An emotionally unavailable person is typically seen as someone who has a fear or block to sharing their emotions, and feelings. They delay making plans, don’t really want a label to the relationship, can’t commit, are inconsistent, they lead you on, or worse. They can be emotionally abusing you (gaslighting, stonewalling, lying).
They likely have 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, and see relationships as a trap where it would be better to keep people at arm’s distance. They are afraid of intimacy. Or can be pathologically incapable of empathy and intimacy.
Finding yourself in a cycle of attracting avoidant, emotionally unavailable partners tends to arise from our own earliest relationships and their psychological effects on our development. It usually happens because we are unconsciously repeating patterns familiar to us.
So people who attract emotionally unavailable people tend to have grown up in homes where one or both parents were also emotionally unavailable.
If your main caregiver didn’t nurture or care for you in the way you needed, you might be facing a subconscious tendency to choose partners who do the same to you in adulthood. While some may be fully aware they had unemotionally unavailable parents, a deep, wounded part of themselves attracts similar romantic partners. Our unhealthy patterns as adults aren’t usually ‘adult’ at all; they result from the wounded child within us.
This perpetual cycle causes us to question our worthiness for love. When there is a pattern in which someone is mostly attracting emotionally unavailable partners into their life, the person believes on a subconscious level that they have to work for love. That love hurts. because that’s what love was to them as a child.
As they grew up, they didn’t believe love was unconditional, as they’d never received unconditional love before. And so, the person may attempt to rewrite history, repeating this pattern with romantic partners and hoping subconsciously or unconsciously for a different outcome. This is trauma reenactment. When you continue to call in partners of the same nature and hope for different results, you continue risking further damage to your confidence and ability to trust yourself.
How do we begin to heal our attachment and abandonment traumas, wounded inner child and stop attracting emotionally unavailable partners?
• Journalling about how you feel.
• Meditating to connect with yourself.
• Doing activities that you discover you love.
• Going on self-dates.
• Finding support with a professional
Andrea x