What Mel Robbins’ Convo w/Gabor Maté Has to do With Your Divorce & Attachment Style

5 Takeaways of this Podcast Episode

1. Invisible wounds matter most — Often it’s not the divorce traumas we remember but the emotional support we didn’t receive in childhood that shapes adult relationships. What Mel Robbins and Gabor Maté help us understand is that sometimes the deepest wounds aren’t from the big, dramatic events we remember — they’re from what was missing. If you find yourself thinking, “I didn’t have it as bad as others,” please know that childhood emotional neglect leaves very real scars. This is the root of Gabor Maté’s attachment style theory. Perhaps you couldn’t discuss relationships, your changing body, or your fears openly with your parents. Maybe you learned early on to be the “good girl” who didn’t ask for too much emotional support. These invisible wounds create those nagging feelings of unworthiness and make it so hard to trust in relationships. When you’re healing attachment style after divorce, it’s important to honor that what didn’t happen in your childhood matters just as much as what did happen.
2. Scarcity mindset is learned — Unmet childhood needs can create attachment styles rooted in “not enoughness,” driving desperation in love and connection. If you struggle with feeling like there’s never enough — enough love, enough security, enough solutions — this didn’t start with you. When we look at Gabor Maté’s attachment style work, we see how early experiences teach our nervous system about abundance or scarcity. Even if your family had enough money or took nice vacations, if you didn’t feel emotionally nourished, truly seen, or safely held, your heart learned that love is scarce. This scarcity mindset in relationships can make you feel desperate for connection, leading you to abandon yourself to keep others happy. Please be gentle with yourself as you recognize these patterns — they made perfect sense when you were little, and now you can learn a new way.
3. Patterns are subconscious — Many post-divorce struggles come from subconscious survival strategies like self-abandonment and avoidance. Here’s something you might recognize: as a child, you learned to take care of your parents’ emotions instead of having them take care of yours. You became really good at reading the room, avoiding conflict, and making yourself smaller to keep everyone else comfortable. While Mel Robbins’ divorce advice often focuses on making conscious choices, the truth is that these protective patterns live deep in your subconscious. You might find yourself avoiding difficult conversations, feeling paralyzed by a simple text message, or suddenly shutting down when triggered. These aren’t character flaws — they’re old survival strategies that once kept you safe. Now we can help those younger parts of you feel safe enough to try new ways of being.
4. Old vs. new healing — Traditional therapy and EMDR therapy can help, but deeper work with energy and homeopathy may unlock dissociated parts of yourself. You may have already done some work in therapy—maybe EMDR, somatic work, or talk therapy—and felt real progress. But then you notice you’re still struggling with the same patterns in relationships, still feeling disconnected from yourself, still avoiding or people-pleasing. Please don’t lose hope on the journey of healing your attachment style after divorce. What you’re experiencing is normal when trauma lives in parts of you that traditional therapy can’t quite reach. Think of it like this: some of your wounded parts are like shy children hiding so deep that they can’t hear when we call to them through regular therapy. Energy medicine and homeopathy can be like gentle music that reaches those hidden places, helping those parts feel safe enough to come forward so we can love them back to wholeness together.
5. Healing is possible — With awareness and the right tools, women can break free from repeating cycles, cultivate abundance, and rebuild secure attachment. Healing is absolutely possible for you. Yes, even if you’ve tried everything. Yes, even if it feels too hard. When you combine gentle awareness with the right healing tools, those old patterns that have felt so stubborn can finally shift. As you learn to heal attachment style after divorce through this deeper work, you’ll start to feel something you may have never experienced—a true sense of “enoughness” from within. Those parts of you that learned scarcity and self-abandonment can learn safety and self-love. You deserve to feel secure in relationships, worthy of gentle love, and confident in your own beautiful heart. This journey takes courage, but you don’t have to walk it alone, and you absolutely have what it takes to heal.

