Thais Gibson

Real abandonment is the obvious.

A parent passes away at a young age, God forbid, or a parent is, they leave at a young age for a child, and all of a sudden that child grows up feeling like, oh my gosh, am I going to be left or abandoned again?

Perceived abandonment is really interesting because the neuroscience of trauma tells us that small t trauma repeatedly enough over time has a quite similar impact to

a singular big T trauma.

So perceived abandonment consistently in a child's upbringing caused them to have real, real abandonment wounds as an adult, similar to if there was a real abandonment that took place.

And perceived abandonment is things like you have very loving parents, but they're really busy.

They're always working.

They're always traveling for work.

And so children grow up in this environment going...

Okay, love is here and then love is taken away and love is here and it's taken away and that inconsistency there causes this child to really brace and deeply fear love being taken away.

And so as adults, these individuals, they adapt in their life to be like, let me really be charming and charismatic and well-liked so I win people over.

And they end up having superpowers in that way in many forms.

But also anxiously attached adults, they people-please so much to the point where they can burn themselves out or they people-please to the point of self-silencing.

And they're big wounds.

So we took this original body of attachment theory and they, you know, it said, here are your four attachment cells.

Good luck.

And it was sort of like, wait, but you can recondition pretty much anything.

Like you can rewire these things.

And I originally started in this work for that reason.

And so what we found is that anxious attachment cells, they have big core wounds specifically around the fear of abandonment, the fear of being alone, excluded, disliked, rejected, not good enough.