From Anxious to Secure Attachment Style with Trevor Hanson

Does it ever feel like you’re dating the same person with a different name? If you notice that you’re often gravitating toward emotionally unavailable people, this episode is for you.

Joining Gretta to discuss attachment is Trevor Hanson, coach and founder of The Art of Healing. Trevor teaches relationship and attachment skills through the Secure Self Club. In this show, Trevor deconstructs common relationship dynamics and shares how to finally break the cycle of insecure attachment. 

This episode covers:

• How to move from an insecure attachment style to a more secure one.
• How anxious patterns can amplify avoidance.
• Why men who have an anxious attachment style may tend to get ghosted more.
• Insights on why men may be more prone to avoidant attachment.
• How porn and other addictions are often attempts to soothe unmet attachment needs.

If you’re ready to make powerful shifts in your life, this episode is for you. 

Connect with Trevor: 

Instagram | Trevor’s Website | YouTube | TikTok 

Connect with Gretta:

Free Guide: What to Say To A Ghost
Free and Private Facebook Support Group |  Instagram | copingwithghosting.com

Music: "Ghosted" by Gustavo Zaiah

Disclaimer:  This information is designed to mentor and guide you to cope with Ghosting by cultivating a positive mindset and implementing self-care practices. It is for educational purposes only; it solely provides self-help tools for your use. Coping With Ghosting is not providing health care or psychological therapy services and is not diagnosing or treating any physical or mental ailment of the mind or body. The content is not a substitute for therapy or any advice given by a licensed psychologist or other licensed or other registered professionals.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 1:06 Trevor’s Anxious-To-Secure Journey
• 3:59 What Secure Vs Insecure Really Means
• 9:06 Attachment As Root Of Dating Struggles
• 12:22 Addiction, Coping, And Attachment
• 20:32 Why Many Men Lean Avoidant
• 26:19 Compassion For Avoidance And Online Backlash
• 31:44 How Anxious Patterns Amplify Avoidance
• 38:20 Becoming Secure Vs Performing Secure
• 43:22 Emotional Rewiring Through Repeated Experiences

Transcript

Gretta: 0:17

Welcome to Coping with Ghosting, the podcast that provides hope, healing, and understanding for anyone who has been ghosted, betrayed, or hurt in relationships. I'm your host, Greta, a certified post-betrayal transformation coach. If you're a longtime listener, you know that I've already covered attachment and ghosting behavior on this podcast, but I realized there were still some really important questions that listeners are always asking me. Joining me to explore these questions and more is Trevor Hansen. Trevor Hansen is a coach and founder of The Art of Healing. He teaches relationship and attachment skills through the Secure Self Club. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Trevor Hanson: 1:04

Yeah, thanks for having me, Greta.

Gretta: 1:06

I'd love to start by having you share your journey from being burnt out and feeling heartbroken and feeling really unrecognizable to yourself to healing and stepping into your power.

Trevor Hanson: 1:20

Yeah. So I, you know, I my big focus in this world is I help people with an anxious attachment style become secure so that they can really change their relationships for the better. And sure, there's also a personal benefit, like you're going to be more at peace if you are more secure, you understand your own self-worth and so on. But my history, I think, from kind of what you're talking about, it was back when I was a lot more on the anxiously attached side myself, which, if somebody's not totally familiar, basically means that you've got some sort of fears, underlying fears of like abandonment, rejection, not being good enough. And those fears oftentimes just escalate into more of that same kind of outcome in your life. You get more rejection, you get more abandonment, you feel like you're not good enough. And things like dating and relationships and even friendships can feel really, really difficult. They lack closeness in the way that you want. And so, yeah, I was definitely that person. I was super anxiously attached, having a hard time. You know, your show talking about ghosting, I think an anxiously attached man in particular, women will experience it too, uh, but early, they experience at a different point. Early in the relationship, men who have an anxious attachment style, they don't exude a lot of confidence, and there's a lot of fear and anxiety there, and they'll come across in a way that creates kind of some pushback from female partners. And so guys will just get ghosted like constantly, all like right off the bat. Like, you know, date one and then she's gone. Or you're chatting with somebody you think you're gonna meet up, and then they just they're just gone. And more anxiously attached guys will get that a whole lot more. Um, and and I experienced a ton of that until I honestly started to not transform. I think there was too many times where I was trying to change my strategy or my approach or how I, you know, went about it. And that was pretty futile. It didn't work because at the heart of it, the thing that was pushing others away was my fears, my anxiety, my lack of confidence. And so it wasn't until I changed that that I stopped getting as go ghosted as much. I started finding the right partners who are gonna respect me. And so, yeah, that's kind of in a nutshell, like the transformational journey that I help people to do is change what's at your heart, and then it affects what goes on in your relationships.