Highlights

• 00:00 “Overcoming Scarcity Mindset”
• 05:05 Invisible Traumas and Intimacy Issues
• 07:31 Overcoming Childhood Emotional Experiences
• 14:25 Unlocking Hidden Parts of Healing
• 17:15 “Homeopathy: Unlocking Energy for Healing”
• 19:36 Holistic Healing Program Launch

Full Podcast Transcript

Tiffini [00:00:00]:

But why do we keep falling into the same toxic internal patterns despite our best efforts after divorce? In a recent viral Instagram clip with Dr. Gabor Mate and Mel Robbins, he reveals a startling. It’s not just the traumas we remember. Women aren’t connecting the dots that the vital emotional support they never received before their traumas left the deepest scars, and they silently sabotage your adult relationships. In this episode, we uncover these unseen forces and chart a path to genuine healing. Okay, if you haven’t seen this viral Instagram clip yet, I have linked it right here in the show. Notes takes you straight to my Instagram so you can watch mel Robbins and Dr. Gabor Mate have this conversation.

Tiffini [00:00:47]:

It is very short, it hits very quick and very deep, and you will feel it in your body and then come right back here so that we can unpack. First things first. The deep impact of a lack of intimacy, or something we may call benign emotional neglect. I hate that phrase. But in childhood, right, because growing up without feeling emotionally safe or truly connected can be as damaging as overt abuse and the emotional neglect or lack of intimacy. It plants seeds of unworthiness and fear, which leads to trust issues and that relentless search for validation that you’re struggling with. And so connecting the dots to the invisible wounds is an essential step towards breaking free from the destructive cycles. I will share examples of how I’ve seen this play out in women’s lives over and over again in my private practice.

Tiffini [00:01:38]:

Then we’re going to talk about the silent saboteur, how the unmet childhood needs disrupt our attachment styles and actually create the scarcity mindset we tend to struggle with. Right? So it’s discussing this idea that healing from what we didn’t experience or receive love validation security is actually uniquely challenging to treat because those voids morph into insecure attachment styles, making us clingy or emotionally distant. They breed scarcity mindset, convincing us that, get this, love, support or solutions are limited resources. Do you ever feel like solutions themselves are limited resources, which then leads us to desperation and poor choices in our relationships. So I will talk about the ways I watch women struggle to access a sense of abundance when it feels like file not found in your subconscious mind. And then finally, we are going to talk about the difference between viral insights on Instagram and actual personal transformation. Because I think we get really excited about a viral awareness. But then it’s like, how do we actually implement the solution? So if you’ve seen the Gabor Mate clip, the insights resonate deeply

Tiffini [00:02:48]:

They shed light on patterns you’ve long struggled to understand. But now that you’re aware of the issue, do you love know how to address it? Do you know if your current efforts truly break the cycle or if they, you know, will ultimately find you slipping back into familiar, unfulfilling dynamics? So at the end of the episode, we’re going to explore the old way of addressing these patterns versus the new way. Let’s dig in. So I want to go on record here as saying, like, we’re not unpacking all of this to blame or shame anyone. Not your parents and the way they parented you and not you. If you’re a parent today, there’s no room for blame or shame here. There is only room to make the things that have previously been in our subconscious mind conscious so that we can shift the pattern. Because the bulk of where we live our life from the patterns from which we are acting on a daily basis, all day, all day, is from a subconscious place.

Tiffini [00:03:47]:

So that is the purpose of this conversation. Not to blame or shame you or anyone else. Now, over and over again, in my private practice, when doing EMDR therapy, somatic work using homeopathy, you name it, treating dissociation, all of the things that we struggle with when we’re trying to rehab our attacks, attachment style is that we have these single incidence traumas, right? Like a divorce or somebody left or an accident or an assault or a whatever, right, where we remember something horribly painful happening. But the thing that actually caused more damage that has to be rehabbed is the lack of safety, security, or relationship intimacy with the parents, their lack of capacity to support us through that thing or to have gone deep enough in a relationship with us prior to the thing in order to prevent the thing from even becoming a trauma. And so very, very often, therapists themselves struggle to treat attachment style. And people struggle to recover from these particular points that Dr. Gabor Mate made. Because it’s more about what didn’t happen in your childhood than what did.

