfortunately, in a lot of ways, culturally, this dynamic of going, oh, you know, you're secure when you don't need anybody. And, you know, that's just going back into more dismissive avoidant behavior. That's like, I'm an island and we're not wired for that. We're wired, actually, in the words of Dr. Gabor Mate, we're wired for both attachment and authenticity. We're wired to have relationships to others, to rely on people, to connect with people, and also to have an individuated sense of self, to know what it is that we're looking for that's meaningful to us, and to have that authentic sort of independence. But it's ideally the best of both worlds. And just because things are different doesn't mean that they're mutually exclusive. Just because,

you know, connecting with others and having a relationship to self are different from each other doesn't mean that it's one or the other healthy interdependent relationships actually have both and to your point securely attached has the word attached within it I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I would love to hear some about the first step of reconditioning. Yeah, so this is a really easy tool that I love to share with people. And there's a whole bunch of ways we can recondition our subconscious mind, but this is one that I always give people to start. So a lot of people

out there will be like, oh, affirmations, affirmations. Affirmations, I think, are not very helpful personally because your pre-existing programs, like we started this episode talking about, are subconscious. Nobody's consciously waking up and picking those core wounds and saying, today I'm going to tell myself 47 times that I'm going to be abandoned and that I'm not good enough and I'm going to see how I feel. Right, right. I mean, the science on affirmation seems to be some degree they work best on the people who need them the least, meaning they work best for people who already believe that they're good enough. Exactly.

You know, I think there's two important things to recognize for people too who don't know this, which is the conscious mind is responsible for three to five percent of our daily beliefs, thoughts, emotions, decisions. And then our subconscious and unconscious collectively are 95 to 97%. So it's not your conscious mind running the show and your conscious mind isn't choosing to think those autopilot thoughts that are sabotaging relationships or destroying different areas of your life at times. And so the first step is we have to find what our big core wound is. It's affecting us. Now there's 18 or so major ones.

I'm not going to list all of them, but I'll list some really common ones per attachment style. Anxiously attached individuals, their big ones are around, I'll be abandoned, alone, excluded, disliked, rejected, not good enough, unlovable, unsafe if I lose connection. Dismissive avoidance, their big core wounds tend to be, I'll be trapped, helpless, powerless in the wrong relationship. I'll be weak if I'm vulnerable. I'm incapable of change. I am shameful or defective if I show or share my emotions and conflict is unsafe or closeness is unsafe. Fearful avoidance tend to basically share on both sides of the attachment continuum,

but they also have unique ones around fearing betrayal, being unworthy or being bad. have unique ones around fearing betrayal, being unworthy, or being bad. So basically, step one, find your core wound and its opposite. Okay? So let's just for simplicity's sake say, I'm not good enough. So I'm not good enough. Opposite is I am good enough. Now we can't just affirm that we're good enough because then the conscious mind speaks language and your subconscious mind does not. So if I say to you, Eric, whatever you do, do not think of a chocolate chip cookie. You probably have the experience of like visualizing a chocolate chip cookie. And it's because your conscious mind hears do not, but your subconscious, the one running the show sees through emotions and images. So the subconscious speaks emotions and images. Now we

need repetition to fire and wire neural pathways. So step one, not good enough. It's opposite as I am good enough. Step two, we need to leverage repetition, emotion, and imagery. And the way we do that is by finding memories because all memories are a container of emotions and images. If you share your favorite childhood memory and it's you being on the swing set with your parents pushing you, you would see the images of the swing and you would, as you recount the memory, smile or laugh or your body language would change. So all we need to do is come up with 10 for repetition, memories to support, I am good enough.

And then we record it somewhere like into our phone and listen back for 21 days because research shows it takes 21 days to really create new neural networks that are hardwired enough where they're going to stick. And it may sound like, oh my gosh, 21 days of work to do those three steps to find the opposite of our core wound, 10 memories to support the new belief and listen back to it for that 21 day cycle. But the reality is this will uproot sometimes decades of retelling these same old stories.