Gretta: 3:53

Thank you for opening up about that. I wonder, could you share the essentials of attachment and how does it all relate to gender anyway?

Trevor Hanson: 4:07

Yeah, so it's it's kind of interesting. So the if we look at like different attachment styles, there's categorically two categories if we simplify it. There's secure and there's insecure. Insecure has got a couple different styles or sub-versions of it. Um, but I'll kind of generally describe the secure and insecure first. So secure is a person who sees themselves. It's a view of self and others, is really what attachment comes down to. So a view of self is I see myself as worthy, good enough, lovable, um, and you can trust yourself, you can rely on yourself, you can fill up your own internal cup and be okay, even in the face of something like rejection or relationship ending. It's not ever going to be happy, but you know you're okay. Like you just feel good still, um, along with the pain. There's a greater hopefulness for a secure person. Um, and then view of others is that you trust others to be there for you. You know that people aren't going to abandon you. At least the right people, the people you want to keep, won't. And you're not worried about keeping the wrong people either. If you're secure, you're like, I don't, I don't care about that. I just want the right people. And so it's trusting in others, trusting in yourself. Then more of the insecure is when you've got things that drive the way of being for you that are more like fears of abandonment, fears of rejection, view of self as negative, or at least a in part it's negative, like you really rustle, wrestle with the part of you that doesn't know if you're good enough, questions your self-worth. And an anxiously or in or avoidantly attached person has these underlying fears of rejection, abandonment, not good enough. And they, at their heart of hearts, don't really trust that others are going to be there for them or that they can be vulnerable with others. And so how this results in relationships is it really interesting. I want to make a note of this. I know you asked about gender, I'll get there in a second. But in relationships, the secure person, they have better relationships. First, they have a better relationship with themselves, they're just more at peace, but also they find themselves um doing things like setting boundaries really easily and clearly because they respect themselves enough not to deal with nonsense from other people. They will um be they won't be overly highly selective in partner selection. They'll just they'll have wisdom and prudence in who they choose. Um, but sometimes people get overly selective out of fear of abandonment as well. Um, that might look like more of an avoidant partner who's just very, very fearful about getting into a committed relationship. Whereas an anxiously attached insecure partner might be ignoring red flags and letting anybody in through the door because they just are so desperate for closeness and connection. And so even conflict cycles, when you're not insecure, when you're not thinking that your partner's words are threatening to you, you're less defensive. You're not gonna shut down, you're not gonna criticize them, you're not gonna call them names. If you're a secure in yourself, you're just like, whatever you say is cool. Like we're gonna talk about it. I don't always love the things my partner says, but like I know how to work through it, and it doesn't attack my self-worth. And so there's a big, big benefit to becoming secure. Almost every relationship issue comes down to that, that one thing. And I know I've talked longer than than uh maybe I ought to. So let me pause real quick before answering your gender question and give give you back the mic for a second.

Gretta: 7:49

Well, that's all really fascinating, and I love how all these relationship dynamics, it sounds like can really be solved with attachment and through the lens of attachment and moving to a secure attachment style.

Trevor Hanson: 8:03

Yeah. Yeah. It's true. It like you you boil it back. Uh I wrote a short little ebook. It's called Fearless Love, and where I introduced this concept where it's like, I think at the heart of almost every relationship issue, except for issues that stem from like some significant diagnosis. Uh so for example, if you've got like a borderline, well, borderline personality disorder really is an attachment disorder if you're looking at it from the correct lens. Uh, but if you've got something like a schizophrenic, if you've got something like, you know, bipolars, like those kind of things obviously are unrelated, but the general run of the mill, issues with conflict, being single for longer than you want, dating issues, uh, even betrayals um and even addiction, I believe, are connected back to the attachment styles um and the lack of security or the presence of security within a person.

Gretta: 9:06

Right, because I was gonna ask you about alcoholism.

