Why Do I Love the Way That I Love: The 4 Attachment Styles Explained
Mel Robbins (host), Narrator, Thais Gibson (guest)
In this episode of The Mel Robbins Podcast, featuring Mel Robbins and Narrator, Why Do I Love the Way That I Love: The 4 Attachment Styles Explained explores transform Your Relationships: Rewiring Attachment Styles And Subconscious Beliefs Mel Robbins interviews attachment expert Thais Gibson about the four attachment styles—secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant—and how they are formed in early childhood through subconscious conditioning.
Transform Your Relationships: Rewiring Attachment Styles And Subconscious Beliefs
Mel Robbins interviews attachment expert Thais Gibson about the four attachment styles—secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant—and how they are formed in early childhood through subconscious conditioning.
Gibson explains that attachment styles are not fixed traits; they are learned “rules for love and connection” that can be reconditioned using neuroplasticity and subconscious tools.
They break down each insecure style’s core wounds, needs, and typical behaviors in relationships and goals, plus how these patterns subtly sabotage success and self-trust.
The episode concludes with practical reprogramming methods—especially a 21‑day repetition-and-emotion process and a guided meditation—to help listeners become more securely attached to themselves and others.
Key Takeaways
Attachment styles are learned rules, not fixed personality traits.
You are not born with an attachment style; it is conditioned primarily between ages 0–2 through repeated emotional experiences with caregivers. ...
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Your subconscious, not your willpower, runs your patterns in love and life.
Roughly 95–97% of your beliefs, emotions, and behaviors are driven by subconscious programming, so conscious goals (“I won’t get angry” or “I’ll stop texting”) will lose unless you change the underlying subconscious patterns.
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Each insecure attachment style has specific core wounds and needs.
Anxious-preoccupied fears abandonment and craves certainty and reassurance; dismissive-avoidant feels defective and overvalues self-reliance and emotional distance; fearful-avoidant struggles with trust, swings between craving closeness and fearing entrapment, and is hypervigilant to cues of danger.
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We reenact our childhood wounds against ourselves as adults.
Anxious people abandon themselves to avoid being abandoned; dismissive people emotionally neglect themselves just as they were neglected; fearful-avoidant people violate their own boundaries and then erupt later. ...
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Healing requires meeting your own unmet needs first.
Each style must learn to give itself what it didn’t receive—e. ...
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Subconscious reprogramming hinges on repetition, emotion, and imagery.
To change core beliefs like “I’m not good enough,” Gibson teaches using ‘auto-suggestion’ in an alpha (suggestible) brain state—often right after waking—by repeatedly pairing an opposite belief (“I am good enough”) with vivid emotional memories or evidence for 21 days.
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Becoming secure changes who you’re attracted to and how you show up.
As you build secure attachment to yourself, you become less drawn to chaotic or inconsistent partners and more comfortable with healthy, secure relationships, while also gaining more capacity for interdependence instead of codependence or extreme independence.
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Notable Quotes
“An attachment style is the subconscious set of rules you have for love and connection.”
— Thais Gibson
“Our subconscious mind is responsible for roughly 95 to 97 percent of our beliefs, our thoughts, our emotions, and our actions.”
— Thais Gibson
“If you’re not born with something, like an attachment style, and it gets conditioned into you over time, we’re just reconditioning to move into a space that works better for us.”
— Thais Gibson
“Whatever our core wounds are also become the biggest things we reenact in the relationship to self.”
— Thais Gibson
“You can shed all this stuff we’ve been carrying for so long… To not live like that is very freeing.”
— Thais Gibson
Questions Answered in This Episode
How can I accurately identify my attachment style if I see myself in more than one category?
Mel Robbins interviews attachment expert Thais Gibson about the four attachment styles—secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant—and how they are formed in early childhood through subconscious conditioning.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What are some early, subtle signs that I’m reenacting my core wounds in a new relationship or job?
Gibson explains that attachment styles are not fixed traits; they are learned “rules for love and connection” that can be reconditioned using neuroplasticity and subconscious tools.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
If my partner and I have opposite insecure styles (e.g., anxious and dismissive), what’s the most effective first step we can take together to move toward secure attachment?
They break down each insecure style’s core wounds, needs, and typical behaviors in relationships and goals, plus how these patterns subtly sabotage success and self-trust.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How do I distinguish between genuinely honoring my needs versus staying in my ‘comfort zone’ and avoiding growth because of a wound?
The episode concludes with practical reprogramming methods—especially a 21‑day repetition-and-emotion process and a guided meditation—to help listeners become more securely attached to themselves and others.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What should I expect emotionally during the first 7–21 days of doing the auto-suggestion and meditation work—are there common resistances or backlash patterns to watch for?
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Transcript Preview
(ticking clock) (upbeat music) I walked into this conversation thinking that my attachment style was one thing, and it turns out, it's something completely different. You can change your attachment style. You can become more secure. In addition, this episode has a bonus, and it's gonna help you transform not only your attachment style, but also your subconscious mind. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and I just wanna start out by saying thank you, thank you, thank you for being here with me. I know that when you are here with me and you're listening to this podcast, you do it as a way to invest in yourself, and I think that's super cool. And that is why I am really excited for the conversation that you're about to hear, because this one is a really, really good one. What are we talking about? We're talking about something called attachment theory, and the reason why I wanted you to learn about attachment theory is because this framework has helped me profoundly in my marriage. It's helped me in my relationship with my kids. Frankly, it's helped me in every relationship that I have, because understanding my attachment style has allowed me to really show up in a different way, in a more powerful and secure way, and I think it's gonna help you too. Now, if you've never heard about attachment style, there are four different attachment styles. You're gonna learn in detail about all four attachment styles. And I love the expert that I have for you today. Her name is Thais Gibson. She has a brand new book out called Learning Love, and one of the reasons why I like the way that she explains attachment theory is she gets into the nitty-gritty. You're not only gonna understand the four different attachment styles. She will explain things like, okay, if you text someone and they don't text back for three hours, this is how you will act based on your attachment style. She's also gonna give you scripts. She's gonna give you strategies and she's going to teach you that you can change your attachment style. You can become more secure. Now, when I told our team that Thais Gibson was coming into our new studios in Boston, Shay Washington, who is our senior manager of the video team, fell out of her chair, because Thais' work has changed Shay's life. Check this out.
Around this time last year, I was going through, like, a huge, huge healing journey and I realized that I was, like, so emotionally stunted. So therapy didn't work. You know, antidepressants didn't work. And so I stumbled upon, you know, Thais Gibson and The Personal Development School, but one thing that really stood out to me was when Thais Gibson specifically spoke about your core wounds. They still sort of manifest in my current life, like my current day, and I just don't know how to navigate through any of those things. And I just never heard it broken down in that way that she broke it down before. And things started coming together really smoothly. I had a much bigger understanding and it changed my life for the better, and I hope to one day become securely attached.
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