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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.

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So I hope you tune in here with me each and every week.

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Do you ever find that in relationships you are haunted by the fear of abandonment, especially once you actually develop feelings and begin attaching to somebody in a romantic way? Well, if this sounds like you, I want to help you decode today why this is actually taking place and assist you in using a really powerful exercise that will help shift and change this fear in general so that you can self-soothe and also prevent this fear from constantly coming back in your relationships.

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one of the first things that you want to understand here is that the fear of abandonment. Any person experience and this also essentially has a shadow around it. In other words, everybody who fears abandonment is also somebody who tends to deeply abandon themselves. And when we say abandon themselves, I really mean their own feelings, their own needs, their own boundaries.

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Get put on the back burner in favor a lot of the time of people pleasing others. And usually this was an adaptation because when you acquire these abandonment wounds to begin with, you learned, okay, well, maybe I'm less likely to be abandoned if I consistently people please other people in my life. And so that may have become a strategy that you use in your relationships, but it may be the very thing that ends up working against you later on as an adult.

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Maybe that worked for you as a child when you didn't really have a whole lot of other strategies available to you. But as an adult, usually the further you abandon yourself, the less you're actually giving people the information they need to take you into consideration what your boundaries are, what your needs are. And if you don't know those things yourself, you can't communicate them to others and as a result, you're going to have less successful relationship experiences.

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So we have to start with a really powerful exercise, and it's called an exercise in individuation. Now, this is not the only way to do individuation work, but individuation work really means learning to be yourself because of who you want to be, not because of how you were conditioned to be. And if you've ever had the experience of being in a relationship and maybe you say something to yourself like, Hey, I know this person's taking space for me, I'm not going to text them back right now or I'm not going to talk to them again if I haven't heard back from them and in order to do that, you feel like you've to go put

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your phone in the other room and shut it off. You know, if you've ever had this experience of trying to push something away because you don't trust yourself to not do something about it, and maybe you even find you put your phone in the other room, you shut it off and then you end up texting the person anyways, later.

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If this is part of your experience, that's actually the difference between your conscious and subconscious mind. Your conscious mind knows logically I shouldn't be texting this person again. I haven't heard back from them already. It's not the right thing to do and get your subconscious mind eventually. Text them again anyways. And what a really important thing you need to know before we even go into this exercise here is that your conscious mind cannot or will or overpower your subconscious mind.

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Your subconscious mind will always win. So if you have this big abandonment fear, maybe you're like trying to maintain more and more proximity and closeness to somebody. But what's actually happening at a much deeper level is that your subconscious is essentially going against your conscious mind and it's winning the battle, and it will continue to do so until you solve this one thing.

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And this one thing is to end the cycle of abandonment in the relationship to yourself. When you learn to meet your own needs and you get really good at doing so and you learn who you are and what those needs truly are not, for example, what needs. You thought that you were supposed to be getting met in a career because your parents told you this is the career you should be in, not the needs that you're pretending are most important to you in a relationship because you're trying to impress the person you're dating.

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But actually your true needs as an individual and you won't be able to end the cycle of self abandonment until you start by discovering what those true needs are.

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So I have some really exciting news and it's that integrated attachment theory training is back. In other words, you can be trained to become a relationship coach, certified an integrated attachment theory in literally 60 days. So who is this for? Well, of course it is for any individual who wants to make an impact and really be of service to others while also obtaining freedom and flexibility and abundance in their lives.

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And this is also for anybody who is already a counselor, a therapist, a coach, and just really wants to expand their toolkit. We've had so many people enter into the Integrated Attachment Theory program because they're just looking to obtain a certain degree of mastery in terms of understanding their own attachment patterns and also the attachment patterns of maybe their children or partner or other loved ones in their lives so they can really support those people and understand them more deeply.

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So please keep in mind that the last two times we ran this program, we filled up very fast. In fact, we oversold the programs and sold out completely. So if you're interested that, click the link below to learn more and dive in with me. And I'd love to see you there on the other side before seats run out.

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So here's the exercise. Number one, we're going to go through the seven areas of what I'm going to say them slowly and you can pause this video if you'd like, and you can write them at the top of your paper.

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Okay. So career is one area of life. Financial is one area of life mental, which is sort of like your thoughts, opinions, ideas, beliefs. It can be like your political views, your philosophies as a person. So career, financial, mental, emotional, okay. Which is like your personal growth area of life, emotional regulation again, career, financial, mental, emotional, spiritual, which is pretty self-explanatory.

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Physical. Which can be like your physical health, physical body, physical appearance and relation chips, which can really be sort of split out into friends, family and romantic relationships. And what I want you to do is take some time. Okay, this isn't going to be an exercise you finish in this one sitting. Take some time and be like, Who am I really in these areas of my life and what do I truly want?

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I'm going to give you some examples in my career. What are the things that light me up that really make me happy? Is there anything I haven't given myself permission to do? Because I'm afraid. But that is really what truly matters to me. Okay, maybe you've always wanted to start that new business, but maybe you're in a career that was safe because of what your parents told you that you should be doing, or that's what somebody convinced you of and you gave up on that part of your life.

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The less of an identity you have in the seven areas that is chosen by you individually and specifically, the more you will attach to other people as a means of forming your identity and the more that when that person pulls away, you will feel like your sense of self is falling apart. And that is why we cling so much.

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Okay. If you truly know who you are in the seven areas of life and what you want and what you're looking for, and you're on a mission for those seven areas, you know what your purpose is. You know what's meaningful to you. You can still care about people deeply and love them and you'll want to be around them.

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But when they pull away, it won't feel like you're falling apart. So career, what do you truly want and are you designing your life accordingly? Even things like financially, right? Maybe you're spending all your money right now, but maybe at heart you want to be a saver and maybe you're spending all your money because you're trying to keep up with the Joneses and you're trying to make sure that you're in a place where you can get all the lavish things that your friends have.

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But maybe it would actually make you feel better to invest in your financial freedom for the future. But you won't know these things until you take the time to really consider who I am and what do I truly want Separate from society, separate from what the media has been telling me my whole life, or commercials or television or social media or my family members.

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What am I actually wanting to create in each of these areas? The stronger and stronger your sense of self and identity becomes, the less scary it will be if something is moving. Because part of what's happening to right is like if relationships are your whole life and you attach your entire identity to how well your relationships are doing and you're not individuated, and these other six out of seven areas of life, again, if your whole identity is there and something's going wrong there, it's going to be like it shakes your entire world rather than shaped one small part of a really big piece of the puzzle.

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So it is going to be really important that you do this work, take the time, go through career, financial, mental, your own personal opinions, ideas, philosophies, things of that nature, emotional, how you want to grow, evolve emotionally, regulate experience and express yourself in those areas,

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it's all about strengthening your sense of self and identity and it really stops this abandonment cycle from existing within your subconscious mind in relationship to self. And by healing these things and doing this deep in our work, you're going to see that your ability to self-soothe improves dramatically in the fastest period of time possible. Because as long as you continuously self abandon when somebody mirrors that fact, you and your external world, it's it's like the straw that broke the camel's back every time because you're already trapped in the cycle of doing exactly that.

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So career, financial, mental, emotional, spiritual, physical and relationships take the time, move through these different areas, take the time to reflect on who you actually are, what you want to create, and you'll see that as your identity becomes. It begins to strengthen your ability to self-soothe and self-regulate it and also know your needs and what you need to express to other people in your life as you're doing this work expands along with that.