In this Soul teaching on Part I – how to stop attracting emotionally unavailable love, you will learn:
- The distinction between emotional availability and emotional unavailability
- How emotional unavailability is a sign of unresolved trauma
- The covert ways trauma can be stored in your psyche
- Why an emotionally unavailable lover in your life is really an opportunity to heal
- And more…This is Part I of a two part series on emotional unavailability, you can read Part II here.
Are you a magnet for emotionally unavailable love?
It took me a while to get around to writing this teaching (three months to be exact). mainly because I wanted to get a sizeable group of respondents to take the poll so that we could really get a good idea of how the percentages held when we scaled up a couple of hundred people.
It’s no surprise seeing that many of my current newsletter subscribers and social media followers are on their Twin Flame journey, that a large portion of my audience feel they struggle to find or keep love and that when they do find love, an even higher percentage finds their partner emotionally unavailable.
This may have impacted the percentages to be higher, because my audience is a conscious lot, who also have high standards when it comes to love relationships. My audience is into self-reflection and tends to be aware of the different recurring patterns in their life.
They don’t live their life on auto-pilot.
My audience wants more out of a relationship than security, status, sex and children (chakras 1 to 3). They want deep soul connection, authenticity, purpose and spiritual evolution (chakra 4 and up). Which makes them more aware of the lack thereof in their current reality.
Because the soul uses separation (distance) to bring up the subconscious wounding within Soul Partnerships, it can certainly feel as if your person is emotionally unavailable. This could even be the case, that they are emotionally unavailable in and of themselves.
It could however also be that they appear to be emotionally unavailable to you specifically in order to help you bring up deeper unresolved pain that you are not aware of but carrying within your vibrational field. Even both could be true at the same time, meaning they are emotionally unavailable and they are helping you bring up deeper unresolved subconscious pain that you are not aware of consciously – but that is there nonetheless.
This is not to say that if you are a magnet for unavailable love that you are somehow to blame and that it’s your own damn fault. Blame is a 3D concept to begin with, it does not exist in the higher dimensions (5D and up). It’s also not to help you gaslight yourself into excusing your person’s potential bad behavior.
As both scenarios would keep you firmly stuck where you are right now.
Instead I am writing this teaching to give you a deeper perspective that will allow you to shift out of the pattern that has emotionally unavailable love manifest itself in your reality to begin with. This is information that I would have loved to know in my 20, 30, and even 40’s.
Oh gosh, it would have saved me some heartache.
Because if you are a magnet for love that shows up as emotionally unavailable, than the thing that you want most is to have love be emotionally available to you – am I right?
It’s my intention in writing this teaching series including Part I (that you are currently reading) and Part II (coming soon) to get you onto a trajectory that has you reach this goal of becoming a magnet to true love, that is fully available to you in every way.
If you are done feeling unseen, unheard, unappreciated, unwanted and unloved, bear with me as we delve deep into the origins of emotional unavailability and find the keys to shifting this pattern once and for all.
But before we start, I want you to promise yourself one thing and that is to take action after reading this. Knowledge itself never changes anything, it’s the application of knowledge that creates change. For example: You can know that eating junk food is not good for you and that eating clean is better. Knowing this, does not change your health or your weight, the knowledge itself has no impact on your body and it changes nothing. Until you apply that knowledge and stop eating junk food (or at least, eat less of it) and start eating clean instead – your body can’t benefit.
In the same way breaking the pattern of attracting emotionally unavailable love takes committed action from your side, reading this teaching along with ten other teachings and various different books on this same topic changes nothing. You can read all the information you want about having love show up the way you want it, but unless you take the steps that need to be taken to achieve your goal nothing will happen. This is because knowledge itself changes nothing, until you apply that knowledge to your life.
The results of our poll
Reading the results of our poll you will see that our audience is around 90% female. The majority is heterosexual and a smaller portion plus or minus one fourth of both our male and female audience identifies as LGBT.
72.3% of our audience feels they are struggling to find or keep love. The slight majority of 60.6% are currently not in a relationship, but almost 40% are (although often not with the person they want to be with, if I look at my clients who are part of this audience).
What is really interesting though is that 79% of our poll respondents feel that they attract emotionally unavailable partners, which means that even when they are in a relationship which was roughly 40% yes and 60% no – they feel that their partner is emotionally unavailable to them.
The other thing I found extremely interesting is that there wasn’t that much difference between an emotionally unavailable father 67.7% and an emotionally unavailable mother 62%. In hind sight I would have liked to have added some control questions here, to deepen this out a bit like ‘Who do you feel was more emotionally unavailable? Your mother or your father?’ Also switching from unavailable to available in this question may have led to some wrong answers.
