00:00:00:00 - 00:00:33:16
Thais
Hello and welcome to the Personal Development School podcast. I'm your host. Thais Gibson, and I create regular podcast episodes to teach you about your relationships, attachment style and the subconscious mind. My goal of this podcast is to give you tools and awareness you need to thrive in your relationships, feel deeply connected, and find harmony and fulfillment in your relationships and personal life.
So I hope you tune in here with me each and every week.

00:00:43:19 - 00:01:11:06
Thais
I want to talk to you about what a secure relationship actually looks like. And we'll talk about eight major characteristics that securely attached relationships have. And we will talk about something really important to recognize, known as interdependence. So if you are wondering and you grew up in some kind of environment where you didn't know what a secure relationship looks like, you didn't have healthy modeling, maybe for you, relationships look like two people who are just two ships passing in the night.

00:01:11:08 - 00:01:32:11
Thais
Or maybe it looks like a lot of chaos, a lot of fighting, a lot of arguing. If you are in a position where you're like, I don't even know what a healthy relationship should look like or what healthy love should be. This is going to be a video for you to really dig into this and start to see some of the characteristics that you can envision for your future if you do the the work to be able to

00:01:32:11 - 00:01:35:20
Thais
essentially heal anything within yourself that's preventing you from having this

00:01:35:23 - 00:01:53:06
Thais
Secure relationships have individuals who are interdependent. So if you imagine, for example, we sort of have a continuum on one end of the continuum, there are people who are very codependent, right? So they think, I'm going to meet all of your needs. You're going to meet all of mine. I'm going to take care of your feelings. You're going to take care of my feelings.

00:01:53:12 - 00:02:18:05
Thais
And there's this boundary looseness and there's this expectation. But one of the really big Achilles heels of codependency is that there's a lack of communication and there's essentially this assumption that you're responsible for my life and I'm responsible for yours. And that never works long term. I mean, that always ends up creating resentment, miscommunications, challenges. Each person is essentially outsourcing the relationship that they have to themselves.

00:02:18:07 - 00:02:36:22
Thais
On the flip side, we have something called counter dependency, which is essentially these huge boundaries. There's an individual fear of becoming a master too close and essentially an unwillingness to budge around this concept or idea of like will meet each other's needs. Instead, it's like, No, I'm going to meet all of my needs. You're going to meet all of your needs.

00:02:36:22 - 00:03:01:01
Thais
And every now and then we'll come together in small doses for specific things. And that's just another thing that, you know, it doesn't work long term. It doesn't create sustained, fulfilling relationships. What we are looking for in healthy, secure relationship attachments is interdependency, which is essentially both. It's that I can have a full relationship to myself and a full sense of self and identity.

00:03:01:03 - 00:03:22:14
Thais
And my partner in the relationship will have that same full sense of self and identity. And at the same time we are able to, with our whole selves, come together, connect, look out for each other, be considerate of each other's needs, be considerate of each other's emotions, be mindful of each other's boundaries, talk things through, support each other.

00:03:22:14 - 00:03:41:15
Thais
So there's it's a both, right? It's that we are responsible for ourselves and we can lean on and support one another. And this is something that's really, really important because I find that in a lot of relationships today, we sort of end up in one of those two polarities, and sometimes that's because a lot of the dating advice and dating culture that's happening nowadays.

00:03:41:17 - 00:04:00:07
Thais
So in this case specifically, I really want to stress something and I'll go through the other seven things in here, but I really want to stress that when we are in interdependent relationships, things are not about perfection. It's not that we are always going to nail it for somebody else. We're always going to know exactly what they need.

00:04:00:07 - 00:04:19:05
Thais
We're always going to know exactly how they're feeling and exactly what to do. We're not going to be perfect. And the most important thing about interdependent relationships, and I'll speak as somebody who was very insecure, early attached and became securely attached with a good bit of work and healing is one of the things I learned essentially on my journey.

00:04:19:05 - 00:04:44:20
Thais
Okay, so this is as you know, to becoming secure. So this wasn't even just my romantic relationship. This was in multiple relationships in my life. I learned that the real work in relationships, the real move towards more unconditional love, feeling, seen, heard, supported, understood, and vice versa. Being able to see here truly support and understand somebody else is actually in our willingness to communicate.

00:04:44:22 - 00:05:14:06
Thais
People are going to make mistakes in your life. You're going to have people all the time who let you down, misread something, forget something that's important to you because we're human beings and because in today's society there's so much pressure. Be it financially, career wise, you know how busy everything is. There's so much pressure on everyone's plate coming from so many different directions that nobody's going to have the capacity to be perfect at remembering everything for everybody around them.

