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Masterclass.com slash JOL. Hi there, this is Jillian on Love and I'm on a mission to teach people how to transform their romantic relationships by transforming the relationship they have with themselves. So whether you're in a relationship, you're single or you're heartbroken, I've got you covered. I'm Jillian Trecky, certified relationship coach and teacher with over 20 years experience helping people transform their relationship with themselves through their bodies, breath to minds.
I have now coached and taught thousands of people to become better versions of themselves and change their way they show up for and within their love lives. In today's episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Ty's Gibson. Ty's is a lifelong student of the mind with an MA in trans personal psychology and more than 13 different professional certification.
She currently runs her own company, the personal development school and her client-based practice has helped thousands experience significant life transformations. She also wrote the book Attachment Theory, a guy to strengthening the relationships in your life and she really is an expert on attachment theory. So that's what we do.
We have a conversation on this and it's a fascinating conversation just exploring all the details and the minutia of each attachment style, also the way that maybe culture plays a role in it, maybe the way it changes and men and women and also how you can start to heal it. And honestly, normalizing it in many ways. So I think that you are going to get a lot out of this episode and so without further ado, here we go. Hi Ty's, welcome. Thank you for having me. How are you? I'm doing well.
I'm so excited for this chat and I think that my audience will be very excited to hear it. So I'm grateful that you're here. I'm just going to start with a, I think a pretty basic question, but important. It's a two part question and I'm sure you get this all the time. What is attachment theory? And then the second question which is related is how is attachment style conditioned in us? Great question.
So basically, attachment theory was something originally developed by John Bulby and Mary Ainsworth and it talked about how basically I have this set of rules that we learn about how to give and receive love and relationships. And so there are four major attachment styles, but the original work of John Bulby didn't really talk too much about how to change your attachment style. And it's not a diagnosis. It's not a disorder.
It's really a subconscious set of rules that you get conditioned into you through repetition and emotion. So if anybody's not familiar, there are four major attachment styles. What is the securely attached style? They statistically do the best in relationships because they get a lot of healthy modeling as children.
And the three in securely attached styles are the anxious attachment style who tends to be needy, clingy, afraid of abandonment in relationships are dismissive, avoidant attachment style who tends to grow up with some form of childhood emotional neglect. So they become afraid of being vulnerable as adults and they actually become afraid of commitment. They're basically in opposition to the anxious attachment.
And then they're fearful of avoiding who tends to grow up with a lot of chaos and childhood. And that chaos conditions them to essentially feel like they have the anxious side of relationships and they're afraid of abandonment, but they're also afraid of too much closeness because they have negative experiences around closeness. And so they really swing back and forth between their anxious and avoided sides.
And so how all of these styles get conditioned is basically in other words how the subconscious gets programmed. And if you look at principles of hypnotherapy, principles of neuroplasticity, what you'll see is that repetition and emotion is what fire and wire these neural networks.
So whatever we're exposed to repetitively that elicits an emotional response tends to create these ideas that we have about ourselves, about what love is supposed to look like, about what connection is supposed to look like. And it's in these particular experiences that we can always dive into a little deeper for each style that really cause us to have this role, this set of roles for what we're expecting from our loved ones.
You know, we as adults may think love looks like emotional neglect and that's how it should be if that's how we grow up or love looks like somebody always being chaotic and fighting. And so I'm going to be the one that fights in relationships because that's what I know. So we tend to actually act out these conditioned ideas as adults because it's what's familiar to us. Okay, great description.
I am also under the impression and have actually the strong belief that family is not the only thing that conditions us to have a particular attachment style. I don't think it's fixed. And I think that we can, a traumatic event or a big event in our life can shift our attachment style. I think who we're relating to can bring out a certain attachment style.
I think that there are people who can be secure most of their life and then they have a really traumatic experience in a relationship where they are abandoned and then not triggers some sort of anxiety. Would you say that that's true? So I would say absolutely to most of it. So the first part is yes, when it comes to who can actually be a part of our conditioning, it's anybody that we're exposed to through repetition plus emotions.
So I have an example of a client that I worked with at one point and she was a really successful gymnast and she had very securely attached parents. Her other siblings were securely attached, but she was fearful of waiting because she would go home from school every day and she would go to the gym for four hours and she had a very chaotic, unpredictable coach. And the repetition and motion of being exposed to that definitely had a huge impact on her being fearful of waiting.
Some childhood we tend to reference that the most because in childhood we're basically in a hyper-suggestible state. We're producing mostly alpha and theta brain waves until around the age of eight years old, which are the brain waves we need to produce when we're actually being hypnotized. So we're basically sponging in our information, our modeling at a very young age and of course, the largest influences of that are our parents in childhood.
But to your amazing question, it can be other influential mentors. It can be that we have grandparents around. Even our siblings that are maybe older than us can have some sort of influence if they're babies sitting all the time. There can definitely be other influences. Now you also said one other thing, which is super interesting. You said that we can have a traumatic experience as a one-off that shifts our attachment style. This is also absolutely true.
You have somebody who, for example, has no fear of driving a car, has driven a car their whole life, they're super comfortable, but then God forbid they get into a car accident. They can go into the car the very next day. Their hands can be shaking right as they start to drive because even if they walked away from that car accident, everything was fine. Whenever there's an emotional impact of something that's strong enough, it has the capacity to immediately imprint the subconscious mind.
So we say repetition and emotion, but actually emotion will always be overpowering compared to repetition. Yes, our attachment style can change from one specific traumatic imprint. I've also seen clients who've gone through different forms of abuse and relationships as a one-off sexual abuse, assault, things like this, trigger warning, of course. And that took their attachment style from secure to fearful avoidant more immediately. So these can absolutely be impactors.
And I think those are really important things to be able to reference. Yeah, absolutely. What about the inverse, which is you have a really incredible experience. Because if it's emotion attached to repetition, then what if it's positive emotion attached to repetition or positive emotion attached to a really big experience? Or maybe it's the experience of being in a really loving relationship where someone totally sees you and accepts you for who you are. That can definitely, I've seen it.
I've seen people become more quote unquote, securely attached in that relationship because they feel so seen and so understood. I love these questions. So the answer to that is yes, but there's a really important caveat. So when you look at how we actually become a trap as a people in relationships, there's three major drivers of attraction. Number one is somebody expressing your request traits. It's a trait variety thing biologically.