Tiffini [00:05:05]:

And I see so many people in my private practice comparing their traumas and saying, I just didn’t have that horrible thing that happened to Becky. I didn’t. Who am I to say that I have an attachment style or keep struggling with relationships like what? I don’t have these things to point to. And that’s part of the problem, right? Because you do have these things to point to. This lack of intimacy, this lack of did you feel safe to talk to your parents about anything? Like anything, did you feel truly connected in your childhood? Relationships, friendships, social groups, community groups, did you feel safe to go to your parents about the most vulnerable experiences to do with friendships, sex, body image. I didn’t go to my parents about any of this, and maybe I’m the far extreme version, but I didn’t feel safe to go ask questions about sex or my body or, you know, I straight up and down was like afraid because I knew I was gonna be given an answer from the Bible and not an actual like sort of sensitive, you know, compassionate response. And let’s talk for a moment. The point Gabor Mate makes that very many of us as children in the good girl era, right, we were actually trying to protect our parents.

Tiffini [00:06:20]:

We were trying to protect ourselves by not being vulnerable, but we were actually trying to protect our parents because we sensed their overwhelm, right? And by being good girls or however we showed up, right, we were protecting them. And that’s sort of the reverse intention of a parental relationship, right? And so thank God all of this is healable, but that urge to protect them or to protect yourself is an issue. And then he describes how that actually that tendency for us to protect our parents rather than feeling deeply protected is actually what makes us vulnerable to experiencing traumas in the first place, right? Because predators can sense, and that can include your ex. Your ex can be said predator, right? Can sense. And maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I’m not trying to take it to the dramatic crazy place here, but people can sense when we are self abandoning. People can energetically sense when we are self abandoning. And so when we look at this early childhood tendency to self abandon, that is the scarcity from which, you know, I see most women really struggling to recover from.

Tiffini [00:07:31]:

And I see it over and over again in my practice where when I’m in there with EMDR actually treating the capital T traumas, that then there will be this sensitive moment that pops in somewhere in their memory networks where either a caregiver denied that the bad thing happened or didn’t support them when they revealed it or shamed them or avoided it or told them that it was their fault or like any host of things, right? But inevitably I’ve seen it over and over again when treating these things, that it’s actually how the parent responded or didn’t respond, that that is the more complex thing to recover from. So where do we go from here? Because this is the roadmap, right, for scarcity mindset, for attachment style problems, for this sort of desperation for external validation or a difficulty feeling like we don’t have to abandon ourselves when we’re Parenting or when we’re dating, or when we’re even just in social circles, right? Or on the Internet. Like we need to, you know, curate how we present ourselves and not be authentic. This is the birthplace of codependency. And all of these issues that have become such popular conversations, which I’m so, so, so grateful for. But the really interesting thing that I watch women struggle with is how do you teach someone to have in a mindset or a perspective of self that they cannot find because it didn’t happen in their childhood, Right? So let’s go to if you felt a lack of sufficient support or a lack of sufficient intimacy or a lack of sufficient problem solving in your childhood, Right. If it felt like there was not enough resource, even if it was, even there was, if there was enough money or even if there was enough fun or enough, you know, experiences. Maybe you had lots of cool experiences in child, but childhood, but where it came to those emotional pieces, there was like not enough of something, right? Not enough protection, not enough seeing you for who you are, whatever the not enoughness is, right? How do you help women really experience, experience enoughness when they can’t remember feeling enoughness? That’s the issue that I think most people run into when they’re trying to rehabilitate an attachment style.

Tiffini [00:10:10]:

And this is why it’s actually easier for women who have children to rehab their attachment style than for women who have not had children yet. Because when you have had a child, there’s just this thing, this thing that happens in your amygdala and in your heart to do with bonding and connection that often, I don’t want to say it always happens because it doesn’t always happen because sometimes there are some neurobiological factors that interrupt it happening, right? But for many women who have had children, it can be somewhat easier for them to rehab their attachment style because there’s been this sort of bonding experience, this capacity to give love. And so that doesn’t always mean that it’s easier for women to receive love themselves or to see themselves through loving eyes. But when you’ve had a child and you can see your child through loving eyes, often I can help women transfer those loving eyes that they have towards their child, towards themselves. Now it’s still a process and it’s very, very challenging. And the habit to self abandon once you’ve become a mother is even greater, I believe, right? So it’s like, all right, mothers have an easier time in one way and have a harder time in another way, right? So, but, but this is sort of the silent saboteur, if you will. Right? Is like, I keep inviting you into this abundance mindset, this law of attraction as a tool, this trusting the universe, this not abandoning yourself, seeing yourself as pure magic, the way I see you. But if you have not, if you cannot remember feeling that, how do you get there? And multiple women in this last week, you know, because we’re enrolling our program currently and we’ve been having these beautiful conversations with so many women.