And I can share firsthand, this was something that was so powerful for me. And I've now seen through some of our programs, we have over 25,000 people report an 88.7% improvement in their core wounds on these self-paced programs. So like, you don't know that people are sticking to them for this full 21 days, but they really, really work. And it's really impactful to just start with that simple tool. So let's talk about that a little bit more. I am a person who, A, has a very bad memory. I don't remember lots of things. Like I would say the vast majority of my childhood simply isn't even there that I can find. And I don't tend to think in images very much. So when you say to find 10 memories that counteract the core belief,

okay, so 10 memories that made where I felt enough, if my core wound is I'm not good enough, I would find 10 memories of where I felt like I was enough? Exactly. And when you say record them, what do you mean? What am I saying? What is somebody actually recording? Excellent question. So you would write out like, actually, just for argument's sake, can you share like one memory of a time where you felt enough about

something? You're asking the wrong question, a memory, it could take me 45 minutes to come up with one. It can be small, they don't have to be these like monumental achievements. Like maybe your podcast reach a certain number of downloads. Or maybe you had somebody come up to you and say like, Hey, you've really impacted my life. Like, is there anything like that for sure? There's plenty of those sorts of things. Yes. Perfect. So you would write out like a sentence or two that represents that moment. So, you know, Bob came up to me on the sidewalk when I was, you know, going for a walk at the park and he said, you know, he listens to my podcast and it's, it's impacted his life. So one or two sentences, you'd write them down and then you would just, you know, take the video on your phone and just

not record the video. And you just use the audio only and just read out those sentences from those 10 pieces of memory. And for people who don't have, you know, a beautiful, amazing podcast changing everybody's lives like yourself, you know, for somebody who's like, well, I don't know, you know, even little things like, hey, you helped your coworker in the workplace yesterday, or, you know, your boss said, you know what, you're really making an effort and I appreciate that.

Just those little tiny things gives us that repetition and emotion that we need. So I feel like this kind of could run into the same problem. And you could tell me how to get around it, which is if I don't feel like I'm enough, right, I might view those experiences of feeling like enough. And I might then filter them through that core wound so that they don't even feel. You know what I mean? Like I could see somebody going, well, yeah, like you said, it's easy if you do something where people tell you all the time that you're good.

But yeah, I helped my coworker yesterday. But so what? That doesn't really matter. Or, you know, I guess I felt like enough when my boss told me that I did a good job. But my boss is kind of an idiot anyway. And like I can see how we would filter these things right back through the core wound. It's such a great question. So I do see this. I would say I see this in about like 10 to 15% of people. Us pessimistic ones. Yeah, well, it usually represents when people, and maybe this

was your past, right, is when we have a core wound that's so deep. So, you know, it's like so hard to even like think differently of it or even to challenge it in some capacity because it's so close to our sense of self and who we are for so long. So there's, there's a couple of little hacks. So the first thing is we try to get people to just like focus on one pointedness, right? Just focusing on not giving those self objections, being mindful of your internal dialogue and keeping your mind trained during that three-minute focus period of listening back to it on, no, my boss did say I did this good thing. You know, there was this improvement here. If that's too difficult for people, we then instead hack the system by starting a process called starting general and then getting specific. So we don't go, I am good enough. Here's the piece of

evidence. We say, it's possible that I'm improving. And we start for, you know, the first seven days or so just with that, you know, just evidence that it's possible that I'm improving. Then we move into, I'm seeing myself improve. And then we move into, you know, and so we graduate ourselves when we start to build emotional resonance. Now, the reason this tends to work really well is actually that we have this mechanism in our brain called the reticular activating system. And I'm sure you've heard of this, but for anybody listening, the RAS is basically a filtering system. And the most common example that you'll see it used within is like if somebody's trying

to buy a new car and you may have not noticed that car in the road before, but now that you're focusing on buying the new car, oh my gosh, I see the white Jeeps everywhere on the road. So we can actually leverage this when it comes to reconditioning, which is as I start to look for these pieces of evidence, have this routine of like focusing on these things, I'm sort of tuning my dial into this, which also allows us to keep graduating and building momentum across time. Yeah, I really like that idea. I often think of that with things that sometimes if we can't get ourselves to positive, can we get ourselves to neutral or even undecided? You know, like I can't quite believe that, but I'm going to be willing to consider that maybe it could be that, right? Because our brains have a, and this may be more developed in some people than others, like a pretty well attuned sort of BS system, which is when you're telling yourself something that you can believe them to some degree. It's much better, you said, which is like, I might be improving is a far better affirmation than I'm wonderful, if you don't believe you're wonderful, right?

