The distant, independent, mysterious, aloof, slightly cold, but charming emotionally unavailable types can be so dang alluring. I know firsthand.
They are like a drug you want to get more and more of, even if you wished they were more emotionally available to you. But that’s how you should approach ending your desire to want an emotionally available person. It’s an active drug-like withdrawal you need to take. Because you deserve to be with someone who wants all of you…but first, you need to believe that.
What’s going on with emotionally unavailable people?
An emotionally unavailable person is typically seen as someone who has a fear or block to sharing their emotions, and feelings, and just generally struggles to sustain the emotional bond between the relationship. They delay making plans, don’t really want a label to the relationship, can’t commit, are inconsistent, they lead you on (aka “breadcrumbing”).
They likely have what psychologists call an “avoidant” attachment style, where they avoid intimacy due to past traumatic experiences of emotional neglect and shame for their feelings. They have not healed these wounds yet, and see relationships as a trap where it would be better to keep people at arm’s distance. They are afraid of intimacy.
Or the other hand, an emotionally unavailable person could just be someone you, specifically, can’t have. They are emotionally unavailable to you, although they could be emotionally available to others. An example is someone in a monogamous romantic relationship already or even someone who is busy (with a new job at work, with kids, with other recent big commitments) and clearly states this from the beginning.
There’s a lot of societal stereotyping around emotionally unavailable people being men, but emotionally unavailable romantic partners exist across the entire gender spectrum.
Now I could sit here and do a psycho-analysis of emotionally unavailable people but that wouldn’t give us true healing. Because healing our desire to want emotionally unavailable people comes from looking in.
Now, what’s going on with us?
Well, emotionally unavailable people like emotionally unavailable people. Now I hope this wasn’t too crazy of an insightful sentence, but it’s an important one to realize. Healthy people aren’t interested in continuing to date toxic people, and toxic people aren’t interested in continuing to date healthy people. You attract who you are, especially in the relationship with yourself. If you are emotionally unavailable to yourself, you will prefer an emotionally unavailable person because they feel familiar with how you treat yourself.
This is the science of attraction. Our mind is wired to choose what feels familiar because familiarity breeds safety and our mind wants to keep us safe. Specifically, our subconscious mind, which is responsible for ~95% of our decision-making. You want to change who you are attracted to, you need to change what feels familiar. And that starts from within. From looking at the person reading this and making a chance to be more emotionally available to yourself.
It’s really important to realize that always being attracted to emotionally unavailable people is a subconscious manifestation of your own emotional unavailability and fears around commitment, because if you were truly emotionally available and ready for love, you would be turned off by men who aren’t, not continue to chase or obsess over them. — Erika Simone
Every person you’re romantically interested in is a mirror and piece of feedback about how we treat ourselves. We have to believe we deserve better, and we have to believe we truly deserve emotionally available love even if our past told us we didn’t.
Luckily, we don’t have to be held back by our past anymore…and it starts with showing ourselves that.
So how can we become more emotionally available?
There are many ways to become more emotionally available, and you can find the way(s) that works best for you, but a starting list includes regularly integrating:
- Journaling about how you feel
- Meditating to connect with yourself
- Spending time being physically intimate and present with yourself
- Doing activities that you discover you love
- Going on self-dates
- Creating moments of vulnerability by allowing yourself to cry
- Write a letter to your younger self (especially explaining why you deserve love then and now)
- Asking others for help when needed
- Create, vocalize, and enforce your boundaries
- Sharing how you feel with safe people (people who care about you)
- Intentionally surround yourself with emotionally available couples/people
Changing your habits can take a lot of work and a lot of time, but you have to realize the pain of liking an emotionally unavailable person is worse than the pain of spending your whole life blocking yourself from real, healthy, and genuine love that you inherently deserve.
You change the world when you change yourself. World healing starts with self-healing. You end the curse of liking emotionally unavailable people when you realize the beauty of becoming more emotionally available to yourself, and you act on that realization.
You deserve to heal your limiting beliefs. It’s now time to believe that.
❤
N
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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