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Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s.
The podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our
20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast, new listeners,
old listeners, wherever you are in the world.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down.
The psychology of our 20s, okay, so one of the big hot topics in psychology online in
the media, especially in self-help communities at the moment is attachment styles.
Attachment theory essentially says that we learn how to form intimate attachments and bond
with others based on our childhood experiences and when those experiences and our primary
relationship with our caregivers is disturbed or difficult, it can lead to a disorganized
attachment style.
Now I think that it is so amazing that so many more of us have the language to describe
how we relate to others, how we form attachments.
It is one of the biggest and most valuable important theories in psychology with a small
caveat being that I also think it's important that we get it right and if we are going to
apply these labels of insecure, of anxious, of avoidant, we actually know what it means.
So today we are bringing back a favorite guest of ours, somebody who has been on the show
before and also one of the world's biggest experts on the topic of attachment styles and
attachment theory.
Tase Gibson, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me excited to be back here with you.
Yeah, so for those of you who don't know, we've previously done an episode on anxious
attachment theory or anxious attachment style, sorry, last year, which actually goes
into like the overall theory a little bit more around, you know, John Bolby, Mary Ainsworth
who created this theory and like the unique style.
So if you miss that, I would recommend going back and listening to that episode.
But can you tell us a little bit about yourself and yeah, I guess where your interest in attachment
theory really began?
Yeah, so I really started getting interested in people, I think, at a really young age.
So I went through a family dynamic that was pretty chaotic.
There was a lot of intense fighting and arguments and so my parents go through like a very long
and quite intense divorce that went all the way to like the superior court of Canada.
Like all these sort of dramatic things.
And I think I was a really sensitive kid and I was perentified a lot.
So what that really means for anybody who's not familiar with that term is I was put in
the middle of a very young age sort of forced to play like an emotional parent role for
my parents and they would both vent to me about each other a lot.
And I think I spent a lot of my early childhood wondering like why do things have to be so
difficult?
Why can't people who love each other just kind of come together and figure it out and like,
you know, they obviously care about each other and they care about me and my sister.
But why can't they just figure out how to not be like this with one another?
Because they really kind of brought out those hard parts of each other.
So from a really young age, I was really interested in like people and human dynamics.
And I was definitely there as sort of the therapist kind of child for my parents too.
So I think it was just very natural for me to evolve into this type of work.
It was definitely not something I disliked.
I always liked like talking about real things and breaking things down.
And it was through my own kind of struggles as like a teenager and going into my early adult
years that I ended up doing a much deeper dive in a more serious way until like how do
we really heal?
How do we really work through these things?
And it was through that that one of the things that revisited was attachment styles.
And I ended up sort of combining a lot of my research in hypnosis with my background
and a lot in like this subconscious mind.
And then traditional psychology and the traditional sort of school system wrote and combined that
with the principles of CBT and NLP and ultimately attachment styles to really create a body of
work about how not only can we change our attachment style and become securely attached,
but also diving deeper into the work of John Bolby and Mary Ann's Wrath of Power Attachment
style originally forms.
So basically went on to run like a 10 year, almost 10 year client practice and then put
a whole bunch of programs online.
The personal developments will all about the attachment theory kind of stuff.
Oh my gosh, I love that whole story because I feel like you make a great point which is
that yes, the original theory is like amazing and it's such a solid foundation, but our
understanding of how the human mind works has also evolved a little bit and so it's important
to kind of evolve our traditional and conventional theories with like that more modern understanding.
You also spoke about pre-rentification which I find to be such a fascinating subject.
For those of us who don't know what that means, it's basically you become the parent
for your parents.
So that child, parent dynamic actually kind of reverses and so you might become a confident,
you might be a mediator like you said, you might have to provide for them physically, emotionally,
financially.
What do you think, is there like a specific attachment style that that normally contributes
to?
Because part of me is like, oh, is it would it be secure because your parent really needed
you or would it be avoided?
Such a good question.