Trevor Hanson: 9:10

Yeah. So you think about alcoholism. Well, let me let me make a little illustration in the insecure side of things. There's the anxious and the avoidant, and we can go into the depths of them, but as generally speaking, um, we'll talk about anxious, for example, because that's who I work with the most. Anxious, they will cope with their fears of abandonment, rejection, not being good enough by reaching desperately for other people to provide that reassurance, to provide that closeness. And so they'll ask for commitment too early in a relationship. They're melting into a little puddle as they're waiting for the text back and they're not getting the text from that person who they thought they would have by now, or maybe even if they didn't think they would have, they just want to desperately hear from them. Their drug of choice is the attention of somebody else. And they don't feel good enough or worthy on their own, and so they rely on somebody else's attention to do it for them. It is more common with males, but men who are anxiously attached, you will also sometimes and often find an addiction as well. An addiction specifically to pornography. Pornography is a pseudo attachment. It's it's the girl who always says yes, never says no, is as beautiful as you always want her to be, and is awake 24-7, willing to be there. And the brain doesn't really know the difference between this fake interaction versus a real one. And so for an anxiously attached male whose fear is all about lacking closeness and connection, might reach for something like that really unconsciously, not making the connection, but continue to go back and back and back into that. But things like alcoholism, it's not always this way. And I'm not saying the root of all addiction is the insecurity, but usually the root of almost all addiction is some sort of emotional pain. And a lot of emotional pain falls under the categories of an insecure attachment. So let's say somebody's addicted to alcohol, maybe that addiction actually started trying to numb the pain of never feeling good enough, or never being chosen, or being overlooked by your parents, and then feeling constantly anxious and on edge that you're never going to find somebody, or overwhelmed at work because you think that your worth is contingent upon what you do or how you perform. And then you go to the mind-numbing, body-numbing addiction of alcohol, and it's only a symptom of the root cause, which is most likely connected to attachment in some form or another. So, yeah, it's it's kind of a wild theory to say that attachment is kind of the root of almost all of these challenges, but in some regard, I really do believe that it is.

Gretta: 12:03

Wow, that is so fascinating. It feels like so many guys are avoidantly attached. Why is this? Am I right?

Trevor Hanson: 12:12

Yeah, yeah. So um from what I know, and I'm still searching for this, and if somebody has a better answer for me, that'd be great. Send it to me. Um, I don't have real hardened research from a clinical study that says men are more likely to be avoidant. However, um the narrative is that, and it winds up being pretty true. I mean, I work with couples, I work with anxiously attached people. I get way more women in my program than men. Uh, when I was doing couples work and couples therapy, um, I got a master's of marriage and family therapy and was licensed in the state of Utah and started doing therapy there. It was almost always that the man was the avoidantly attached and the woman was anxious. Uh so the real question is if that's true, that men tend to be more avoidant. I think one of the reasons why is that you look at how men were taught growing up as boys to respond to emotional situations. Really, guys were kind of taught they could have two emotions anger and excitement. Everything else was too fluffy and too weird. You can't be sad, buck up, you can't cry. Love is too squishy and girly to feel. Um, all the other emotions on the spectrum, for the most part, were kind of ruled out as not safe. And so they learned that if they have an emotion of some sort, that you gotta bury it, right? Go to your room until you can stop crying, be a man, buck up, don't do that, you know, which was basically you must avoid feelings. And that's a big trademark of the anxiously attached or the avoidantly attached. They avoid emotion. And because they avoid emotion, they also avoid emotional connection, but they also really didn't have a lot of times, boys don't have somebody where, well, and I'm not I'm speaking generally, right? Because I'm an anxiously attached guy, so I break the mold, right? But girls are more likely to have somebody there to nurture their soft feelings. Oh, princess, come here. I love you, sit on my lap, you know, like uh they're kind of they're kind of seen as the little queen, a little princess. And so they're gonna get that nurturing more often from school teachers, from parents, from grandparents. That's just culturally how it's instilled. And so these boys they grow up with this underlying narrative that says, oh, I I can't be vulnerable. I can't let people see who I really am. I can't get close to people because then maybe I'll get hurt. I gotta kind of be more independent. Independence is the route to safety. Uh, closeness and vulnerability is not the route to safety. That is the route to being left out for to be, you know, left out to dry. And so it's with that lens, it brings a lot of compassion because a lot of people are going to be angry with the avoidant because of the experiences they've had with them. And I don't want to say your anger is unjustified. It is, right? If you get hurt, then of course you should be hurt, sad, angry, all of the above. But sometimes understanding this pattern increases compassion for the avoidant. And if we can increase compassion, then we can also increase our ability to navigate a potentially avoidant partner, spot them earlier, and potentially move away from that partner, but also learn how to navigate a relationship with a partner who might have some avoidant tendencies. My wife has avoidant tendencies, and we've got a great relationship. She's totally more on the avoidant side of the spectrum, and it's awesome. We do well, but it's because I have a knowledge of what's going on there. I can navigate it with compassion and empathy. And she has some ownership and willingness to take on her own patterns and help to address mine, because I still have some leftover anxious patterns, though we've both kind of earned security through our work. Yeah, it just makes it so you can you can make it more successful.