Tiffini [00:11:52]:

Multiple women have told me that this is where they struggle, that they have done a lot of really good work in therapy. They’ve maybe done EMDR and they’ve done some somatic work and they’ve faced a lot of really, really hard things. But there are still these tendencies that it falls apart in dating relationships. Or gosh. One really amazing woman said, it feels like when she tackled dissociation and got honest with herself about some of these traumas, it feels like she took the car apart really successfully. Right. The old way, but then can’t figure out how to put the car back together. And I think that falls in line with what we’re saying here.

Tiffini [00:12:26]:

It’s like, how do you build something you’ve never seen or felt or experienced before? Like, do you ever watch Great British Bake off and they have to do that one middle challenge where all they get is, like some directions on a page, but they’ve never seen the thing and there’s no actual recipe. Right. I feel like that’s the thing we’re talking about here. And so I’ve seen a lot of women bump up against some real limiting beliefs that they are really dug into. And it’s because there’s not this early childhood remedy. I mean, memory of abundance and solutions and enoughness and, you know, for them to know how to rebuild the car or bake. Bake the dish. And so that is real.

Tiffini [00:13:08]:

And then, you know, you get a viral clip like Gabor and Mel Robbins. I mean, we’re all obsessed with Mel Robbins lately, right? We. We’ve been reading in our program with the women that we’re currently working with, Mel’s book, let them. And how many of the women, right, we’ve really had to work through. Well, how do we let them. And then let me, like, in practice, right. Really excited about viral clips like this. We get really excited about Mel’s book.

Tiffini [00:13:37]:

But then I watch in real time, women struggle to implement. And that’s where my heart really goes out to you. Because then you start to lose hope and faith that true Healing is even possible. So let’s talk about this sort of last piece, right? The old way, the new way. You’ve heard of Mel’s book, you’ve heard of Gabor Mate, maybe you’ve read some of his work and you have done all this really good therapy, but there is still this stuck stuff. And as far as you know, you are doing really good work to break the cycle, to be aware of these things. You’re listening to this podcast, you are doing everything you know to do, to connect the dots. These insights, they resonate deeply.

Tiffini [00:14:25]:

You’re so grateful for them, it feels like it’s unlocking entire rooms in your mind that you never knew were even there. And that in and of itself feels like a relief. But now what the old way of healing from these things, right, is find a really good therapist who understands somatics or emdr, brain spotting or whatever it is, right? And do some really good work there. Get very excited about the progress. It may take years, right, but you will make really cool progress. But afterwards you will start to realize that you still struggle with dissociation. Periodically, you still have dissociative parts in terms of internal family systems parts work, which we’ve been talking about, that have been very hard to reach, right? Because you can do really good work with those parts that are on top. But then very often the reason dissociation persists even after doing really good somatics, even after doing really good EMDR is because you have pre verbal parts, pre picture memory parts, or you have parts that are so buried in dissociation that EMDR can’t reach them.

Tiffini [00:15:32]:

And so then after a period of time, you realize, shit, I still am doing dopamine seeking behavior, I still am doing needing validation behavior, or I’m still doing avoidance behavior. How’s about that, right? You know what I mean when I say avoidance behavior? That text message comes in and you have a body sensation. And you have a body sensation because you’ve done good work. And so you’ve connected the dots, right? That you have a body sensation, but then you can’t sit with it, right? And it takes you hours or days to circle back to that text message because somewhere in there a part got triggered, right? And so when it comes to healing from divorce, this stuff comes up when you’re dealing with parenting issues, when you’re dealing with co parenting issues, when you’re dealing with watching your ex’s new partner do X, Y or Z. I have tea to spill about my ex husband’s ex wife, I cannot Believe I buried the lead this late in the podcast. You will have to tune in next week. I don’t know when we’re gonna drop that, but we have spoken. There’s that.