It's so interesting to a lot of the research and attachment styles actually shows that
you're more likely to become at least a fearful wooden or a dismissable wooden, like having
an avoidance side the more in mesh you are at a young age with your parents.
And I think part of what often happens is that you'll have that side of like feeling engulfed
and overwhelmed and obviously in like traditional dismissive avoidance, the two fears are really
about engulfment and then being defective in some way, right?
So they fear being trapped in the wrong relationship or and a lot of that trapped core fear first
comes from being meshed in some form.
There was through printification or just, I talk a lot about this topic at the drink.
We have like direct perentification and indirect perentification.
So direct is like myself and I was a fearful avoidant before working on my attachment style.
And my direct was like, I was directly in the middle, people directly coming to me.
In client practice and through our programs at PDS, I've often seen instead that dismissive
avoidance are indirectly perentified.
So they may have a parent who's like very depressed all the time and the other parent
not around and they start worrying like, okay, my parents not okay.
And if they're not okay, how will I be okay?
Right?
Because we're very aware that we're completely dependent on our caregivers for survivability
on age.
And so if there's a combination of avoidance and then indirect enmesment, I find that to
be the most consistent output that will produce a dismissive avoidance and adult.
That makes so much sense like the engulfment, the enmesment.
I feel like we've jumped the gun.
I've jumped the gun.
I went straight to like an in-depth question about avoidance attachment style.
But that's what we're focusing on today.
What exactly makes somebody avoidant how common is this in society?
Can you kind of break down something you've already spoken about is dismissive versus
fearful?
Can you break down what it means to be somebody who is avoidantly attached, according to
theory, according to your own personal experience as well?
Yes, it's such a good question.
So there's two quote-unquote avoidance attachment styles.
One is fearful avoidant and one is dismissive avoidant.
So fearful avoidance, one of the big differentiators is they have an anxious side.
So they basically oscillate between being anxious and avoidant.
And they basically, because they grow up with conflicting ideas about love, they often
have some very good experiences with love, like having some very loving moments, some caring
moments, and then having some really chaotic ones.
And fearful avoidance are characterized by a little bit more trauma than the average
attachment style that's the type of trauma we think like a big T-trauma.
So it can be physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, addiction in the family or
household really, really intense divorce processes.
These kinds of things where there's a lot of that intensity.
And dismissive avoidance are characterized more by emotional neglect, but also can be
combined with that sense of engulfment or enmeshment.
So fearful avoidance will tend to have that side of like fearing abandonment and yearning
for closeness, but then also fearing engulfment and enmeshment and entrapment in their relationships
and so they can really go from being really hot to very cold.
So they're kind of the attachment style if anybody's newer to this stuff that's like,
come get close to me, come get close, I won't love.
And then they're like, no, get back, you're too close.
And I experienced that my whole early teenagers and early adult life, like I would constantly
be like, I really want connection, I really care about connection.
And then when I felt really connected or attached to people would terrify me, I would be
like, we're going to hurt me, something bad's going to happen.
And I would try to start pushing them away.
And I was less like that with friendships, but I was extremely like that with romantic
relationships.
I was probably a very difficult person to be with before doing the work.
And so, you know, it's because we first have those core fears about like, closeness has
good moments, but it also has really scary moments.
And so we go back and forth within ourselves, which really mirrors back the way we were conditioned
about love and attachment to begin with.
And then dismissable boydance, their overarching theme is childhood, emotional and neglect.
So, you know, generally we'll see that they neglect their own emotions as adults because
there was never really a lot of emotional attunement.
And if that's combined with indirect and measurement and the fear of getting too close or being
engulfed, you'll see that they tend to be people who constantly keep people at arm's
length.
And so they may show up in like the dating stage of relationships when they're first
the attachment bond hasn't been built yet.
And they may be more charming or charismatic or seem to be, you know, quite available in
a lot of different ways then, but once they start to attach, they tend to just exclusively
fear being trapped or being criticized until they'll really push back and they may be the
type of attachment style that, you know, seems unable to commit, pushes away all of a
sudden out of the blue, even when commitments just starting and when things are getting more
real.