Gretta: 16:30

Right. I'm so glad you mentioned the compassion piece because I have a lot of compassion for children who are taught to suppress their emotions. And so when I encounter avoidance, I tend to go right to compassion straight away. The thing is, is I see so much dislike and I don't want to use the word hate, but every time I open Instagram, and maybe this is just because it's my feed and this is what I do, it there's so much bashing of the avoidance. And it makes me wonder like, is ever it just feels like so many people are avoidantly attached these days. Do you think there's more people who are avoidantly attached now than there were in the past, or is it just because we now have language for it?

Trevor Hanson: 17:20

No. Here's here's what I think is happening in part. We have language for it. It's multifactorial, but the factor that the most vehement, angry, digital pitchfork and torch commenters in because I get it too. I I bring compassion for the avoidant on my page, and I help the anxious. My goal is not to not to throw the anxious under the bus, not to tell them their pain is invalid. My whole purpose is to help them have positive relationships. Why would I want to undermine your pain? My goal is to help them. And what I find is that I get a lot of like very angry people in the comments when I do exactly what you're talking about. Or if I kind of tease, I did a video recently called Day in the Life of the Avoidant Attachment, and it was just kind of funny. And um, it made fun of the avoidant a little bit. Uh, I did the same thing for the anxious, like, nobody's safe. I'm gonna get you, I'm gonna tease you a little bit. And so, but I noticed in the comments, oh my gosh, avoidance, they should basically never be loved, is almost like the message. And the frequency, I actually think is, and this is gonna be such a gut punch. Whoever's listening and anxious, don't turn it off yet. Listen to my argument. I think the uh the anxious at times are to blame for the increased avoidance. Gut punch, right? But let's talk about how.

Gretta: 18:44

Gut punch.

Trevor Hanson: 18:45

Let's talk about how. And blamed might not be the right word, but I want to this this to empower the anxious not to make them get defensive and true tune off turn off. So if you're listening, here's the first thing. I want to validate that if you've had an avoidant partner, that's painful. It's a painful experience. Nobody should experience that. I've experienced it, but I also created it. So if you look at my life, I'll take my life as the first example, because I'm gonna be the owner of this pattern. When I was an anxiously attached dude trying to date these girls, I would put on too much pressure. I would maybe ask for commitment too soon. I just showed up with a real lack of confidence and clarity, and I presented instead a lot, a lot of anxiety, uh, whether they could sense it or not. You know, I could, I could fake it really good, but there's underlying, I mean, especially women, women got an amazing um intuition, and they can they can pick up signals of this dude's insecure, he's not confident. And because of that, I would find these girls just blowing away like tumbleweeds in the wind and never coming back, and me in the desert of my own singleness, knowing, not knowing what to do next and feeling like the ultimate victim. Well, if these girls just would commit, if they just give me a chance, blah, blah, blah. And it was all about them, right? I could have joined the people online being mad at the avoidance and said, Well, they're avoidant. Honestly, I don't think these girls were avoidant if I look back. I think these girls, maybe some of them had avoidant tendencies, but I threw fuel on the fire of their avoidant tendencies by overbearing, over-smothering, asking for commitment too quick, just not showing up with confidence that they need to feel safe in a relationship with a guy, right? And so it's like over and over again, and even if you're secure, you're not gonna like that kind of anxious behavior. And eventually you're gonna say something. Maybe you're not terribly confrontational. If you're really secure, you're pretty good at confrontation. But if you're trending secure and you're still not that great at confrontation, you might say, hey, I'm just not quite ready, or this isn't for me, and you're not really giving an answer. It's the vague avoidance answers, but really it's like I don't want to explain to you how you're pushing me away. And maybe like I don't feel like I need to explain it. And so, and if you look longer in a relationship, that's early relationship. Longer in a relationship, the anxiously attached when they feel abandoned, when they feel not good enough, when they feel rejected, which they're gonna feel that way a whole lot more than a secure person because they're gonna interpret their partner's behavior as an abandoning, rejecting, um, on and so on, when in reality it's not. And so the frequency of feeling hurt is gonna go up. And the intensity of that pain is gonna go up. If you've got frequency and intensity, then you're going to most likely see the anxiously attached do things like criticize their partner. You never show up for me, you don't care about me, you don't love me, you this, you that, you this, you that. Uh, or they'll just point out their partner's behavior rather than asking proactively for what they need. And the anxiously attached are Always saying, Well, I know I ask for what I need. I say it right out, but if you actually watch them, I sit with them, couples, and they'll they're not asking, they're just telling their partner the ways they're failing them. Oh my goodness, whether you're secure or even leaning, avoidant, if somebody's blasting you with criticism and the way you failed them, instead of inviting them to show up for you differently, sure, we're cool. Almost anybody's open to feedback as long as you have some level of security in any regard, even an avoidantly leaning person. My wife, for example, um, when I'm more critical in my approach, she's shutting down, she's pulling away, the avoidant comes out. When I choose to show up in a more healthy way and I'm asking for what I need, I'm not assuming that she doesn't love me or care about me. She's much more willing to engage in a conversation. And so what I think happens is that the fears of abandonment that an anxiously attached person has lead to protective behavior that accelerates or heightens the avoidantly attached uh presentation in another person. And so at the end of the day, they're sitting there going, everyone I date is just so avoidant. They're all just avoidant, and this is it, and I'm the ultimate victim. And then they're perpetually stuck ignorant to the fact that they're creating this pattern as well.