But although the results are maybe a bit skewed, they are interesting nonetheless and there may actually be a very logical explanation for the perception of both parents being less emotionally available than we would want our parents to be (I go into this in Part II of this teaching series).
How does emotional availability affect your love life….?
| Do you struggle to find or keep love? | Yes 72.3% No 27.7% |
| Are you currently in a relationship? | Yes 39.4% No 60.6% |
| Do you tend to attract emotionally unavailable partners? | Yes 79.0% No 21.0% |
| Was your father emotionally available to you? | Yes 32.3% No 67.7% |
| Was your mother emotionally available to you? | Yes 38.0% No 62.0% |
| Are you male or female? | Male 10.0% Female 90.0% |
| What is your sexual preference? | Men 76.8% Women 15.5% Both 7.7% |
What is emotional availability?
But before we can go deeper into the underlying causes of emotional unavailability, we first need to define what it means to be emotionally available and what it means to be emotionally unavailable. We can’t find the underlying causes or the way out of this pattern, before first really understanding what we are talking about.
I turned to the blogosphere for these definitions:
‘Emotional availability is being able to consistently feel your way through difficult, undesirable, or painful emotions – both within yourself and in others. You don’t avoid, dismiss, or run away from these feelings nor do you allow them to dictate your actions.‘
Source: natashadamo.com
‘Being emotionally available means being reachable. Its both the ability to feel deeply, as well as to communicate those deep feelings. Being emotionally available also means being able to sit with difficult/upsetting/challenging emotions, both in yourself and in others, and to not run away from them. It means being able to be with someone who is in pain and not trying to fix it, but instead, just being a loving, brave, mindful presence with that person. Being emotionally available means being open to, comfortable with and brave in the face of all human emotions and experiences (not just the easy, light or positive ones). Being able to face both the beautiful, the light, and the good, as well as the painful, difficult and the dark.’
Source: travelsandtrdelnik.com
Contrast that to what it means to be emotionallyunavailable:
‘Emotional unavailability describes a person who’s evasive, avoids meeting up, or simply doesn’t like to talk about their feelings or relationships. That person might also have difficulties with the following: trusting people. bursts of anger. forming and honoring commitments.’
Source: greatist.com
‘Fear is one of the root causes of an emotionally unavailability: fear of intimacy, fear of being overwhelmed, fear of being hurt, fear of being judged, irrational fear of death and/or fear of being exposed as less than who they portray themselves to be. When we look deeper into the emotionally unavailable person they have almost always experienced feelings of toxic shame, feelings of not being good enough, feelings of inadequacy or simply feelings of being bad.’
Source: allrelationshipmatters.com.au
In short emotional unavailability is a trauma response.
This is something that will be fully clear once you have finished reading this teaching. When a person is emotionally unavailable, it is because this pattern is their survival mechanism that they developed due to unresolved trauma that has caused them to shut down emotionally to themselves.
When you have shut down your own emotions, you are going to have a hard time being truly emotionally available to someone else. Especially within partnerships, where the emotions of our partner stir our own emotions and so listening to our partner share their emotions about how they experience us and our relationship with them will often stir precisely those emotions we don’t want to feel or can’t allow in (see shutdown emotions above).
It hits our unresolved pain, and it’s the unresolved pain being triggered that causes someone to become emotionally unavailable to their partner.
It’s not because of the partner that one shuts down, but because of the unresolved pain.
Trying to fix someone’s pain, is not the same as being emotionally available.
You are not your partner’s therapist or parent, nor do you want to assume these roles with them. Even a professional therapist, should not council their own spouse because of the unequal distribution of power within a client-therapist relationship. Assuming the role of a parent or a counselor, creates an unequal distribution of power within your relationship triggering for example feelings of toxic shame, feelings of not being good enough, feelings of inadequacy or simply feelings of being bad as described above which causes the emotionally unavailable partner to shut down emotionally even further.
Being truly emotionally available, is being with someone while you allow them to go into their arising emotions by creating a safe non-judgmental space without interfering in or trying to steer their process. You simply hold space for them, while they internally face what arises in the same way you allow yourself to face what wants to be seen within your own emotional experiences. The key to emotional availability is being able to embrace and allow all the emotions within yourself. the good, the bad and the ugly.
Allowing yourself to feel an emotion is something different than reacting from your emotions. You can allow yourself to feel through anger, without lashing out or hurting someone through your anger. Emotions do not need to be acted out negatively, in order to be released. They need to be allowed in and felt as they pass through. The more you suppress or disown certain emotions, the more overpowering they become.