And they'll work really hard to maintain their privacy and their distance from people
a lot of the time because as a child, the closest man I was neglected and I was engulfed.
And so those are things that they're scared to relive as adults and they'll go out of
their way to stop that from happening.
So those are sort of the two avoid an attachment style and some of those key differences
between them.
That was like so succinct.
I also like the point that you made around it being kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy,
right?
Like you start pushing away so they start behaving the way that you always expected people
you were close to to behave and so you reinforce that like primary maladaptive behavior of once
again avoiding connection and perhaps self-sabotaging.
Okay, I have a hot state question for you and maybe you probably don't know the answer
to this but how common is avoid an attachment in society?
Really good question.
So there hasn't been a huge body of recent research done about the attachment breakdown
about 30 years ago.
A research show that it was roughly 50% of people are secure and then research show that
somewhere between 5 and 10% of people were disorganized attachment style and then the rest
of the split was between anxious and dismissive avoided.
And disorganized is also sorry, fearful avoiding a.k.a disorganized attachment style.
They're often referred to as the same thing.
It's the same attachment style at the end of the day.
So it's funny because we have a bigger attachment style quiz and we have a lot of people to
come in and take it and tons of people will be like, I tested this way but I realized
through doing some of the coursework I'm actually this attachment style it's one of the most
common things we see and research shows very conclusively, historically that self-reporting
is not always the most accurate thing.
Sometimes, although research will show that we're looking at the totality of a board
and attachment being somewhere around 20 to 30% shared by dismissive avoidant and fearful
avoidant attachment style, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a little bit higher, particularly
dismissive avoidance because dismissive avoidance tends to self-report is more secure.
I've absolutely noticed that pattern.
And we've had like a couple million people take our attachment style quiz so it's not
a small sample size.
And what will happen is people will think that because they're repressing their emotions
which is very dismissive avoidant and because they tend to not get into lots of fights or
chaos in their relationships, they'll often conflate that with being securely attached
rather than realizing that what's securely attached actually means is we can work through
our conflicts, we can express our emotions vulnerable, we can let people in and let our
guard down and let somebody get to know us and we can invest in commitment and invest
in a relationship.
And those are really the cornerstones of what it means to be securely attached rather
than the absence of arguing means secure attachment which is what the DA tends to conflate
things as.
So I think that probably that percentage is significantly higher than just the 20 to 30
percent.
But the more common research now that's coming out is at least showing that secure attachment
style is on the decline over the last 30 years as well.
I don't want to make, I'm going to make like broad statements here and maybe they're not
true and they probably should be more research into it but I do feel like there is obviously
like a separation between parents and children more now like with social media, with our phones
that really stops children in a way of reaching out but then also like parents from engaging
properly with their children.
And we also know that there is a lot of generational trauma that if not broken gets passed on, that's
largely like there is like a core moment where you can kind of fix that right and it's
like if people aren't doing the work then it's not going to happen.
You know, that's what happens.
I feel like I don't know if that's a big broad statement but we'll have to say.
I thought that was a perfect statement.
Like I really really agree with that.
I think that we're in a generation now or because of social media and the phone and
convenience and also because of like a lot of our culture and a lot of places throughout
the world is like hustle culture like work so hard to all these things and obviously like
just some of the things that are happening in the world too like inflation and financial
pressures, it's causing you know both parents to often be working and both parents sometimes
will be working multiple jobs or to be overwhelmed and stressed and just like you said there's
that generational trauma where if somebody's not right within themselves I always say this
like trauma is literally contagious.
It's not contagious in like a germ theory way the way we think of like contagion but
trauma is contagious in the more proximity you have to somebody who has unresolved trauma
the greater likelihood that trauma is going to be passed along right and so to your point
if we have this fractured culture and this fractured sort of system that we're living
in in a multitude of ways of course that's going to affect somebody's attachment style
and so much of what really creates secure attachment is is a caregiver able to be present.