Years and years ago, if somebody we were trying to survive in the wild and somebody really smart pairs up with somebody really strong, they have a better chance at surviving. So we are actually designed and wired biologically to be attracted to people who have different traits that ask if somebody is assertive and somebody is more weak or timid, they may actually be attracted to each other at a subconscious level. The second thing is somebody meets your deeply unmet needs from childhood.
So if you felt unseen as a child, somebody is very present, whoa, we can really get like attraction that takes place very quickly. The third thing, and this is the most long lasting part of what we will invest in in terms of attraction, it is our subconscious comfort zone. So there's two things that we have to kind of touch on about this. One is that our subconscious mind is actually wired to hang on to negative experiences more than positive.
If you're out walking through the forest and you see a bear, you know, and you have to walk back the same route the next day, you run away from the bear, but tomorrow you have to walk back the same route the next day, you're not going to be thinking about how pretty the tree was next to the bear. You're going to be thinking about what the bear's teeth looked like, right?
So we're wired to focus on the negative and hang on to it more as a means for self-protection and so a very survivalistic part of our wire. And so what happens is when we have previous negative experiences in childhood or from other attachment experiences, coaches, mentors, family, et cetera, we actually hyperfix it on them a little bit more and we tend to re-project them. We tend to think all these things are going to be recurring. This happened in the past. It's going to happen again.
And so when we talk about those three major parts of attraction, the third one being that subconscious comfort zone of familiarity, the craziest thing that happens, it seems quite counterintuitive, is that we'll focus on negative things and we will often subconsciously reject things that are unfamiliar at the same time. So let me expand on this for just a moment. Let's say you grew up in a household where there's abandonment trauma. You keep feeling like, okay, somebody's pulling away from me.
As an adaptation, you may go, okay, well, I have to hyperfocus on everybody else like an anxious attachment style, maintain proximity, try to keep really close to people and people pleased so I don't get abandoned. What's going to happen is your subconscious mind is less likely to be attracted to people who are very present with you, who really do meet your needs. You are more likely to be attracted to what's familiar.
It is the biggest part of what's familiar to us, the relationship that we have to ourselves. If you follow this sort of line, an anxious attachment style grows up with abandonment trauma, they in turn abandon themselves to try to seek connection from others. They put their own feelings last, their needs last, or people pleasing everybody. They are very unlikely to be attracted to people who are very present with them.
They're most likely to be attracted to people like dismissive avoidance, who are also not very present because it mirrors back to them the subconscious comforts only have for how they treat themselves and that is what is most familiar. Our subconscious will tend to reject things too far outside of that comfort zone as it means for self-protection. You'll even see it on the dismissive avoidance end of the spectrum. Dismissive avoidance are very preoccupied and anxious about their own time alone.
Who are they often more attracted to, people who are more anxious, people who are preoccupied with their time as well, who mirror back to us the way we treat ourselves. Yes, absolutely the right relationships can really heal us and be healing, but I think that there's a literature out there that says, if you're anxious, just date a secure person.
After being in the field and clinical practice and working in our programs for the last 14 years, I have not seen a meaningful subset of people statistically who are going into relationships with security attached people when they're very anxious or very dismissive avoidance or very fearful avoidance. Dismissive avoidance will be, they'll feel uncomfortable as somebody so present, anxious attachment styles.
We'll think all this person's boring, fearful avoidance will often say, this is boring, it's not exciting. What it really is not is it's not them being used to their attachment style being activated and they will often reject secure and loving people until they clean up the relationship they have to themselves. This episode is brought to you by Rocket Money. Have you ever found subscriptions that you forgot about or any that you paid twice for and didn't realize it?
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So one thing that I always say is that the health of a relationship, health being the strength of a relationship is largely determined by two things, who we choose and how we choose to show up. And so the paradox is I believe that who we choose to partner with and who we choose to spend our lives with is one of if not the most important decision we will ever make in our lives. So who we choose matters.
But at the same time, right, because the relationship and personal development, all of this is filled with so much paradox at the same time. If you think that just changing partners is going to do the trick and by the way, sometimes it does. Let's face it. Sometimes you just like attachment styles and attachment theory aside, sometimes you just make a bad choice and then you date someone else and things are really good.
But if we're talking about patterns and one has a pattern of struggling in their romantic relationships, there's two things. To consider, it's not just choose another partner, it's the mirror. It's what do you need to actually heal within yourself? I'd like to dive in a little bit into all the attachment styles, but starting with anxious attachment and you said, you know, being with someone secure. So I'm someone who's healed her anxious attachment.
And I'm also someone who has been somewhat avoidant only when I'm not really into the person. I have definitely like switched, but it all was very largely dependent on how much my heart was involved in their relationship. So as someone who has healed her anxious attachment, one thing that I have noticed is there's a couple of things. I am no longer attracted to avoidance. I mean, I might actually feel a twinge of sexual attraction to someone who might be avoidant.
But that is not someone who I wish to be in a relationship with anymore. I actually find like securely attached people much more attracted, but that's because I did the work to embrace my own power because I think that, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, is that underlying so much of the insecure attachment styles, anxious attachment, dismissive avoidant, fearful avoidant, which I know in some circles is considered disorganized attachment. And there's so many different.
So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that too. But I believe what's underlying it is that like people feel an intrinsic, everyone fears that they're not enough, but there's a little extra of that. And that I think that everyone who I've worked with on all sides of the insecure attachment style is they don't necessarily feel connected as cheesy as this sounds to their own power, to their own strength. And therefore they are afraid to communicate openly and honestly in their relationship.
They're afraid of being judged. Certainly there are people who are afraid of being smothered, but at the same time, they're also fearing not being enough.
This is just my experience with it that ultimately healing some very, you know, which is a very overused term, but core wounds within ourselves to be able to like for the anxious attachment, I believe that a lot of the anxiously attached folks, and I think that there's a spectrum, I've worked with people who are severely, severely anxiously attached, barely able to function in their relationships. I identify as someone who had anxious attachment, but I was never to that extreme.
But what I have found is that there's a lack of belief in oneself in the world at large. There's an insecurity that's not just in relationship, but there's an insecurity, not in every area of their life. They could have very secure friendships, but this feeling of insecurity is not only in the relationship, and I would be so curious to hear if that's something that you've found as well. Yes, I would love to dive into that. I think that's amazing.
