00:00:00:00 - 00:00:26:21
Thais Gibson
I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the idea of a perfect relationship. According to an .anxious preoccupied attachment style individual in their subconscious expectation. And these are not necessarily like the healthy expectations, like what we want, the ideas that we want to have in terms of our subconscious expectations in a relationship. Technically, we want to have needs on expectation, a.k.a. we want to turn the expectation into a need by communicating about it and sharing our internal reality with our partner.

00:00:26:25 - 00:00:55:05
Thais Gibson
But some of these are healthy and the ones that aren't healthy. I will make corrections for like healthier, updated expectations for ways we can communicate so that these things turn into needs and become productive in a relationship dynamic. So the perfect relationship, according to the .anxious preoccupied subconscious expectations. So number one, one of the and some of these are painful for the anxious preoccupied by the way some of these things are in a way like sort of cognitive distortions that are very healthy and important to correct.

00:00:55:07 - 00:01:32:16
Thais Gibson
So, number one, one of the ideas that a a or AP has is if you love me, you will always want to be closer. And this comes this is sort of rooted in codependency, like we hunger to, you know, fill this emotional void within ourselves through another person, through attaching to, you know, and bonding to another person. And while there's a natural tendency for people to get closer and spend more time with the people they love and cherish the most, when this becomes something that's at the expense of the relationship to oneself, where like the other person obliterates your own sense of self.

00:01:32:29 - 00:01:54:25
Thais Gibson
This is where it actually becomes very unhealthy. And if we're deriving our sense of self through another person, this will create codependency. And there's usually a lot of tumultuous ness associated with codependency to begin with. So what a healthier version of this would be is we will spend lots of time together. We will communicate about our needs and how much time we want to spend together, how much we want to communicate when we're not together.

00:01:55:05 - 00:02:16:00
Thais Gibson
We'll get really clear on that and will really love and cherish our time together. But we will have a sense of self at the same time. They're not mutually exclusive things, and we'll have our own time that we spend with ourselves or with friends or family members outside of the relationship. And we will also have our own hobbies, our own unique interests, these sorts of things at the same time.

00:02:16:10 - 00:02:43:11
Thais Gibson
And it's okay if you like hobbies with your loved one or partner. So we'll have these like natural things that are happening and it's okay to have a relationship partner that really wants to do the hobbies with you. When you've got lots of hobbies together, that's totally fine. But just making sure you keep balance in the relationship to yourself and all seven areas of life, making sure you have an identity as a human being, a unique, beautiful human being, that you are outside of the relationship and not deriving your identity just through the relationship.

00:02:43:17 - 00:03:00:02
Thais Gibson
Another one is this idea that we'll meet each other's needs all the time and it sort of piggybacks off of our last one. But it's this idea that like at a subconscious level, apes tend to believe that I'm just going to meet all of your needs all of the time, and then you're just going to meet all of my needs all the time, and then it's going to be even.

00:03:00:17 - 00:03:17:29
Thais Gibson
But what really has to happen is we want to be able to meet other people's needs when we take ourselves into consideration and feel that we can do that. And it feels right and good for us and we want to be able to meet our own needs as well and vice versa. We want to know that, you know, we can express and share our needs to other people, communicate them.

00:03:17:29 - 00:03:41:05
Thais Gibson
But it's not an absolute necessity that somebody always meets all of our needs. We can meet our own needs also, or we can share our needs with other loved ones in our life, friends, family members, these sorts of things and direct them from there as well. And having a healthy balance across all those different dynamics and places, relationship to self, relationship to friends, family, romantic partner, children, parents, these sorts of things.

00:03:41:19 - 00:04:03:23
Thais Gibson
I guess that's all family. When we have that, we have a harmonious relationship much more effectively. We have connection. We don't come at things from a place of fear or desperation because our gas tank is not running on empty. Now here's another big one. If you love me, you'll know what I need without me having to ask. This one hurts so much and causes so much unnecessary destruction in relationships.