Gretta: 23:27

I'm certainly guilty of a similar thing. So I get it, and ultimately, we didn't cause anybody to ghost, we didn't cause anyone to betray us. We we probably showed up the best we knew how in the relationship with the skills and tools we knew at the time. And our behavior influences people's actions as well.

Trevor Hanson: 23:52

Yeah, yeah. And you know, it's it's a tricky thing to talk about, right? Because as you're saying, um, I don't want to sit here and blame somebody who's truly been a victim of a really poor situation, right? Like if you had somebody betray you, especially like cheat on you, whatever, it's like, of course, at the end of the day, it's not your responsibility for their actions. That person did something horrible to you, and you can never take that away. What I am saying, what I'm hoping to portray, is an empowering message that says, you don't have to be stuck. Not everyone's avoidant, not everyone is gonna ghost you, not everyone's the same. There might be something you can do to influence the situation for the better. And it's and sure, you didn't know then, but now you do know. And there's a path forward. And so that's that's the message of hope. It's really hard sometimes to give a message of hope and accountability. Um, but usually a message of hope does include one of accountability because if anyone's gonna change the pattern in your life, it has to be you.

Gretta: 25:00

Right. I've been the common denominator of several people ghosting me. And so I use that as okay, it's time for me to reflect. What am I doing? How am I potentially, potentially, just curious, unintentionally triggering people. Maybe, you know, there's been times in relationships where I've had a reaction level 10 to something that wasn't that big of a deal. And I noticed that the person I was with, it might not have been the right time. I wasn't reading the room, and I had this huge reaction and it pushed them away. And then they ghosted. I know that this person couldn't hold a space for me because of their it's felt what felt like avoidant tendencies, and it just wasn't the right time. And so, like, I don't feel like it was my fault that they ghosted. I didn't tell them to ghost. They could have been like, hey, you know what? I'm not available for this right now. I need some time to cool off. They could have used their mature words to take some space, but they didn't, and they chose to just leave and never talk to me again.

Trevor Hanson: 26:10

Totally, totally. So it the I can almost hear those who are listening now, the anxiously attached, going, oh, okay, great. I'm going to control the situation now in a new way. I'm going to try and control my behavior so I don't look anxious, so I don't push people away. And they're going to go behaviors down, and they're going to try to control the situation with behaviors. And what's going to happen is that uh you're going to get burnt out and you're not going to have the clarity that you need in a relationship. The hard but essential path to really breaking this pattern is to changing the attachment style at its core. So, what I mean by that, and I'll tell you some like trickle-down effects of this. If you go from a person who, we'll make it really simple, you got some fears of rejection and abandonment, and oftentimes you don't feel good enough about yourself. And then that leads to anxious type behavior that pushes partners away and they don't commit to you. Whether they're avoidant or not, we don't actually know because the behavior is the same. Some of them probably are, some of them might not be. Those who aren't are not of your creation and you wouldn't have had a good relationship with them anyway. Then there's some of them that aren't avoidantly attached, and maybe they could have worked out. Those are the ones that we want to be able to keep in the future, right? So you're not going to be able to discern that if you're still in the midst of feeling this fear of a rejection, abandonment, and not good enough. Once you switch the narrative, you do the deeper work to feel deeply secure in yourself, confident, you fill up your own emotional cup, uh, you know your own self-worth, you know exactly like who you are and what is okay for you to expect. All of that comes when you are quote unquote securely attached. And by the way, you can totally get there. I mean, I help people, uh, our thing is we help people go from anxiously attached to secure in just four months. And if they don't even make that transformation in the four months, they feel like they didn't like it, then we don't even make them pay for the program because it's and and I we've we have had no zero people go through unsuccessful. Everybody's done this successfully, everybody's come through. And so the hopeful message is you can do it. But let's play this out. If you're secure, then what happens is you have discernment as to who is avoidant and who's not, because number one, you've ruled out a lot of your own anxious behavior. You're like, I'm not double texting anymore, or clinging, or asking for commitment too early, or doing things that might otherwise be like a little bit manipulative to try to see them again. I'm not doing that anymore. All that stuff is gone. And so that's not going to be the factor that pushes them away. So if they start pulling away, then it's probably another factor. It's just like math. You just rule things out. It's an elimination diet, is what we've done. We've eliminated things, and now we know what's left, and we know what we're quote unquote allergic to and what's left over. And so, and you also have a greater sense of self-respect and self-worth. And so you're more likely going to be setting boundaries, not from a place of fear and anxiety, but from a place of self-respect, going, you know what? No, I need this in a relationship and I need that. And then you can watch the other person's response to determine if they are healthy or if they're more avoidant. It's really, really becomes simple. So you get clarity and discernment on who is and who isn't. You just feel better about yourself. It's more enjoyable to be in your own skin. And you wind up attracting the kinds of partners who are going to be close, we're going to show up for you, we're going to love you, all that, all that good stuff. It's just going to come flooding into your life. And so the answer is not to try and change your behavior to look secure. The true, the real answer is to truly become secure.