I just want to say one or two quick things about stuff that you mentioned that I think is really meaningful. So you said earlier that you became less attracted to insecurely attached people once you did the work because your subconscious comforts own changes, right? So now your zone of familiarity is you show up securely to self, which means you're going to be more attracted to that another people, right?
You could still have a little bit of attraction from the repressed traits and okay, but not the type of attraction that they invest in somebody. So I love that. I just want to highlight that for anybody listening that that's the outcome that we're looking for. And then the other thing is you said, I can be avoidant if I'm not interested. And I just want to really, I think it's really important for anybody listening to separate those two things out.
They can have avoidant behaviors when they're not interested. They don't engage. They don't show much effort. But when you're trying to find somebody who's a dismissive avoidant attachment style, it's not just like their behavioral patterns. It's their personality. You know, you would see what you said earlier. If you're not that interested, you might be avoidant. Yes, maybe you send some short text messages or you don't engage too much, but you are a person who is emotionally available.
You are a person who is capable of vulnerability. What you're saying right now, Tyson, so important for listeners because, and I'm sure that you've seen this too, there are so many people out there who are saying, yeah, you know, he's not responding my text. She's not responding my text. They're avoidant. And I often have to say, maybe they're just not that interested in you. That doesn't mean that they're actually avoidant. So I just wanted to throw that in because that's what you're saying.
And I think it's so important for people to hear. Exactly. And I think it's important for people to work on if they're trying to make a distinction, don't just dump anybody who's not showing up into an avoidant category, look for the differences between somebody's behaviors versus their actual personality. So somebody who is a dismissive avoidant attachment style, these are personality traits and qualities. And you'll see that they are emotionally unavailable as people.
They will tend to not have vulnerability in their friendships, in their family relationships. They won't often speak of their feelings. You will see that they tend to have these deep, deep sensitivities to criticism because they have a cor wound around being defective, which we'll talk about in just a moment with the cor wound spark.
But they'll have these qualities that go with them everywhere they go, rather than not having those qualities actually being quite emotionally available, vulnerable, capable of deeper and more insightful conversations, more regulated in their nervous system function, not so sensitive to criticism, open to constructive feedback, and then in one particular interaction in a relationship dynamic, they're not engaging.
Those are just people who could be less interested, rather than the personality of a dismissal avoidant attachment style. So I just, I love that you brought that out. I thought that that was so important for digging into. Now, going to the cor wounds part that you mentioned, you're exactly right. The cor wounds that we have, and from a cognitive behavioral therapy perspective, cor wounds are really important.
As somebody with a background in hypnotherapy, what I've often done has been like, let's take these modalities, these therapeutic modalities, and let's actually engage the subconscious mind in the process. So when we have cor wounds, cor wounds are part of how we come to identify ourselves. So let's say, for example, that we grew up in a family where there is a lot of criticism, just as a really simple example. There's two very critical parents. Why did you get a B?
You should have had a NAEP class, you know, all of that sort of repetition and emotion that we're getting. And this takes place, the subconscious mind is designed to get certainty, right? It feels like certainty is familiarity and thus safe and more likely to produce survival. So whenever we don't understand something or we can't emotionally process something, we give it meaning.
So in one particular case, you may see that in this really critical household, we go, okay, it must be that I'm not good enough, right? Now, the I am not good enough, cor wounds is associated with all three and securely attached styles in different ways. But what happens is we don't just take that into our relationships. When we have a cor wound or an imprint, yes, it can come from attachment trauma, but we tend to believe this as a part of our identity.
Each attachment style has cor wounds and they can actually be reconditions. These are not things that because we have them, we have to take them with us for the rest of our lives and we're not born with them. They come from nurture. They can be reconditioned by nurture. They're not nature, right? So when we leverage principles of neuroplasticity and recondition, we can actually change these ideas that we've adopted about ourselves that may have their roots in attachment trauma.
So for the anxious attachment style, their major cor wounds are, I'm not good enough. I will be abandoned. I will be alone. I am excluded. I will be disliked, rejected and unsafe if I'm not getting my needs met through others. The dismissive avoidant, their big cor wounds are things like, I am unsafe to connect. I am weak. If I open up or if I'm vulnerable, I am incapable of being vulnerable or really making changes and showing up for a relationship. I am trapped, helpless or powerless.
If I end up with a wrong relationship, I'm one of the biggest ones is I am disactive. Children when they can't get their needs met, they personalize everything. So dismissive avoidance don't go, oh, my parents are emotionally unavailable. They go, there must be something wrong with me that my needs can't be met. So childhood, emotional neglect often produces a lot of shame. And then we have this big cor wound of I am shameful at my core.
The fearful avoidance cor wounds, they tend to have each side, they carry the anxious side and the avoidance side. Yes, fearful avoidance and disorganized attachment style are absolutely the same thing. There's just different terms for them. And when you look at these different dynamics of the anxious and avoidance wounds, they have those abandonment wounds, the trapped ones, but fearful avoidance because they grow up with so much chaos, they have to be so hypervigilant about everything.
And so they're always waiting for the other shoe to drop. And that creates this big wound around I can't trust and I will be betrayed. And so they tend to also have a very difficult time trusting people. Even if they trust their partner, they don't necessarily trust the future. Oh, how do I know you won't betray me in 10 years? Things are good now, but what if it changes? And again, this comes from a lot of that chaos.
So once we know our core wounds, we can actually leverage principles or some really simple exercises and happy to share for how to reprogram these things. So we're not carrying around this attachment, what it really is for lack of a better term. It's our baggage from the painful things that happen to us. It's the things we couldn't process that we stored instead. And now we reproject back out onto our external world and all of our relationships.
And they absolutely show up in the workplace, in friendships, in terms of our self esteem. They show up in all of the areas of our lives because even if they have a root and the way we attached, they're part of what we've come to believe about ourselves that our core. How much is anxiety and underlying issue in all three insecure attachment styles? Absolutely an underlying issue for all three. They have different ways of processing it. So for dismissive avoidance, they're anxiety.
You'll see shows up very much because they have a very chronically dysregulated nervous system. They're spending much of their time in sight or flight mode. This is the dismissive avoidance has the chronically dysregulated nervous system. Okay, please continue. I'm sorry, I just wanted to make sure I heard that correctly. No worries. Yes. So they do and it often shows up as irritation because they don't want to be too vulnerable. They won't say, oh, I'm anxious.