Why also you carry unresolved trauma
For the next part of our understanding of what causes emotional unavailability we need to redefine our definition of trauma. Let’s start off with some quotes from experts within the field of healing trauma, to help us deepen our scope of understanding of the concept:
“Trauma is a psychic wound that hardens you psychologically and then interferes with your ability to grow and develop. It pains you and now you’re acting out of pain. It induces fear and now you’re acting out of fear. Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you. Trauma is that scarring that makes you less flexible, more rigid, less feeling and more defended.”
Gabor Maté
“Trauma is an inability to inhabit one’s body without being possessed by its defenses and the emotional numbing that shuts down all experience, including pleasure and satisfaction.“
Bessel van der Kolk
Like most people you probably believe that because you can’t remember any great traumatic events in your life, that you aren’t that traumatized. We tend to think that trauma is defined by these big memorable experiences, that mark us forever which is one overt way that trauma can show up in our lives, but there are also many covert ways in which trauma can develop and be ingrained in our psyche over time.
Basically there are three categories of psychological trauma: acute, chronic and complex. But because something is our lived experience and we don’t know any better, we can fail to recognize the latter two types of trauma. Alternatively, we may think that because there was no domestic violence or abuse in our families of origins that we can’t be traumatized but for example a parent making their child their best friend and confidant is considered emotional incest and can be very traumatizing because it reverses the roles between parent and child.
Bessel van der Kolk, MD gives us an accurate understanding of trauma when he states that trauma is specifically an event that overwhelms the central nervous system, altering the way we process and recall memories. “Trauma is not the story of something that happened back then,” he tells us. “It’s the current imprint of that pain, horror, and fear living inside people.”
Trauma he says comes back as a reaction not a memory.
So, trauma is not as much about what has happened to us, as well as how what happened to us impacted us and created a trauma-response (a survival or defense mechanism). Our survival and defense mechanisms are the response alterations (Bessel van de Kolk’s reaction) we adapt in order to prevent ourselves from re-living our experienced unprocessed pain.
It becomes like a pre-programmed work around that is meant to keep us safe, but that no longer serves us after some time. Initially we may very well need this protection, but as time passes and it remains unprocessed/unhealed it becomes a burden that dictates our trauma-driven responses and limits us.
And this is where the focus shifts from the emotionally unavailable person or person’s in your life to you, despite the fact that all of this applies to them too. But we can’t change other people, we can only ever create our realities from within ourselves, which is why we need to put our focus within and not outside of us.
Dealing with an emotionally unavailable person can make you feel unseen, unheard, unappreciated, unwanted and unloved.
But here’s the thing:
The ONLY way that you can feel any of the above, is if you have existing unresolved pain around feeling seen, heard, appreciated, wanted and loved. If there was no unresolved pain, these feelings wouldn’t be triggered. On some level these feelings already need to be true for you in order for them to be felt now.
They ring a bell (i.e. sound vaguely familiar) within your psyche.
This is the flip side to the emotional unavailability pattern. The part we often don’t want to hear, out of fear that our experience is our own fault. But let me clear this fear up immediately, none of this is your fault.
I’ll explain why and will even expand further on this in Part II of this teaching.
Anytime that we carry unresolved trauma and pain within the subconscious, the subconscious mind in order to help us heal it, pulls in the people, situations and experiences that help us re-enact our unresolved pain.
Our soul and the subconscious offer us a redo, that not only allows us the opportunity to heal the original pain but offers us a complete exit from the underlying pattern.
Everything is always happening for us and not against us. Which in this case means that when we attract an emotionally unavailable lover in our lives, it offers us an opportunity to heal the underlying unresolved pain of feeling unseen, unheard, unappreciated, unwanted and unloved that we for example carry with us from our childhood, past life experiences, as a collective trauma (patriarchal for example) or transgenerational trauma that was passed on to us through our maternal or paternal lineages.
In Part II of this teaching, we will dive into how to heal this pattern of emotionally unavailable love and discuss where and how it originated. I will also address the potential reason why many of our poll respondents felt that both their parents were emotionally unavailable. Be sure to check back in for Part II of this series on emotional unavailability.
At the beginning of this teaching I asked you to promise yourself to take action on the knowledge being shared with you and I would like to invite you to take inspired action before I publish the next part of this series. It doesn’t matter if you take a small step or a big leap, as long as you act on this new perception of your reality, that has opened up to you after you finished reading Part I.
I pray this teaching serves you and has helped deepen your understanding of the internal pattern that attracts emotionally unavailable lovers into your life. It is a pattern dynamic that works both ways, as you also trigger your person to become aware of their unresolved pain and trauma that they have shutdown or disowned.
Healing trauma is an essential part of the Inner Union and Ascension process, as it prepares the physical body (where the trauma is stored – trauma alters our physiology) for the unification with the soul.
With my deepest love,