Tiffini [00:16:36]:

Okay, but. So these avoidance behaviors, right, they come up with your co parenting, they come up with your family, they come up when you start dating. They come up, you know, when you get triggered by your own children. Like, they come up in so many places, right? That’s dissociation. Those are dissociated parts that are coming up. And so the old way is you do emdr, you do your best work, you get really excited, but you notice down the road, you still have dissociation, you still have dissociative parts, you’re still doing avoidance behavior, you’re still craving validation, you’re still seeking dopamine, and you feel really frustrated and like, it’s not fair that it should be this hard, because it’s freaking hard. It’s too hard. Okay? That’s the old way.

Tiffini [00:17:15]:

The new way is you start to understand what frequency and vibration have to do with your healing journey. You take personalized homeopathic remedies because that’s energy medicine that unlocks the deepest energetic patterns inside of you. So homeopathy, the reason I will die on this hill every day is because it can reach those dissociative parts that EMDR cannot. It will unlock the dissociative parts that somatics cannot, and it will fundamentally shift those pieces, bringing those patterns directly up to the surface so that then when you do emdr, ifs somatics, you build new pathways faster. Homeopathic remedies will disengage the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal access. Damage that has been done from decades of trauma. Has anybody ever told you you had adrenal fatigue or you had you struggled with distress association, or you have a tendency towards anxiety or towards panic? That’s because, do you have hair loss? Do you have problems with weight gain or weight loss? Do you have, you know, menopausal? Are you in early, early menopause? Do you know how many women come to me recovering from divorce, and they are in early menopause because their HPA access has been so dysfunctional because of decades of these dissociated patterns? EMDR cannot solve that for you, but homeopathy plus EMDR plus somatics can solve that for you. So the new way is you take personalized remedies, and then you, from that unlocked, energetic place, understand how frequency works and how to move frequency in your body.

Tiffini [00:18:57]:

Now the law of attraction is flowing inside of you. Now when you use all those strategies, you know this is happening for you, not to you. Now when you’re really understanding what I’m saying, you have to tip up on the vibrational scale that feels available to you because those dissociative parts are within your reach. And now you are present and dissociation has gone away. And now the patterns on the surface and you can shift them. And all the books you’ve read and all the podcasts you’ve listened to, now it feels within your grasp to move. Because before it was buried too far. Because it wasn’t the car accident, the fall on your bike, your parents getting divorced, the sexual assault.

Tiffini [00:19:36]:

It wasn’t that event that caused all this problems. It was these pre 7 years old things that are so dissociated it is hard to even pinpoint. File NOT found that’s what homeopathy unlocks and then gives you access to everything else. And so if you’ve been struggling, feeling like it is too hard and you’ve been doing it the old way and you’ve been thinking about joining our program and you have told yourself there is some reason our program is not, not a fit, it’s too expensive, it’s too hard, it’s too much of a commitment, it takes too long. That’s because to actually treat the things successfully that Gabor Mate talks about, it is a complex layered issue that most therapists cannot treat, most therapists can touch it, can nudge it, can impact it to an extent, but cannot resolve. And so love, if something today resonated deeply inside of you, this is your sign, right? It is the last couple of days before doors close to a different D word. Our fundamental comprehensive program at treating the thing that Gabor and Mel are discussing. And it is exciting the idea of what we can shift with you using these tools.

Tiffini [00:20:49]:

It is why we are so hellbrent on understanding how to move energy in this program. It’s why we do it completely differently because we understand the shift between the old way and the new way. If you are ready for the new way, if you are ready to push the easy button, that doesn’t mean it’s easy because it’s still hard, right? But it is a hundred times easier than the old way goes deeper, more effective, faster, new pathways. Like if you are ready to push the easy button, scroll down into the show notes where it says join the list. Different D word, right? There’s, there’s a link at the top of the show notes and there’s another link at the bottom of the show notes. Either one will take you to the same place. Fill out the brief form, sign up today, Coach Tiffany and I will reach out to you and we will get it going. Don’t abandon yourself.

Tiffini [00:21:36]:

One more time. I love you so much. Peace.