00:04:03:23 - 00:04:28:04
Thais Gibson
I think a big part of why we believe this is honestly a lot of the exposure people have to like movies and and romantic comedies and all these things where somebody goes all in and they, you know, they're the center of my universe and the only part of my world that matters. And whenever one single person is the only part of your life that matters, you can guarantee that you're on a road to volatility with this person because then it feels like death.

00:04:28:15 - 00:04:46:09
Thais Gibson
If we're driving our sense of identity through another person, it feels like death. If there's a threat to the relationship, we think that the person is flirting with somebody or we think that the person is going to move away for their job or whatever it may be. And then we have the breeding grounds for unhealthy patterns of behavior to emerge in that relationship.

00:04:46:09 - 00:05:06:10
Thais Gibson
Right. So that's its own really long topic of conversation. You would do anything for me and vice versa sort of goes hand-in-hand with there with that one, our opinions should always be aligned. We shouldn't have differing opinions. That can be a painful one for anxious, preoccupied. The idea that there should be tremendous amounts of ongoing romantic gestures in a relationship can show up as well.

00:05:06:18 - 00:05:36:11
Thais Gibson
And again, like that's not an unhealthy thing. Like it's really beautiful to have like romantic gestures and to make an effort and to have intentions, to know somebody else's love language and to do things for your partner in their love language. But this doesn't come from like somebody's kind of love bumming their way into your life. This comes from like having these conversations, having respect and understanding of how we can love and give love to somebody else and sharing our needs and sharing our love languages with our partner and the way we receive love best.

00:05:36:19 - 00:05:57:00
Thais Gibson
And then having healthy dynamics established where no matter if you've been together for five years or 25 years, you have a plan to constantly speak in each other's love language. You've had this conversation. This is something I talk about in the advance attachments courses and make people go through and get clear about their love languages and their partners and strategies to meet one another's.

00:05:57:00 - 00:06:27:14
Thais Gibson
And or you can practice that exercise with somebody from a past relationship so you can be clear about how to think that way. And it's not just our romantic partners. This is a great thing for our friends, our family members, so that we can have like a respect and understanding. You really get to know somebody at a more vulnerable level in their internal reality instead of just projecting what we want onto somebody, which can be beautiful in many ways and can definitely serve, but sometimes has downsides because then it's not well received and then we feel slighted by the fact that somebody is not receiving something that we're giving so meaningfully right.

00:06:27:22 - 00:06:48:27
Thais Gibson
So there is this there's lots of places that people can communicate. Basically, the last two. Spend all your time together as much time as possible. Don't spend weekends or evenings apart almost ever. And a is it like a conscious level will be like, no, no, no, it's healthy. I get that it's important to spend time apart. But often there's subconscious very much reacts to the perceived threat.

00:06:48:27 - 00:07:09:09
Thais Gibson
Our fear of abandonment when time is spent apart. So that's important to note. And lastly, the idea that we should talk all day, every day over text message as early as in the dating stage of a relationship and a lot of different attachments, also very different expectations around that, which can sort of create the landscape for for challenges to occur.

00:07:09:13 - 00:07:42:16
Thais Gibson
And it's beautiful to talk and to connect with people often. And it's definitely something that happens a lot more in like the dating and honeymoon phases of a relationship. And it's a really beautiful thing to have this consistency of communication and always touching base once or twice a day. Even as you go into the later stages of a relationship with you, a apart or anything like that, you know, one person is traveling or whatever it might be, but sometimes when we put something like subconsciously, like we should be talking all throughout the day, every day, not only do we kind of like lose our sense of self because we're always being distracted by this, by

00:07:42:16 - 00:08:04:12
Thais Gibson
my phone, by the text messages, and we're not necessarily present with ourselves in our own life to a certain degree when we're constantly doing that. But also then the moments that's not taking place unless we're doing the work underneath to fill our own cup and to question our stories and reprogram our core wounds. And then it's often really easy to give people meaning to that, like there's a change in the pattern, like what's happening.

00:08:04:13 - 00:08:20:02
Thais Gibson
Something bad is happening when like the person might have just jumped into a business meeting and they can't reach their phone for the next 3 hours because it's a long one or whatever it might be. And so we have to have healthy conversations and healthy expectations around that specifically as well. So I hope this all makes sense.