It's almost like they're not willing to fuel their own emotions. So it shows up as irritability, annoyance, frustration, but they're constantly in a dysregulated state. And there's a lot of really interesting research that goes into that. Fearful avoidance also tends to struggle with being in sight, flight, freezer, bond mode, chronically dysregulated. And a lot of the time, anxious pre-opathy, tend to have more anxiety and dysregulated specific to relationship challenges.
So they tend to be fairly okay outside of that can be a little bit more present and not so afraid if there isn't an individual personal issue happening, but the moment there isn't an individual issue happening, these core wounds that we have, they actually trigger, right? When we have these core wounds activated, we have all these thoughts that come with them. I'm not good enough. I'm not interesting enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not attractive enough. I'm not all the enoughs, right?
So core wounds produce patterns of thought. When we are believing in thinking these things, how do we feel? We feel distressed, anxious or frustrated. And that produces obviously our emotional reactions, which are made up of neurochemicals, so can also impact our physiology interestingly enough. And then neuroscience has proven that every single decision we make is actually based on our emotional state.
So even people who think they're very logical or rational thinkers, they're actually making all emotionally based decisions at their tipping point. And then they're just quick to backtrack and rationalize through logic. So it's interesting. And just every single attachment style is prone to anxiety because they have more core wounds that are going to change how they think, how they feel and obviously how their nervous system responds. But you'll also see that they may not show it as outwardly.
Dismissive wounds tend to very much enumerate press, so they'll be more stoic. They're still often feeling a lot of that anxiety, fearful avoidance. We'll often also deal with their anxiety through a lot of different coping mechanisms, trying to control things, for example, trying to pull away from everybody, for example. So there will be coping mechanisms that may make it less obvious. Whereas anxious attachments, they tend to be a little bit more obvious when they are feeling anxious.
You can really see, because they'll share and they'll be more open and more vulnerable about it. You can see it. You can feel it. Yes. This episode is sponsored by Ned. Sleep is literally the most important thing I've learned. Like you can't heal anything if you're sleep deprived and your brain doesn't work if you're sleep deprived. And magnesium is something that most people are very deficient in and it impacts your sleep. And I take something called mellomanesium.
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That's H-E-L-L-O-N-E-D.com slash JOL to get 15% off. How much does gender play a role in attachment styles and how much does culture and generation? That's an amazing question. So gender, I believe, to have more of a correlation rather than causation in terms of effect.
So I think when we look at the construct of gender, so we look at, like, let's say, the way men historically, maybe a little bit less so in our current generation, but historically, men are often taught more, culturally in the Western world, that you shouldn't express emotion. That emotion is wrong or bad. You may be dismissed or ignored if you are expressing emotion. You may be shamed for being too emotional. These roots, culturally, are trending towards more males than females.
And so as a result of that, rather than it being necessarily just about attachment, it's what is created in the attachment trauma. How is that more correlated with gender? You're more likely to see male dismissive avoidance and female anxious preoccupied attachment styles where there's more warmth, more love, but sometimes there can be more inconsistency there. So in terms of gender, it's not necessarily gender itself.
It's the way that different genders are being conditioned and how that conditioning may line up with the same type of conditioning that's likely to produce attachment trauma. So huge impact, culturally, of course, we'll see the same thing. I mean, you'll definitely see it's interesting. I had over the years many clients from different countries and all over the world when I was running my practice.
And I had a particular client who was from Japan and he said, you know, most people are avoided because the culturally, there's a lot more conditioning around having to be stoic and not really expressing emotion. So you'll see a lot more of that as a general rule. So of course, culture plays a big role in that as well. And generationally, I think it's become more normalized now to express emotion. And to be more open and to be more vulnerable.
And I think there's also some stressors that have changed culturally with inflation over the past 50 years with we could originally have, you know, families not that long ago, where one person worked and one person stayed at home. I'm not necessarily advocating for that family system or dynamic, but there can be a parent who is more present with the children.
Whereas if we have two working parents financially stressed having a difficult time paying the bills, different babysitters all the time, different family members coming in and out, we may see more anxious attachment as a result of that, right? We may see more of that inconsistency. Whereas historically, we might have seen maybe a parent who's more present, but we would also be more likely to see more avoidant parents because of that lack of emotional availability.
Okay. Yes. That's very interesting. So how does one begin to heal? Great question. This is a body of work that we really developed through the personal development school. And we have a lot of research to back the solops. So we found that like our original attachment theory talked a lot about attachment styles and patterns, but not enough about how we can actually change these patterns. Like what are the roots?
So my background originally before I did much of the attachment work was in hypnotherapy. Hypnosis originally, actually I did a year long hypnotherapy certification, but then I also did certifications in NLP, CBT, somatic, experiencing lots of different things, but a lot of different areas. And I started to figure out like how can we really blend these things?
Like how can we take CBT and they get more impactful by bringing it into alignment with the subconscious mind and actually being able to move the needle? But a big thing was how do we, I really didn't like the power dynamics, honestly, if it knows this, like clients come in, they come in for a session, you hypnotize them, they work through something they leave, they don't really know how they did it. They can't replicate it, they can't do it on their own.
You know, and it felt like you're giving them an effect rather than teaching them an effect and I didn't love that. And so I started wondering very early on into my practice, like how can I teach people how to reprogram themselves? So they have these take home tools. And there's a lot of really great information in traditional hypnosis that allows us to be able to replicate some of those things.
So basically the first part, if we're trying to recondition our attachment style, there's four main pillars that we really want to focus on that affect to other pillars. But the first one is what are our core wounds? Our core wounds are like our relationship baggage that we're carrying. We can reprogram these things, leveraging principles from hypnotherapy. I'll show a really easy tool in a few moments about that.
Then we have to learn our needs and we have to learn to actually meet our own needs because of that subconscious comfort zone piece. If somebody is only trying to get their needs met externally but doesn't have a relationship to those needs within themselves. Basically, the poster child for that is the anxious attachment style. They have to constantly get their needs met by others because there's a hole in their bucket.
If I can't meet my own needs, as soon as somebody meets my needs, sure, that works. But then my subconscious doesn't have it as a part of its comfort zone. So it will deflect, it will doubt, it will go back for more because we're running on empty all the time. And so we have to actually build a relationship to our own needs first so that we can properly self-suit. So we've got our core wounds, we've got our needs. Then we have to be able to do emotional regulation work.