But I might be improving is something that most of us can at least get behind. Like, okay, well, I can do that. So I love that idea of just dialing things back a little bit till you find that place that does feel like it doesn't make you want to scream out loud. You know, like, oh, shit, you dial it down to that point. I think that's really good advice. Exactly. And part of why we leverage the proof, too, is it makes it more realistic. We're like, well, we have actual evidence. So we're backing it up or the memories or the evidence. And then if combined, you can sort of dial it back, then it's really hard at that point for it to have a difficult time landing with people. Yep. I think the other thing that you describe there, when you talk about repetition and emotion is important here, which is that oftentimes the first time

we do something, it doesn't really do anything. There's no big change, right? And so I talk a lot about one of my core philosophies is that little by little, a little becomes a lot, meaning you do one little thing and it doesn't change anything, but you do that little thing again and again and again and again, and you start to notice the change cumulatively. So I've also found, like you're describing here, that I may do it and I'd be like, well, I didn't do anything. It's like, well, yeah, give it 21 days before I rule out that it's not working. Okay, so I love this so much because I just so strongly agree. And so what happens is your subconscious mind wants to maintain its comfort zone because at the end of

the day, we're kind of survival wired, right? So if we have this comfort zone of what's familiar, even if we've been miserable, we're like, well, this is working because I've stayed alive, right? That's like not your conscious mind, but that's your subconscious and unconscious mind. So we work really hard to not change quite honestly. And this is the example that I gave, you know how we talked about those five major parts and we started with like core wounds, actually give this exercise for our needs. So let's say somebody is really anxiously attached and they hate to meet their own needs, right? They want to focus on other people and other people meeting their needs. Usually people, let's say that their needs are for validation or reassurance or things

like that, which are generally more anxious leaning needs. I get people to sit down and like, okay, we're going to validate or encourage ourselves by saying like three wins that we had today, or we're going to say something positive or compassionate about ourselves, or do something that's like self-reinforcing. And the first seven days people are like, it feels mechanical. It doesn't feel like it's making a huge impact. I feel like it's like, I'd rather just have somebody else say this to me than me do it myself. And I always tell people it's going to feel mechanical for the first seven days. Around day 10, we start actually feeling good self-sourcing. We'll start seeing that people are like, yeah, I actually kind of like

was proud of myself when I gave myself the validation or reinforcement or whatever need it is, right? And people will start seeing that their ability to self-soothe, which largely depends on our capacity to understand and meet our own needs, doesn't feel good at first. But as you build that momentum through repetition and emotion, when you're hitting day 2021, all of a sudden you have these anxiously attached individuals who were terrified of spending time alone or not having a full social calendar being like, I actually really enjoy my alone time all of a sudden. I'm actually like having a good time with myself and even things like emotional connection,

which tends to be a big need for them. Cool. I'm going to emotionally connect through taking a course and learning about myself, reading a book and introspecting, journaling. At first people are like, I don't like it. This doesn't feel good. But as you ramp up sitting around day 10, there's an improvement day 15. And as we get to 21, people are like, I actually like doing these things. So we self source through learning how to build that relationship to ourself again. Yeah, I really like that. So listener, in thinking about that and all the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you were going to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what would it be?

Remember, little by little, a little becomes a lot. Change happens by us repeatedly taking positive action. And I want to give you a tip on that, and it's to start small. It's really important when we're trying to implement new habits to often start smaller than we think we need to, because what that does is it allows us to get victories. And victories are really important because we become more motivated when we're feeling good about ourselves, and we become less motivated when we're feeling good about ourselves and we become less motivated when we're feeling bad about ourselves. So by starting small and making sure that you succeed, you build your motivation for further change down the road. If you'd like a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf,

go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. We're near the end of our time here, but this sort of brings us kind of back to where we started when you discussed the wolf parable, and you talked about self-compassion because Kristen Neff, who is the leading researcher on self-compassion has a term she calls backdraft, meaning that when you start to work on self-compassion, you might actually feel worse for a little bit because it's so uncomfortable. You're almost remembering, you know, the conditions in which you weren't loved, right? And her point is more or less stick with it. Even though it doesn't feel good at first, stay with it and that will pass. And I think it's very similar to what you're saying here, which is

