The term emotionally unavailable describes a person who has problems developing and sustaining emotional attachments in relationships. For various reasons, some people are much more comfortable being open and emotionally available than others. Having a healthy relationship with someone who has a problem being emotionally available is likely to be complicated.
- Are you drawn to emotionally unavailable people?
- Why does this happen, and how might you change this?
What makes some people emotionally unavailable?
Think for a moment about how the pattern of emotional unavailability may have begun.
We begin life in a state of total dependency, needing to try to make sure that our carers know what we want, and when they gave us those things, we needed to be able to express our satisfaction in such a way as to help create a sense of mutual feedback. So all being well, we got what we needed, and our carers took pleasure in giving us those things, and in this way we developed healthy patterns of attachment. This forms the basis of our internal working model, our internalised way of making sense of relationships.
Now when this pattern of mutual reciprocation works well, we can develop confidence in our capacity to know what we need, and in the people who look after us, and they develop confidence in being able to take care of us. Our pattern of attachment is secure and mutually sustaining.
Patterns of attachment and emotional availability
In this way we foster a sense of emotional security in ourselves, and we encourage that in other people. This kind of mutual positive feedback loop helps us to build up a sense of reciprocal value in ourselves and in the world around us. The long-term consequence of this is that when it comes to developing relationships, we might be drawn to people with whom we can repeat this pattern of positive interaction. We have a sense of our own emotional availability and we are drawn to people who are similarly emotionally available, people with whom we can develop a secure sense of attachment.
But it doesn’t always work so well, and if we were parented and cared for by people who were themselves emotionally unavailable, if their patterns of attachment were less secure, then that may have a consequence in terms of how we went on to develop our friendships and love relationships. The experience of attachment that we grew up with stays with us and goes on to shape the way we form attachments in later life.
Emotionally unavailable: When love becomes a negative feedback loop
Instead of a positive feedback loop developing which reinforces a sense of emotional availability, and which might be the basis of enduring and secure attachments, the opposite can happen.
A state of emotional unavailability becomes the norm, and this can have far-reaching consequences in terms of our ongoing development.
Could it be that we keep meeting people who are emotionally unavailable because we keep looking for them?
Strange as it may seem, we are often drawn to find things that reflect the world we have come from, and if that includes an experience of emotional unavailability, then that is what we may seek out and find.
If it has always been familiar to us that interactions with others are disappointing, that we may never have had the sense of getting what we want, then that can make it hard for us to build up a level of self-knowledge about what we find satisfying.
The more this is repeated, the more it can create a kind of mismatch in us so that we continually find ourselves drawn to people with whom we can repeat the experience of emotional unavailability. In this way, we can go around a cycle that reinforces our sense that we can never know what it is like to be emotionally satisfied. We never develop a sense of secure attachment. We struggle to know what it means to become emotionally available.
Strange as it might sound, we may have become so used to experiences of emotional unavailability that we don’t know what to make of anything else.
How do we change the experience of being emotionally unavailable?
One possibility is that we find a way to recognise and learn more about ourselves, to identify that our sense of emotional satisfaction may always have been more complicated than we realised.
If we can find a way to work on this in a confidential setting, perhaps in psychotherapy, then we may find a way to stop repeating our experience of relationships always creating a sense of emotional unavailability.
Furthermore, because these kinds of experiences are often handed on from one generation to the next, when we find a way to work on these things for ourselves, when we find a way to change the pattern of repeatedly looking for partners who are emotionally unavailable, we may be changing it for those who come after us, for our children.
Addressing this question of your experience of emotional unavailability may have far-reaching and surprisingly beneficial consequences for you.
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Having the chance to speak in a confidential setting is often the key to developing a clearer understanding of what might be behind our experiences of emotional unavailability. It may provide the space to understand more about how experience may have shaped us in ways that we haven’t fully acknowledged.
By giving yourself a safe space to look at these things you may start to discover a greater sense of possibilities, and this may be the beginning of developing a greater sense of understanding how to relate to yourself and others, how to start living more fully again, and how to start to have healthy relationships with yourself and other people.
The chance to reflect on ourselves, our feelings and experience can be powerful and transformative. Out of this, you may be able to develop a clearer understanding of how you and your sense of your problems have developed, and what you can change.
I have been working with people on issues like this for more than twenty-five years. My work is built around helping people to develop greater insight into who we are, and how we live.
Contact me to arrange a free telephone consultation to discuss how my approach might help you.
Email: toby@tobyingham.com