By reprogramming core wounds and meeting our own needs, it has a huge impact on this. But we have to be able to regulate our nervous system because as we talked about earlier, all three attachment cells are chronically dysregulated. So we have to be able to do some breath work, some meditation, things that are getting us back in our body and comfortable being present with ourselves. And then we have to do the communication work, both around our needs and our boundaries.
And those are the four main pillars, if we could really simplify, that if we do those things, our attachment cell will change. And we've had about 41,000 people come through our programs at this point. And we have a 97.7% NPS score. And part of the metrics for this are people seeing that they're becoming securely attached if they shall up and take the courses and do the work.
And so what you're seeing is as long as people are willing to do this, their attachment cell will change to become securely attached. So I can share a little bit. Yeah, I would love to hear whatever you're willing to share. But just one question I have. Chronically dysregulated nervous system. I'm struggling to grasp that. Like is anyone ever chronically dysregulated? And I mean, if someone is anxiously attached in their romantic relationships, are they chronically dysregulated?
Not anxious attachments, more so fearful avoidance and dismissal point. And I say chronically dysregulated, what that means is we're spending more time in fight, slight freeze or fawn mode, aka sympathetic nervous system than parasympathetic, rest and digestible. And the proportion of time that we spend there is not ideal to stay the very least. Right. Yeah. No, that's very clarifying for listeners. Because sometimes you know, people take that and think, I'm chronically dysregulated.
So thank you for clarifying. Okay, so it's understanding what your core wounds are, learning to meet your own needs, learning to regulate your nervous system and then learning how to communicate those of the four pillars. Yes. Okay. Exactly. Is the self-suiting part of the learning how to work with your nervous system? Exactly. So the three pillars of self-suiting are really removing core wounds or knowing how to handle them when they come up, which we'll all share a tool for.
And then it's about learning to meet our own needs. Because when we're trying to self-suiting through others, what we're trying to do, if you actually look, there's two causes basically ever with the nervous system having an impact but it being very tertiary. There's two main root causes for emotional pain and suffering, period. Okay. So emotional pain is whenever we have unmet needs. So if I move to a new country and I have a big need as a person for emotional connection, I love people.
I love connecting with people. And in this new country, I don't speak the language. And I leave my husband and all my friends and my family behind. Okay. I'm going to go there and I'm going to feel sad. And that's good. That's feedback for me. Emotions will come as a feedback mechanism to tell us when our needs are not being met. And it's purposeful.
It's there to progress the way it gets part of how we adapt and of all of the species for so long as that emotions will let us know something is out of alignment, something is not working. It's time to go pivot or adapt. So let's say I moved to this new country as somebody who's worked a ton on my core wounds from pure, full of audience is securely attached. And I don't really have many core wounds. I might go, okay, I have to go make friends. I have to go meet people. I'm feeling lonely.
I should be feeling lonely because I have a big need for connection that's not being met. That's fine. Now instead, let's date back to Taiy's 14 years ago before doing this work when I had all these core wounds, all of these stories about myself. I'm unlovable. I'm never good enough. I'm unworthy. I'll be rejected. I'll be trapped with the wrong people. I can't trust people. I had a lot of these big core wounds. So let's put me in the same situation.
I don't get my emotional connection need, Matt. I have the pain of unmet needs. But now the other root cause of emotional discomfort is our emotional suffering. Suffering is more excruciating and it happens when our core wounds are catalyzed. So I go to this new place. My need is not met. And instead of going, oh, I should go adapt. Instead, I storytelling because my core wounds are still a part of my programming.
So I tell all the stories that say things like, well, it's because I can't trust people here. Oh, it's because I'm going to be abandoned. It's because I'm not good enough. Nobody will like me. I'm not going to make friends. And so now I keep myself really trapped. And now I don't know how to soothe, right? Because I have my core wounds activated and unmet needs. And these are the root causes of the only reasons that we will feel emotional pain or suffering.
Now, on top of that, we have that tertiary piece where my nervous system will get dysregulated and it can kind of throw me for a loop. But we want to, when we look at the idea of self soothing, it's actual roots are when we learn to understand our needs and how to meet them. And when we learn to reprogram our wounds or question when those stories are coming up, like I'd be in this new country and I might say, okay, I'm feeling lonely and it's really because I'm an unlevelable person.
Can I actually know that that's true? Do I have any other evidence to counteract that? So when I start working through these stories and then meeting my needs, that's actually how we self-suit. This episode is brought to you by Thrive Cosmetics. I don't really wear a lot of makeup. It's not really my thing. But there are a few things that I cannot live without. And when I discovered Thrive Cosmetics, like this was it. I was like, this is like the perfect makeup for people like me.
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So refresh your everyday look with Thrive Cosmetics, beauty that gives back. Right now you can get an exclusive 10% off your first order at thrivecosmetics.com slash Gillian, that's Thrive Cosmetics, C-A-U-S-E-M-E-T-I-C-S, dot com slash Gillian for 10% off your first order. So if I can, I'll share a tool for the core wounds first, then we can maybe talk about tools for the other pieces. Great. So there's a tool called auto suggestion, and it comes with roots in hypnosis.
I've adapted it a little bit to also bring in some of the cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. So it's called auto suggestion, the leaf-free programming. And basically how it works is if you look at your conscious mind, your conscious mind speaks language. Your subconscious mind doesn't speak language. It speaks in emotion and in imagery. So I were to say whatever you do, do not think of the chocolate chip cookie.
Like your conscious mind here is do not, but your subconscious mind like flashes a chocolate chip cookie because it hears the emotion and hears the imagery. So when we traditionally think of like trying to change things, a lot of people say like affirmations, but affirmations are your conscious mind speaking to your conscious mind. And the problem is not a conscious mind problem. Nobody wakes up and says today, I'm going to tell myself all day long how I'm not good enough.
Nobody is consciously choosing that. So these are subconscious problems. So when we want to actually reprogram the subconscious mind, we need to be able to address the problem where it's at. So we have to speak in the language of emotion and imagery. So what is the container of all emotion and imagery? Well, it's memory. Every single memory we have is actually container for those two things.
If somebody goes back and tells their favorite childhood memory, if you would watch your mind and slow motion, you would actually see, maybe it's your playing on the playground with your friends, and you would see the images of the playground and the slide. And you would smile as you're telling the story because the memory would still have the emotions contained there. So now we know, okay, I can leverage memories for reprogramming. What else do we know?