Gretta: 30:02

Could you share a little bit about the process that you teach to help people rebuild their sense of safety and worth from the inside out?

Trevor Hanson: 30:12

Yeah. Yeah. So there's so many different angles on how to go into it. And we utilize all of them. My my theory is that, you know, sometimes you'll go to like a therapist, for example, and they will have one methodology that they use kind of for everything. They're like an IFS or a CBT or a DBT therapist and they do that one move. And it's on purpose. They don't want to be so eclectic that they provide a disorganized experience for the client. And so they choose one lane. That's good. But if you have the skills to mix approaches, you have multiple schools of thought without it feeling disorganized, then you give the client the opportunity to have kind of the buffet experience. You take them to the buffet of all these different approaches and all these different ways of doing it. They find the ones that work for them. I like that one. You know, you get a small amount, bring it back to the table, eat it up. And then the next time you go back to the line to go grab some more, you know exactly what you want to load up on. You're like, oh man, the crab was so good. I'm doing that tonight, baby. That's so good. Or the steak or whatever. I'm imagining a really nice buffet, obviously, but you're uh you know what you want. And uh, but I will say, on that buffet table, a few things need a high-level principle needs to be there. The quality of the food, yeah, for example, would translate into a high-level principle. It's not necessarily each individual approach or each individual serving, but it's a principle that applies to the entire buffet. And the principle that applies to the entire approach is that most people are missing emotional experiences that reprogram their nervous system. Emotional experiences. So an example of something that's not an emotional experience is gaining more awareness around why you feel the way you do, or looking at your patterns and understanding them. It's good, but it's not actually going to change you deep down. Reading more books about attachment theory and dating and everything else in between, not actually going to change the heart of you. You know, I ask people all the time, do you feel like you're downloading so much information, like books, podcasts, maybe even therapy, awareness, but you don't feel like you actually see a big difference in the way you feel deep down or the way you behave. There's a gap. There's a big, big old gap. And that gap must be filled through the emotions. So I'll give you an example of an emotional experience. An emotional experience might be looking at what are the unmet needs of my childhood? Let's go back to the guy example, the guy who didn't have somebody listen to him express his emotions and there was no safety there. Okay, so the emotional experience is learning how to do that for yourself in the present day through daily rituals, practices, and routines where you are holding loving space for your own emotions, and you're becoming that new source of safety. And in so doing, really focusing on how do I feel when I do this? What's the emotion? And I almost guarantee you're gonna feel things like self-acceptance, self-love, self-trust, you know, hope. You're gonna feel that and just like letting your body bask in it. What that does is it treats it teaches the emotional part of your nervous system that you, the self, are the one that you can trust. You don't need somebody else to feel safe. Do we need somebody else in partnership? Yes, of course. I'm not saying to become the super individualized, I don't need no man snapping my fingers in a Z formation kind of queen that doesn't need anything. No, no, no, no, no. But you don't need anybody else to feel safe. And you are in charge of safety. Oh, baby, that's awesome. And you don't want those emotional experiences just once. You need them on repeat. That's why frameworks are really important. Frameworks provide the path for recreating an experience. It becomes a skill, not just a one-off that you have to rely on your therapist or your coach for. You can do it. So, in short, the answer is to become secure, you need emotionally corrective experiences that bring you towards feeling safe within yourself. And you need them on repeat. And in order to get them on repeat, you need frameworks that can take you there. And that's the whole premise of what we've built. It's all built on that idea.

Gretta: 34:38

I love that. Could you please share a self-guided practice that people can use on their own to support inner child healing and develop greater emotional safety?

