In this interview, therapist Thais Gibson discusses her personal background of emotional parentification and how it sparked her lifelong curiosity about relationships, leading to the development of her Gibson Integrated Attachment (GIA) model. She outlines the origins of classic attachment theory (Bowlby, Ainsworth) and highlights a key distinction: unlike traditional theory, GIA asserts that attachment styles are not fixed and can be reshaped through neuroplasticity and reconditioning. Gibson provides a concise breakdown of the four attachment styles—secure, anxious, dismissive‑avoidant, and fearful‑avoidant—describing the typical childhood environments that foster each style, the core emotional wounds (abandonment, shame, volatility), and how these patterns manifest in adult relationships. Throughout, she emphasizes that attachment styles are subconscious rule‑sets rather than personality disorders, and that understanding and renegotiating these rules can lead to healthier relational dynamics.
Chapters
So on one hand, we have the anxious attachment style. They usually grow up in like fairly safe environments and healthy environments, but there's a lot of inconsistency. So there could be two very loving parents, but they work a lot. So it's like love is there and then love is taken away, and then love is there and then it's taken away. So they grow up with these big abandonment wounds. They fear being abandoned, they fear being rejected or not good enough, disliked, and they tend to need a lot of certainty and reassurance because of that huge fear of abandonment. And as partners in their adult life, they become often very anxious or needy or clingy.
So Taiz, I'm so excited to chat with you today. I'm curious, how did you get into attachment theory? Like, where did your work begin with that?
I think from a young age I was really curious about relationships. I had two very loving, good-hearted parents, but they just kind of fought like cats and dogs. They really brought out the worst in each other, honestly, and they went through this very long divorce, went to this very special court in Canada. There was just a lot of chaos at a very young age, and I think I always wondered as a sensitive kid, and I was the oldest child in my family, kind of like, why does it have to be like this? And I think being the oldest child, there's only two of us, but there was a big age gap between myself and my sister. I was also sort of like the caretaker at a young age. And I was very much the caretaker of both of my parents' emotions. So, you know, a lot of people are familiar with the term parentification, and we can have different types of parentification. The practical form, which is like maybe there's an alcoholic parent and you have to put that parent into bed and tuck them in and get them water. But then there's emotional parentification, and I definitely had the latter. So, you know, my parents would get into these huge heated arguments and things would be broken and it would just, you know, very chaotic. And then I would go check on my mom and she would cry and I'd go check on her and then I'd go check on my dad and he, you know, and so I think from a young age I was kind of in this role, but I always liked it. I always like enjoyed getting to understand people and sort of the depths of human emotion and what we go through and what we experience. So I think I started off having a passion from a very young age.
But I would love for you, if you will, do a quick breakdown of the main attachment styles and your nuance, you know, the Gibson Integrated Attachment Theory, like what the difference is versus regular attachment theory. If you can just give us a quick breakdown on that because those are so good.
Absolutely. So attachment theory, the body of work, was originally developed by John Bowlby and then later Mary Ainsworth. But they talk a lot about your attachment style, but not that you can change your attachment style. And I think something that's really relevant is your attachment style, it's not like a Cluster B personality disorder. It's not, it doesn't have the same kind of like really, really intense deep roots with so much trauma per se. But it's sort of your subconscious set of rules that you've learned about love. So if you're more avoidant, for example, you usually grew up in a family where, you know, you learned everybody should take care of themselves and we don't really talk about emotions. And then if you pair that person with somebody who grew up with tons of emotions You know, it's sort of like having a board game and, and you have different rules for how the board game works. Like, you have the rules. Yeah, exactly. And so it gets confusing, right? And, and the sad part kind of is that it doesn't have to be confusing. Like, usually it's two people who really love each other and really care, but we just have these different rules and we're not understanding. And so it's, it's quite a solvable problem when we, when we frame it in like, hey, these are conditioned ideas we have and we can recondition them. We're not born with them, they get conditioned into us. We can leverage principles of neuroplasticity for reconditioning. So the, the 4 attachment styles, the first one, securely attached. Securely attached kids grow up, essentially one of the big overarching themes is approach-oriented behaviors. So when they cry, parents come towards them, they check in on them, they soothe them, and as they get older, they negotiate needs with them. So So let's say you have a child and the child's crying and it's past their bedtime, it's 10:00 PM and they want candy. It's not being permissive. It's not being like, "Sure, take the candy, kid." That's not the goal. The goal would be to say, "Hey honey, I know you want candy. I know that candy tastes really good, but it's past your bedtime. It's going to keep you up to have more sugar. Go to sleep and if you eat a really healthy breakfast, lunch, and dinner, you can have more candy tomorrow." So there's this dynamic of like, I'm validating your perspective. I'm listening to your needs and I'm negotiating needs. Children grow up as a result of all this and they feel like, "I'm worthy of having my needs met. It's safe to communicate and be vulnerable, and I can trust and rely on other people." They definitely have a deeper sense generally of self-worth because of growing up in that kind of environment, and trust and certainty and safety relying in co-regulatory ways with other people. That's statistically roughly 50% of the population from 20 years ago. Research now is showing it's maybe closer to 30%. And then we have our other insecurely attached styles. So on one hand, we have the anxious attachment style. They usually grow up in like fairly safe environments and healthy environments, but there's a lot of inconsistency. So there could be two very loving parents, but they work a lot. So it's like love is there and then love is taken away, and then love is there and then it's taken away. So they grow up with these big abandonment wounds. They fear being abandoned, they fear being rejected or not good enough, disliked. And they tend to need a lot of certainty and reassurance because of that huge fear of abandonment. And as partners in their adult life, they become often very anxious or needy or clingy. The flip side is the dismissive avoidant, pretty much the opposite in a lot of ways. And dismissive avoidants, they can grow up with like very overt neglect where there's like food's not on the table, kids are never in school, but the vast majority of the time they grow up with a very subtle neglect. Where the environment's safe, there's good structure, the parents are kind, but they're not emotionally available and they don't positively reinforce in any way emotional expression. So kid cries and they're kind of like, "Okay, go back, come back when you're done crying," or they don't soothe the child enough. So the child who were biologically wired for this starts feeling like, "Okay, you don't really validate this emotional part of me and I need this, and so something must be wrong with me at my core." I'm needing this and it's getting rejected. So they often grow up with these big shame wounds around like their own emotions, feeling weak if they're vulnerable, defective if they're vulnerable, and unsafe to really be themselves in an emotional way. And, and so as adults they can sometimes become dismissive or avoidant, as the name would say, and they can also become sometimes afraid of commitment or afraid of like really exploring their own emotional selves.
Yeah, ding ding.
And then last but not least, there's the fearful avoidant. And fearful avoidant attachment styles grow up with kind of the anxious and avoidant side. And generally it's because they have these really conflicting ideas about love, some really positive ones, some really negative ones. And so it can be that there's an alcoholic parent, a narcissistic parent, somebody who's just, you know, a lot of chaos in the home, lots of fighting between two parents, and But basically they have the anxious side, the fearing abandonment side, but they also have the trapped side and the fear of being shameful or defective, and they have a hard time being vulnerable as well. So they are very push-pull, very hot and cold in relationships, and they generally are a little more volatile because they're usually going through a lot of emotional volatility in their relationships themselves. And attachment deeply to somebody else really triggers a lot of their big wounds from childhood that they often experience.