We know that we need a repetition and that emotion and imagery to fire and wire neural pathways from a neuroplasticity perspective. So what we do is we bring those three ingredients together in a really simple way. Let's say the core wound is, I'm not good enough. When we're like, I'm done with this. I don't want this baggage any longer. Okay, what's the opposite? I am good enough. We need 10 memories so we get the repetition and within the memory, we have emotion and imagery.
So 10 memories of why I am good enough, things I did that I'm proud of. I graduated from this program, got this certificate, whatever it might be for each person's individual experience. I show up this way in my friendships and this way as a family member. And the things that we feel good enough around when we can actually write out those memories, we've got repetition, emotion and imagery. So neuroplasticity research shows us it takes about 21 days to really build new strong neural networks.
We need repetition. We want to actually record those 10 things we come up with and we can replay them and listen to them and feel about them and see them in our mind. We have to be present with it for 21 days. And in doing that, it has a huge impact on reprogramming core wounds. And I've seen this replicated out, not just in when I ran my claim, based practice with many people or in my own life, but also with tens of thousands of people at this point. And it's very effective.
So it's very simple, but it's all just what are the core wounds you're working on? Take one or two of them at a time. 10 memories to oppose them. I'm abandoned. I'm worthy of connection. I'm unlovable. I'm lovable. I am disrespected. I am respected. I'm unsafe. I am safe. Very simple. 10 memories or pieces of evidence for why you are safe or worthy of love or whatever it might be that you're working on. And then we record those. We feel about them. We see them for 21 days.
You literally talk about the memory and record yourself talking about the memory. Yes. So often people just go to their phone and just play it back in the evening. I think it's just firefight. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, really great question. And you can do it where you rewrite different memories all the time or you journal them out as long as you have the repetition and emotion. But I find it just most streamlined for people to record it. Listen to it while you're brushing your teeth.
Think about it feel about it just really simplified streamlined ways. And we're actually most adjustable in the first hour of our day and the last hour before bed because we're producing more alpha brain waves. If you've ever watched somebody watching television and they're like in the television and you're like, Bob, Bob, and like they don't answer you and you're like, Hello, what's going on? What's actually happening is television makes us produce a lot of alpha brain waves.
And when somebody is really in the television like that, they're in a light state of trans. And so, you know, when we can target those times, those are places where we're most adjustable. In other words, when programming can actually develop the deepest roots in the fastest period of time, we're most adjustable in the first hour of the morning, last hour before bed, after meditation, after watching a lot of television, after, you know, breath work, things like that.
So we can leverage those times as well to kind of speak up the process, but 21 days is like the gold standard for doing the work. And we really will see transformation if we stick to it. One of someone says they can't find 10 memories, which I really think that they can, but sometimes people tell themselves the stories, speaking of stories.
They're so, so in their wound that they can't even step outside of themselves to find those memories, even though I can pretty much guarantee that people could find them. But when someone is sort of like being a stickler that way and feeling really stuck, what do you suggest? That's such a good question because this totally happens. It happens to be like one in 20 people, but it definitely happens. And it's actually interesting.
So we have this mechanism in our mind, I'm sure you're probably familiar, but maybe listeners won't be, it's called the particular activating system or RIS. And it's job is to filter out information. What of its functions is to filter out information. And it does this according to what we're focusing on, but also according to what our pre-existing beliefs are. So the really obvious example of the RIS at work is like, oh, you're buying a new car.
It's a white Jeep. And now all of a sudden, you see white jeeps on the road everywhere. You've been focusing on it, so you've noticed those things. But what people don't talk about often enough when it comes to the RIS is it will also filter out information according to your beliefs, which makes reprogramming extra sticky because if we truly believe that we are so not good enough, somebody will sit there and they'll fight you on it. You know, I've had this experience.
No, there's no evidence for me at all. In those cases in particular, we are just trying to leverage repetition and emotion. So there's a few core things that we can keep in mind. Number one, they don't have to be huge pieces of per. Okay. They don't have to be. I'm good enough because I'm so proud of this one thing I did. It can be I'm good enough because I got out of bed on my first alarm this morning. I showed up to work on time. It can be small things as we get more momentum around it.
Our RIS will start to focus on that and will actually be more open to seeing other things that we're proud of and will start finding things that we forgot about or didn't even think of. The second principle is if we're really stuck, we can apply the generalist rule. So we can start more in general and then get more specific over time. So rather than saying, I am good enough, we can start with it is possible to improve.
And then as we build some resonance with that, we can move into I am improving more and more. And then we can get to it is possible that I am good enough and then I am good enough. So we can start more in general and then we can get more specifics. So it feels like there's pieces of evidence there. And then lastly, we can look for other external pieces of evidence. So we can look for if it's possible for other people, it might be possible for me.
So how have I seen people in a similar situation to myself also improve and become good enough? Or how have I seen other people who may have a history of abandonment, wounds and that been healthy relationships? And those can be evidence for a subconscious mind to begin with again until we build more residents and can make it more personal to us. I love that. That's wonderful. I think it's going to be so helpful for listeners. Okay. So my go-to drink when I'm not drinking water.
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So what I do, don't wait order now at hopwtr.com slash jol for 20% off. That's hopwtr.com slash jol. Last question for you. I'm not sure if you've noticed on social media, but there seems to be a trend where quote unquote avoidance are really considered the villain that they really are the fucked up ones in relationship. And that a lot of people are using avoidant and narcissistic interchangeably, avoidant and abuser interchangeably. And so I'm curious to know your thoughts on that.
And I'm also curious if there's any data that suggests that people who are abusive, emotionally and or physically, if there's an attachment wound behind that and if there's any data that supports it, it would lean more towards avoidance. These are great questions. So I'm going to go right and would as well be really honest, unpopular opinion. And I actually want to make a really important distinction here.
So there is a massive difference between a dismissive avoidance and somebody with narcissistic personality disorder. And I understand that we can have an experience of things being very hurtful where if somebody is stonewalling because they don't know how to communicate to somebody who's very anxiously attached, for example, that can feel extremely triggering and it will ignite their old triggers and their old wounds and even exacerbate them and deepen them perhaps.
So there can be things that take place within a relationship dynamic that can leave a similar emotional outpunt to something that could be abusive. So I will say that because that's the truth.