00:05:14:08 - 00:05:38:06
Thais
But what really matters is in those moments of imperfection, in those moments of under misunderstood or forgetfulness or somebody hurting your feelings in some kind of way because they weren't aware about something that was personal to you. It's in those moments, the relationships that will count and will mean so much will be the people that in those moments you can go to and say, Hey, we have a misunderstanding, or Hey, you know what?

00:05:38:08 - 00:05:56:11
Thais
You may not realize, but the thing you said yesterday that actually really hurt my feelings, that's a sensitive point for me. Can you be more mindful about that in the future? And it's the relationships who respond to that and make the effort not to be perfect, but to make sure that there's progress? Right. So it's this is how we truly build with people.

00:05:56:11 - 00:06:15:05
Thais
It's not that people are you know, and I remember as a fearful, avoidant thinking that people hurt you just run in the other direction. And something that was really healing and really powerful for me was you realize if people hurt, you were humans. Nobody's going to be perfect. But what's going to matter is if I go to those people, I communicate to them what hurt me.

00:06:15:11 - 00:06:32:18
Thais
I ask them to be mindful about that in the future, and they may not be perfect at it, but I can see that they're trying and making the effort. And over time we have so much progress. And so I just, you know, before I get into some of these other things of what a securely attached relationship looks like, I really want to highlight that securely attached relationships are not between two perfect people.

00:06:32:24 - 00:06:54:06
Thais
They are interdependent. A sense of a person having a sense of self, and this ability to support somebody else. And you know, in those moments and they will happen to everybody and those moments of imperfection, the real work, the real bonding, the real depth of relationships is done and comes from as communicate and working through those things together.

00:06:54:06 - 00:07:12:04
Thais
And that's one of the most beautiful parts about a secure relationship, in my opinion, is that you can get to a point where you can trust the people around you and trust yourself that if there is an issue, it's 99% of the time going to be a solvable problem. And there will be people in your life that may not be able to show up in a healthy way.

00:07:12:04 - 00:07:30:08
Thais
Right. But there's something we talk about as well in PDFs in one of our courses. It's called How to Heal Family Relationships. And we talk about how not all relationships in your life are meant to be level five relationships. So when I go down a rabbit hole for just one more second here and then I'll tell you some other parts of secure relationships.

00:07:30:08 - 00:07:47:21
Thais
But what we talk about in this course, I'll put a link for for free for 14 days as well for for a limited time if you want to check it out. But in this course, we talk about how there's five levels of closeness. Okay. Level one is like no contact. Level two is high level contact, maybe once a month, maybe once a quarter.

00:07:47:23 - 00:08:09:12
Thais
Somebody or kind of like, you know, friendly with kind two, but don't really have like a deep bond. Level three. You may speak to somebody on a more regular basis and share more openly and vulnerably. Level four, you're speaking to somebody once a week, twice a week, much more regularly, and you're sharing personal things. There's a real connection and bond there, and Level five is the closest person to you or closest couple of people to you.

00:08:09:14 - 00:08:31:24
Thais
You share everything, probably talk every day. And one of the biggest things that hurts us as a person is to get into a position where we are trying to have a level five relationship with somebody who's only capable of doing a level three or a level two. And so, you know, I'm not saying that as we work through things, we hash things out that everybody's even available for that or capable of doing that.

00:08:32:01 - 00:08:37:00
Thais
But you're going to find out who is and you want to invest in the relationships where that is possible.

00:08:37:00 - 00:08:57:01
Speaker 1
I just want to jump in here and let you know that we are doing a 14 day free trial, which means you get access to the personal department, school and everything we have going on on the other side for free for 14 days. That means you get access to the four live webinars I do every single week. You can come in, you can ask me questions with your camera on.

00:08:57:01 - 00:09:23:00
Speaker 1
We can chat. You can leave your camera off if you prefer, or type your questions in the chat. There's lots of opportunity to get your questions answered and on top of that you get access to all of our different courses. We have over 55 different courses on relationships, communication boundaries, emotional mastery, guilt and shame, learning your needs. So many different facets that are really important to master our lives and feel really good about our lives going forward.

00:09:23:02 - 00:09:42:07
Speaker 1
And last but not least, there's also community elements in there. So there's a daily community event, whether it's practicing communication or doing a guided morning routine or a guided reprograming exercise. We have trained facilitators and coaches who are in there doing that work, showing up to support you on your journey every single day. So I would love to see you on the other side.