Trevor Hanson: 34:51

Yeah, for sure. So I was one day sitting in Chick-fil-A and I saw this dad hanging out with his daughter, and the daughter was running back and forth from his booth to the playground. I had a playground at this particular Chick-fil-A, and she was probably four, maybe five, and she was just in the zone, man. She was like sweating. She was playing so hard. I loved it. She was just she had her hair all stuck to her face, and she was running back and getting a chicken nugget and then going and playing. Ultimate five-year-old experience. Like, I can't think of anything better at five than like eating chicken nuggets and running around Chick-fil-A. So that's what she was doing. And and there came the point in every five-year-old's day that is the worst part, which is the words, we gotta go home. But you gotta go home, right? And so dad says, We're hey, sweet, we gotta go home. And she starts to do what any reasonable five-year-old would do. She acts pretty irrationally, and she acts like a child. Of course she does. That's what she should do. She's five. And so she does a bit of that, and it wasn't too crazy, but she starts saying things that aren't very true. She says, But Dad, we're gonna never come back here. And he looks at her kind of curious, like, oh, weird. And she goes, And you're being so mean. Oh, okay. And he's just kind of listening to her. What I watched Dad do is a perfect model for how we can interact with our inner child. She was an actual child, but we all have an inner child, and an inner child is the part of us that still feels hurt, scared, lonely, protective, maybe angry, that's left over in our nervous system from times in our life when we originally felt that way. When we felt hurt, scared, lonely, not good enough, betrayed, um, insignificant. And it's kind of that self-protective part of our nervous system that then projects all that fear onto the current situations or our current partners or what have you. And so an inner child will also say really irrational things. It won't sound like we're never coming back, but it might sound like I'm never gonna find love, or they're never going to love me, or my partner doesn't care about me, or I'm not good enough, or I'm never gonna be good enough, everyone's gonna leave and nobody can be trusted. All those big scary beliefs, right? So they sound kind of similar to the little girl in Chick-fil-A, just different words, right? She even judged dad as mean, and we might judge others as uncaring or not loving when we're so fearful that they might be that way. And so what dad do what dad did was so cool. If we had to put it in steps, it could be step one. Is this the framework I'll give you? So if you're writing things down, again, remember frameworks is how you create repetition, and repetition is how you get emotional experiences. So step one is he's just validated her. He kind of leans over so he's on her level, and he goes, Oh, sweetie, I know you love being here so much. Oh, I know you're so upset because you gotta leave. That makes a ton of sense. And you think dad is being mean, yeah? She goes, Yeah, you're being mean. And he goes, Oh, and you feel like we're never gonna come back? She goes, Well, yeah, it's so good here. And he just goes, Okay, I get I get that. Dad does seem kind of mean right now because he's telling you what to do. And uh when you leave something so fun, sometimes it can feel like you're never coming back. I get it. And what happened there in step number one with the validation, he didn't say what sh her beliefs were true. He did not do that. He just said he gets it, he understands. And what happened is you could see her. I watched her start to come online with dad. She was like, Oh. She was kind of more trusting and more open to listening to dad because he listened to her. And step number two is he he invited her to listen to some some truth, kind of a reframe. He says, Can I tell you a couple things that might be important? And she's like, Well, sure, okay. And he goes, Well, you know how your cousin, every time they do a soccer game, we come here after. Well, we got a soccer game later this week, so we're actually coming back in just a few days. So we're definitely gonna come back. And you know your princess bed at home? You the one with the new cover on it? Yeah. Well, you want to sleep there, right? You don't want to sleep on these hard little chairs, do you? And she kind of laughs, like, no, I don't want to sleep on these chairs. And so she's starting to see that dad's got some wisdom that she doesn't. And he goes, and I'm not trying to be mean. Mom just sent me a message. She said that she's so excited to see you because she wants to hear about your, it was something at school that happened, I can't remember, your project. And she starts to go, oh yeah, I want to tell mom about that. So she's realizing that dad's not mean, that they're gonna come back and everything is okay. And so he reveals truth to her. This is kind of the second step in a loving way. He reveals the truth. If we're doing this with our inner child, maybe we're waiting for somebody to text us back and we think that they're not going to and we're freaking out. And maybe the truth we remind our inner child of is hey, even if they don't text you back, like that's not the end. You're okay. I still got you, I'm still here for you, or just at work. They don't text or at work, they told you. That's just how it goes, or there's another reason, right? There's so many signs that this person loves and cares about you. There's got to be another explanation why you're not getting that text. I got you, it's okay, right? It's that loving parent that you become for that part of you. And then the last step was dad invited her to take another choice. So he said, Why don't we go home, quickly finish your apple juice right here, and then we'll go home and we'll go see mom and we'll come back later in the week. How's that sound? She says, Okay. And she went willingly with dad. No kicking, no screaming, no hand pulling, none of that like horrible yelling parent junk that sometimes you see in public that makes you cringe. She went willing as can be. She buckled herself into her seat and off they went, and it was totally fine. She was almost dragging dad out the door. And this will happen with your inner child. When they trust you and you invite them to do something different, such as, hey, instead of worrying about getting this text back, let's call one of our best friends and just hang out with them for a minute. Or let's read something that makes us feel happy, or let's just make a meal, or go work out, or you know, pray, like whatever it is. Like just choose something else. And your inner child is much more likely to agree willingly to act secure. And I'll tell you, the coolest part of this whole process, validation, uh truth revealing, and then redirecting into a new path, is that there's an emotional experience that happens for that part of your nervous system where you feel love, you feel compassion, you feel closeness for that part of you. That feels like safety. That's the underlying emotional experience that really transforms you as you feel something during this process. It can be done through a meditation, it can be done through journaling, it can be done through just speaking it out loud to yourself as you sit there on your bed waiting for that text back and listening as if the inner child is speaking back and writing down what they say, but almost have a conversation with this internal part of yourself using that basic framework that we saw modeled from the data Chick-fil-A so beautifully.