I will also have to say that for a dismissive avoidance and that relationship, it's quite possible the anxious preoccupied on how they're reacting to their own triggers is also deepening wounds of the dismissive avoidance because they are very sensitive to feeling defective when they get criticized or negged or anything like that. It can deepen those wounds.
These I would really take out of the space of calling it abuse and I would instead call these what I've identified as our primary trigger patterns in relationships. Your relationship has this, especially between insecurity attached people and it's that every time that we have a big core wound that's unresolved exactly how we behave when our own core wound is triggered will retry the other person's biggest core wound and how they behave will retry our hours.
Really obvious example anxious and dismissive avoidance, dismissive avoidance pulls away because they need a little more time to themselves. It triggers I am abandoned. The person reacts to their own triggering of being abandoned by trying to maintain proximity and get closer.
It triggers the dismissive avoidance I am trapped core wound or they might nag and it triggers their defective core wound and then they pull away further and exactly how they're pulling away retry goes the I'm abandoned core wound and this will go around and around and around in circles and every person has this in relationship. It's very worthwhile to identify what yours are and work on getting out of them.
Now when we look at the actual differences between abusers so somebody who has narcissistic personality disorder for example versus a dismissive avoidance there's some really substantial differences. But a narcissist when they are doing things they are doing things not from a place of self protection as much. We can make the argument that some of that's there.
You can think of dismissive avoidance as being people who pull away not push other people away or hurt other people or throw things at other people. And when we look at some of the key distinctions first of all a narcissist has one of the first traits in the DSM-5 is a grandiose sense of self importance. They think they're way more important than anybody else. This dismissive avoidance quite honestly like can't really be that concerned with that. They don't care to be greater than anybody else.
They kind of just want to be left alone. Second thing we'll see is this huge need for admiration and attention. Again, dismissive avoidance they appreciate like acknowledgement appreciation and a relationship. But if you give them access of admiration and attention they'll pull away. They actually don't like that. Another thing you'll see is narcissists tend to be extremely lacking in empathy.
dismissive avoidance actually tends to be quite good at empathizing with others but they're poor at expressing it. So they'll do things for others a lot of time through like acts of service that they see somebody sad. They'll cook them something, bring them something they feel for them, but they're not doing things that are harming people and then being immoral about it and not realizing it. The way that we would see more in alignment with narcissistic personality disorder.
You'll also see when we work through things a huge sense of entitlement from the narcissist. And again, these are personality traits of the narcissist. They tend to believe they're better than greater than other people. Again, dismissal avoidance kind of want to be left alone. They're not that concerned with that.
Another characteristic in the DSM and I won't go through all of them but narcissists are very concerned with being associated specifically and almost only with high power, high status people. They want to just, you know, they have these unlimited ideas about having more success and beauty and brilliance than other people. Again, like this is just dismissive avoidance or like let me do my own thing over here.
They're not that concerned with jealousy, envy, power, status, excessive admiration, excessive attention. So if anybody is trying to distinguish the difference, if you pay attention, there are those of really key differences between somebody with NPD or DA, dismissive avoidance attachment style.
The last part that I just want to say there is that when you look at the things that could have similarities, sometimes dismissive avoidance, they will be bigger takers and they will be more self-oriented. So they will take more than they give because they think everybody is out for themselves because that's how they were conditioned. That was the modeling that they received. And so they expect everybody to be in that space.
So if somebody wants to be giving something to me, it must be because they truly want to rather than sometimes people are getting from a place of covert contracts. I'm going to give to you a bunch of times right now. So when I have to ask you for something in a month, you'll be there for me. We're talking about the fearful avoidance or the dismissive avoidance, right now. The dismissive avoidance attachment style.
So the dismissive avoidance has a core belief that no one can be trusted, basically, that everyone is basically out for themselves. The fearful avoidance. Does a dismissive avoidance is the one that tends to be like everybody's out for themselves. And it's not in a, I can't trust people way. It's that they usually had unavailable parents. So they assume that everybody's just not really looking out for each other and hypervigilantly aware of each other. They think I'm responsible for my needs.
You're exclusively responsible for yours. Which is part of what's happening right now in the zeitgeist, which is like, no, no, no, like you're responsible for your needs and I'm responsible for, you know, because the pendulum always swings. And so I think that one of the things that people struggle with the most is the dance between independence and dependence. How much am I responsible for these needs of mine, you know, and how much am I responsible for the needs of others?
And I think that it's so individual and one thing that I wanted to add to this conversation is that I really think it's important that people understand that there's more to a person than just their attachment style. So if you're in a relationship with someone and you're noticing certain behavioral red flags, if you will, it's also the integrity of that person. It's the level of maturity of that person. It's the level of self-awareness of that person.
So you can be in a relationship with someone who struggles with an insecure attachment and it's not going to necessarily be a nightmare relationship, but you can be in a relationship with someone who might also struggle with insecure attachment, but they've got all these other things. Maybe they're just not a very good person. They don't have a very strongly developed character. They're selfish.
And let's put aside abuse and narcissism for a moment, but they're just like their immature, maybe they've been really spoiled, maybe they just don't have a lot of strong character. So I think that that's also just given the conversation around narcissism and abuse and all of that. There's a larger tapestry to human being and their behavior and relationship than just attachment style. And so people really need to consider all of that. I love that you're saying that.
And I think that we do this thing where we think, oh, they have this attachment style. So either it goes in one of two polarities either. I'm going to justify all of their behaviors and weaponize my empathy against myself. Oh, poor them. They've been through all these things. It's just their attachment style. I'm going to put up with all of it, which is definitely what's one subset of people do. Or we assume everything is just their attachment style.
And so we don't hold them to a higher standard or have a discussion about things and like, hey, let's do the work on stuff. And I always like the biggest piece of advice I've been self-giving to people all the time. If they're not sure, they should invest in a relationship or not is set a deadline. Okay, do not wait forever. Set a deadline. Get clear about how long you're willing to put up with the things that you don't like.
Poor into your work, communicating more clearly, talking about your needs in really healthy, constructive ways. Make sure that you're self-suding really well so that you're not triggered and coming across in a way that's not going to work out to get your needs seen and heard. And within that deadline period of time, when you're showing up at the best of your capacity, it's going to be really obvious if somebody wants to do the work with you or not.