00:09:42:07 - 00:10:00:20
Speaker 1
There's lots of exciting stuff in there and we have had a 99.7% NPS score, which means we have literally that many people who report being really successful, APD us and wanting to recommend us to others. And it was all done anonymously. So I felt really honored that everybody shared that. So thank you to those who did. But yeah, please join me on the other side.

00:10:00:20 - 00:10:07:05
Speaker 1
Come check it out. See if it's a book for you. I'd love to see you there.

00:10:07:05 - 00:10:21:14
Thais
couple of things about secure relationships that you'll see so far that we covered interdependent, able to hash things out and work through things, not expecting perfection. Number three is being able to emotionally regulate, you know, securely touch people.

00:10:21:14 - 00:10:38:15
Thais
One of the things that happens that is very preventative to big fights to make arguments is that securely attach, people have less wear wounds. And this is something that if you're insecurely attached, you can work on. You can do the work, too. And I'll put the link to for our 21 ways to reprogram your subconscious mind, of course.

00:10:38:15 - 00:10:57:14
Thais
And you can check that out all in this in the 14 day free trial that we're just going to run for a little bit here. But that course is something that will allow you to be in a position where the trial will give you access to everything. But the course helps you recondition core wounds if you have them, so that you can be emotionally regulated, so that you can feel in charge of your feelings.

00:10:57:19 - 00:11:14:19
Thais
And honestly, that's something that everybody should strive for. Like, it sounds like such a crazy thing to hear when you're insecurely attached. And I know because I've been there and I thought that, like, emotionally regulating sounded like a pipe dream. But truly, you can get into a space where you feel are really, really in charge of your emotions.

00:11:14:21 - 00:11:43:17
Thais
Another big thing is secretly attached. People have the capacity to trust. Okay, so we all have like an internal trust baseline. And for some people, this internal trust baseline is fragmented because of a lot of painful past betrayals. But trust, we start with this internal trust baseline for everything. Like, you know, you may if you go to work in the morning, you trust in some level that your coworkers aren't going to like attack you in the workplace right?

00:11:43:17 - 00:12:00:04
Thais
Like physically harm you, you know, or you trust that, you know, as you're driving to work, people aren't going to try to crash into your car for fun because they feel like it, right? We have this like baseline of trust where we're not worrying about those things or hopefully not worrying about those things. And then there's a lot of trust that's earned right.

00:12:00:04 - 00:12:19:16
Thais
And we do this this earning of trust through getting people asking the right questions, seeing how people respond to conflict, seeing if they're willing to work through things and grow with us. Right. So we have all of these things that are really important. So number one, interdependency. Number two, being able to effectively communicate or hash things out. Number three, emotional regulation.

00:12:19:16 - 00:12:46:17
Thais
Number four, trust. Number five, the ability to have healthy boundaries and to have a sense of self. So it's really important that when we get into relationships, we have this capacity to be like, relationships are really important area of my life, but they're not my entire life. I don't get into a relationship and then stop showing up at work or stop caring about my work or stop caring about, you know, saving my money or budgeting or stop caring about friendships or family relationships.

00:12:46:21 - 00:13:02:11
Thais
Like we want to make sure that we are able to have boundaries and how these boundaries protect our sense of self so that we have this capacity to know that we can show up for things in life outside of relationships. Right? A relationship should be a really important area of your life, but there's multiple areas of your life that exist.

00:13:02:11 - 00:13:26:05
Thais
So that's another huge component and the ability to really support one another securely attached relationships have to people who care to get to know one another, to empathize with each other, to understand, you know, what some of these wounds or sensitivities are. And although they're not making that their responsibility to fix or solve, they are going out of their way to be considerate about those things.

00:13:26:05 - 00:13:44:05
Thais
Right. For example, if you're dating somebody, you know, they have an abandonment wound, you might make sure you're a little more consistent with texting or if they're panicked or afraid of something too, to reassure them. Like, we do these things because we know that someone's pain and we care to support them in that and vulnerability is our next one.

00:13:44:05 - 00:14:01:14
Thais
So being able to also ask for support overall, right, being able to have the discussion where when we're feeling afraid or we need reassurance or we need a boundary or whatever it is that we can do that also. So these are major important components of what a securely attached relationship looks like. Hopefully that makes a whole lot of sense.

00:14:01:14 - 00:14:05:14
Thais
thank you for being here. Thank you for stopping by and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.