give it a try. You know, three minutes a day for 21 days, it's an hour, maybe an hour and a half, and you see changes occur during that window. So what does the process look like in an ongoing way? Right? Because I'm not saying that doing that for three minutes a day for 21 days won't make a difference, because I think it can. I also don't think that you reprogram a lifetime of thinking in an hour and a half. So what does this process look like in an ongoing kind of way? Yeah, it's a fantastic question. So when it comes to core wounds, I get people to only do one or two core wounds at a time. And I know that some people will sit down and be like, I have like seven core wounds. And so it feels overwhelming, but it makes a huge impact. The analogy I often give is this acronym of BTEA.

And this is not the only way it works, but our beliefs lead to thought patterns. So B to T. So if you imagine a core belief is like a tree trunk, all the branches coming off are the core wounds. So if you think I'm not good enough, you think I'm not interesting enough, funny enough, pretty enough, smart enough, fill in the blanks, right? All the thought patterns that will come off enough. How do we feel when we start thinking those thoughts? Will we feel sad or hurt or upset? And then neuroscience has actually proven, a neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio has actually proven that every single decision we make is based on our emotional state. So even people who think that they're very logical, rational thinkers make emotionally based decisions in full and then are just quick to rationalize or justify

through logic. And so if we pluck that belief, that core belief out at its root, it will change our thinking. It will change how we feel and it will change our actions and behaviors, right? You can see if I'm telling the story, I'm not good enough or I'm unworthy or whatever it might be. Maybe I go home and I drink or maybe I go home and I binge eat food or watch television for nine hours to avoid myself. Like we all have these actions that will follow. So the process I often give to people is like pick one or two core wounds that you're sick of that you're done with and start there.

And people will see their emotional state change. They'll see their thought patterns change. They'll even see their actions or coping mechanisms change over time. And then pick another one or two that you're ready to get rid of. And it's an ongoing process, but it makes such a big impact. And I also think that something I promised myself a long time ago is, it's funny, you actually said this at the beginning and it startled me because I was like, oh, I don't think I've said this out loud before. One of the first things I did on my own journey was somebody said, oh, you should meditate and you should learn to watch your thoughts and see

what you think. My first time ever meditating, I sat down and as soon as I sat down, I tried to watch my thoughts. I'm like, okay, watch your thoughts. But my thoughts were already running. And in that moment, I heard myself go, this is stupid. You're going to fail at this. Like you fail at everything else. What's the point of doing this?. You're going to fail at this. Like you fail at everything else. What's the point of doing this? You're always going to be this way. And because I was witnessing it in the moment and actually watching it, it was like mind blowing to me. Like it was so life-changing because I was like, oh my gosh, here's what I'm numbing. I'm numbing this voice in my head all day long. And so like, I am such a big advocate of reprogramming core wounds because it's changed my internal

dialogue. And then it's also changed as a result, how I feel and my coping mechanism. So I highly recommend, you know, people doing this and we see amazing results with tens of thousands of people doing this. But what I would recommend for people is sit down, pick one or two at a time, do it for the 21 days, go back, do a few more, check in, practice being more mindful with your internal dialogue. And as you're doing these things, I always see for people that the momentum builds on itself. You know, we generally see people will

go, I'm feeling better. I feel different. I feel more confident and confident. Isn't like feeling like you're the best person in the world. It's the absence of all the junk. And we'll see that momentum build and keep doing it and continue on. And when we pair that with like learning to meet our own needs and doing some nervous system work, these are really powerful steps towards healing our internal world and becoming securely attached. Well, we are out of time. This has been a wonderful conversation. You and I are going to continue in the post-show conversation because I want to talk about this idea that beliefs lead to thoughts, lead to emotions, lead to actions, because I think it does work that way. But I also think

it works other ways too. And I would love to talk with you about that. So listeners, if you'd like to get access to this post-show conversation, ad-free episodes, special episodes that I do, behind the scenes things, and you want to support something that's important to you, go to oneufeed.net slash join. Thais, thank you so much for coming on. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be here and really grateful that we got to chat. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar

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