Gretta: 42:54

I think it's brilliant. And I know listeners really needed to hear that. Many listeners probably really needed to hear that today. So thank you.

Trevor Hanson: 43:04

Thank you.

Gretta: 43:05

I wanted to ask you about information overload. We kind of touched on it, you kind of touched on it a little bit earlier. There's so much information out there about attachment, narcissism, just psychology in general. And after being betrayed, people tend to do a deep dive to really just understand the psyche of the person who hurt them. And years ago, I was in therapy and I was just analyzing the person who ghosted me, and my therapist was like, stop, stop analyzing them, focus on yourself. And it was kind of one of those light bulb moments where I'm like, okay, knowledge is power, but like at what point do you need to like kind of just stop going down the rabbit hole of Learning. Like somebody could go get a PhD in this stuff just to understand the other person, but like, how much do we really need to know?

Trevor Hanson: 44:08

It's far less important to understand the psyche of the person that hurt you than it is to understand yourself. And it's far more important to heal yourself. Um so much so that I don't actually think you need to understand the person who hurt you at all. I mean, it's sometimes nice, but most of the time what you're really looking for is an explanation that proves that you're actually lovable. That's what you're looking for. When you're trying to figure out why did they hurt me, you just need the jury to come out and say, it's not because of you. You're you're still enough, you're still lovable, look how messed up they are. And a good dose of that is fine. I'm not saying that it's wrong or anything of that in regard. Sometimes that is actually, well, I'll revise a little bit. Sometimes that is a little bit necessary to get you some momentum in the right direction. It unlocks maybe one barrier to healing, but the barrier that removes, my hope is that it leads to yourself. You remove the them, so it leads to the you, because the you is where you're going to find your your real healing. It's not by chasing down the story of who they were and why they hurt you, but really focusing on who you are and how you can heal you.

Gretta: 45:38

Yeah, this was incredible. How can everyone connect with you?

Trevor Hanson: 45:44

Uh yeah, so a good way of doing it is just go to Instagram. Uh, that's the biggest place where people find me, The Art of Healing by Trevor. Uh there, as well as on my website, theartofhealing by Trevor dot com. You can find me either place. And when you're there, I would say just the first thing you should do, yes, you could scroll the content, whatever, but if you're like, wow, I want to really put this into action, there's a free training, a little seminar. It's 15 minutes only, but it is, I almost guarantee if you've been stuck in therapy or coaching for years and you don't feel like you're making progress and you want to become secure, this will give you more clarity in 15 minutes on what you need to do in order to become that secure person than you've gotten in the last 15 years of therapy, however long you've been in there. Hopefully not 15 years. But um, and I say that with confidence because consistently, that's the feedback that we get from people. Like in 15 minutes, you blew my mind on what I actually need to do, and it's free. So go get it. There's literally zero risk, it's just a free video.

Gretta: 46:50

Well, your expertise is amazing. Thank you so much for being here and taking the time to share all of this important information with everyone. And yeah, I just I'm so grateful. So thank you.

Trevor Hanson: 47:04

Hey, thank you.

Gretta: 47:06

And friends, I'd love for you to follow at Coping with Ghosting on social media. Please join my free and private Facebook support group. Finally, remember, no matter what you're facing, you're not alone and you're worthy of care and consideration. You deserve the best.