And if the needle doesn't move, you're probably with the wrong person who cares what their attachment style is. It's, are they doing the work to show up with you and change? I have seen so many people with the most trauma, extreme fear of avoidance, extreme trauma in childhood. Go into relationships, be like, I don't think I'm ready for a relationship, but they showed up and they poured into the work, they became secure and they became amazing, incredible partners.
And I've also seen people with maybe a secondary attachment style of something insecure, unwilling to do the work, not willing to show up and they don't show up and they're not good partners in a relationship. It's important to recognize the attachment style because we can have more understanding, insight, compassion, but at the end of the day, what makes two people compatible and a relationship workable is are the needs being met? Are we working through things that we don't like?
Do we have healthy communication patterns and are we growing together in a relationship? And so the attachment style can give the context for what we should work on and what we need to improve to become secure. It can provide a bit of a road map, but we need to be clear about what are the person's behaviors, how are they showing up? And are we actually in a relationship that's fulfilling us without justification, without all this attachment style or all?
I should wait around forever to see if they change. We're going to know if you set that deadline pour in, it's going to be very clear by the end. Oh, I think that's wonderful advice and I couldn't agree with you more. Thank you so much. Is there anything that you would like to, as we wrap this up, is there anything that you really want to share or get off your chest here to this audience or any other piece of information for me?
And you've shared so much today, Ty, and I'm very grateful, but just wanted to give the mic to you, so to speak, if there's anything else you want to share. Thank you. I would share one other thing, actually, that I feel like is so important for people in their healing journey that I think is not being clarified enough out in the world. And it's about communication. So I'll just tell a really quick story.
I used to see people when I was running my client practice and they would come into my client practice and a lot of times they'd come in and they'd say, Ty, I'm here as a last resort. I'm about to divorce my spouse of 20 years. They're never showing up, you know, and they'd be in this long-term relationships and they say things to me. I've tried everything. I've communicated everything and it doesn't work.
And after I went a year of this, I stopped believing people when they would say that because what was often happening is they were communicating, but they were communicating their needs in extremely dysfunctional ways, not as a character issue with them, but just because we aren't taught these things.
And so I came up with a set of steps that are really important if we actually want to communicate our needs because I think that we're finding in the world that people are like, communicate your needs more and then somebody communicates their needs one time and they say, you never do this, you should be doing this. And they think, I communicated my needs. Now my partner better meet them. And then they think because I said them once they should never forget. And these are fallacies.
These are not truths in relationships in terms of how they work. So when it comes to communication, that other big part that we talked about around healing your attachment style, there's a few things we really want to master. One is we need to positively frame when we could communicate. So there's a huge difference between saying something to somebody like, you never want to spend enough time with me, you don't care. Versus saying, hey, I really miss you this week.
I feel like we haven't spent enough time together. Can we plan something fun to do on the weekend? One is going to trip somebody's defense wires from all the conditioning they had about conflict as children. Oh, I have to defend myself and protect. They don't hear your need. The other is actually going to get you seen and heard. So now you have a better chance of like, hey, my need might actually get met. The second thing is people are not specific when they communicate.
So they say, I need support. I would see countless times that couples would go home. I would have a client session. They would say, I'm going to support my wife more this week. Come back the next week before the wife even can sit down. She's like, I haven't done anything to support me this week. And he'd be like, I did the chores every day. And she'd be like, oh, that's not support to me. It's being more encouraging and validating.
So we often, because we have our own subconscious set of rules, aka attachment style of what we believe love looks like, we have to paint the picture for the other person so that they can be clear. Because there's a lot of like, there's a gap that happens where people miss the mark. And it's absolutely sad because then we have these two people who are trying, but it's not landing with one another. So frame in the positive, paint a picture of what the need looks like.
And the third one is see your needs through true embodiment of communication is not I communicated really intensely once true embodiment is that, you know, I go to my partner or spouse and the moment a need isn't being met, I'll say it. I'll say, hey, I really need a little bit more of this this week because I'm feeling stress or overwhelmed. Could you show up in this way?
It is that I will take that with me into the workplace, into my friendships, into my romantic relationships, my family relationships. I will communicate my needs in a positively framed way, very clear and specific. In real time, the moment something trails off, it is not I communicate my needs once. And now as my partner didn't mean them, it's bad. Now, of course, there can be a context in which you communicate with those three tools in mind.
And you show up extremely well and somebody never makes an effort at all. And you're probably in the wrong relationship. But I just want to highlight to people that just because you communicate your needs once, you know, doesn't mean that somebody's going to remember forever.
And if we see the needle move and then things trail off, true embodiment of interdependency, not codependency, not counterdependency of actually being able to self-sue and have a relationship to myself, but also of a thriving relationship to somebody else requires communicating with these three steps in mind and doing it the moment something falls off.
And I think that that's just something that needs to be said because I noticed out on the internet, there can be a lot of, I did communicate and they didn't show up and it's like, well, maybe we didn't communicate in a way that was able to get us heard. That is so incredibly accurate and true. And I thank you for adding that. I really do. I think it's going to be incredibly helpful. Thank you so much. How can people find you? So I am at personaldevelopmentschool.com.
There's a free attachment quiz if anybody wants to take it and they can go through and get a report. And I put daily content out on YouTube, which is personal development school. And then my name, TaiE, skips in THIAS. Thank you so much. And I think people are going to run to it. And I just really appreciate you. I appreciate you coming on the show.
I appreciate you sharing your incredible knowledge with everyone and for clarifying some things and for really giving people things that they can start to work on immediately. So thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I really loved this and all of the depth of your questions and really, really enjoyed the suspicions. So thank you for having me. Well that's it for this week's episode of Jillian on Love. I hope that you enjoyed the conversation with myself and TaiE as much as I did.
She's absolutely brilliant. So please, please check her out and all her work in the show notes. We will link out all the relevant links so that you can get in touch with her and get in touch with her school. And if you know anyone who could benefit from this episode in any way, please do not hesitate to click share because you just never know whose life you could be changing. And I thank you for being here and I thank you for listening and until next time. Jillian on Love is a Q-code production.
Executive produced by David Henning and Steve Wilson, produced by Shen Yin Hu, editing and music by Will Tendi. Hello, everyone! Hey guys, Heather Ashley here, host of the Big Mad True Crime Podcast. If you're looking for a true crime podcast with all of the details and none of the small talk, you have found your people.
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