Are they able to exercise something called approach oriented behaviors in psychology meaning
that when a child cries or they seem distressed the caregiver goes towards that child approaches
them and tries to soothe them checking with their needs and what that does is it allows
a child to think like okay I'm more of the expressing emotion I'm more of you know negotiating
my needs and conveying what they are and I get positively reinforced by my parent when
that happens and in a culture where everybody's on their phones or everybody's overstressed
or overwhelmed or burnt out and parents don't have that emotional availability in that
same way and they don't have as much bandwidth for those those approach oriented behaviors
of course that's going to affect the attachment style of children.
So I really like that point as well I feel like that is such a compelling thing because
I say it a lot of the time and it's not just say that people aren't trying the hardest
and don't want to raise like amazing beautiful well-rounded children it's just hard to do
that when your environment is trying to keep you like overly stimulated by your phone
or overly engaged in social media or in work or anything like that.
So this is kind of a follow-up question do you think people who have a dismissive or
a fearful attachment style do you think that they are aware as conscious of it I think
you kind of already mentioned this right they're less conscious of the fact that they
have this attachment style is because it's kind of like protective is there like do you
think that it's because that they implicitly have recognized a benefit in being this way
so subconsciously like choose to be unaware of it why do you think people more so self-report
as secure.
This is such a good question so I think the first two things is like the fearful wooden
and dismissive wooden are different so fearful wooden is like I was fearful wooden trust
me we know we're insecure attached like it is loud and clear like you'll be on the
constant forever roller coaster relationships until you heal your attachment style so like
fearful wooden say always know they're like the first to know like something is not right
with my attachment self if they have extreme highs and lows like really good moments and
then really really awful or chaotic moments and trust issues and you name it so fearful wooden
tend to know the most but again that's not like five to ten percent segment of the population
the dismissive avoid which are sort of large or portion there you will generally see that
I think you you kind of nailed it you hit the nail and I had there where they they see
it an implicit benefit you know first of all if if I grow up and I can't get my needs
Matt let's pretend I'm a dismissive avoidant for a moment and I'm a child and I grow up
and I can't get my needs Matt in a relationship for my parents and I'm wired for by a lot like
I'm biologically wired for attunement and my parents are emotionally unavailable then
what happens is I go well it doesn't feel good to keep you running for something and get
rejected so I'm going to adapt to this by just repressing my need to even attach to
them and by doing that it creates relief and so now I think that keeping attachment in
a distance is a very good thing it gives me this reward feeling instead of it could be
the relief instead of feeling like oh I'm just yearning for something and keep feeling
rejected and on top of that dismissive avoidance because they're suppressing their emotions
are less likely to feel their emotions and feel that something is off and the third
layer to that is that dismissive avoidance end up in a dynamic where they go well I'm
the logical one I'm straightforward I use my brain and I'm not really giving into my
emotions and of course there's tremendous benefits to that right like there can be huge
benefits of all attachment styles that are insecurely attached they have unique and
really beautiful characteristics but that's still going to be something that doesn't benefit
relationships because when the moment comes to be raw and real and vulnerable and build
a genuine connection if somebody's so closed off to that they can't even access that
properly and they're terrified of it and that becomes a really painful thing so I think
to your point they are already suppressing their emotions so they don't even feel as
much as something's off and then they see a benefit in themselves being that way which
makes it kind of this catch 22 where it's even trickier to realize that something's
not right.
Ask a follow up question here which is do you think that men or women are more likely
to be this way because I get this question all the time where it's like the profile that
you're describing right, being incredibly rational right like that's something that I
think we often associate with men that they are like these rational people when it comes
to relationships and women are emotional whether that is correct or not or this idea of like
men are allowed to be a lot more emotionally closed off.
Also the factor of like printification right like women are perhaps more preentified so
does that contribute to them like they have so many questions.
