The essence of conscious growth in a relationship depends on the couple’s desire to grow together psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, as well as sexually. This implies conscious awareness of the self, conscious awareness of all of one’s feelings, thoughts, actions, and reactions, and acceptance of the fact that each of us is responsible for all of these facets of ourselves. Such a conscious link between partners keeps sex alive in ways that go far beyond sex toys and fantasy games because it speaks to the real – and eternal – connection between the two individuals.
Gabriella Kortsch, Emotional Unavailability and Neediness
If you don’t love yourself, you’ll always be chasing after people who don’t love you either.
Mandy Hale
The bad news is that you get your feelings back. The good news is that you get your feelings back.
Often heard in Twelve Step Fellowships
My friends and I had a very interesting discussion on Emotional Availability this week. We shared our experiences of growing up in families where the adult caregivers were often emotionally unavailable and how we had developed coping strategies to survive such barren childhood landscapes, strategies that were no longer serving us in adult life.
Then the conversation turned to some fundamental questions, pertinent to our growth and healing today, such as:
How do I know if I am emotionally available?
How can I tell if the person with whom I am interacting is emotionally available?
What can I do to explore the availability of someone or myself?
How do I discern between fantasy, wishful thinking, and reality?
What are the red flags of emotional unavailability?
To set these questions in context, we could look at a recent „Topic of the Day“ from the PQ (Positive Intelligence) Mental Fitness modality (by Shirzad Chamine, paraphrased by myself), which goes as follows:
The best way to tell if you are in „Sage“ or „Saboteur“ energy is by observing your emotions, energy, and mood. That would help you to intercept your Saboteurs faster and, should they have already succeeded in hijacking you, to recover faster.
Today’s focus is to practice becoming a stronger observer of your own moods and emotions. Simply observe and notice your emotions and moods as often as you can. To keep it simple, just label each observation and assign it to one of the following categories: positive, negative, or neutral.
Negative emotions and moods include (and are not limited to): stress, anxiety, fear, anger, resentments, disappointments, self-doubt, guilt, and shame.
Positive emotions and moods include those such as peace of mind, gratitude, curiosity, compassion, empathy, delight, joy, and love.
Neutral is where there is no emotional charge at all, such as when you’re just doing simple routine tasks.
This blameless self-observation is key to determining whether you are in fear-based Saboteur or love-fuelled Sage mode, so you can decide if and when to shift. For today, however, don’t worry about shifting and don’t judge yourself if you observe yourself in a negative mood.
Simply observe your emotions and moods as often as you can, and label them as positive, negative, or neutral. Your Judge Saboteur might consider this a waste of time, but you’ll soon recognise that simply becoming aware of how you feel and how the emotions manifest in your body will facilitate a powerful shift over time.
This is because you’ll discover how much mental and emotional energy you’re wasting, and you’ll begin to automatically shift more quickly from negative to positive. Change always starts with accurate, real-time observation of what your current state is, before shifting to a new state. Becoming an astute self observer is key.
So, don’t worry about shifting any emotions today. Just make a point of observing and labelling your emotions or moods as positive or negative without judging yourself or beating yourself up if you catch yourself in the negative. As you know, judging yourself would only fuel the negative cycle. The key here is blameless self observation, in other words, the Sage discernment rather than the Saboteur judgement…
My feelings during the discussion brought me to the following conclusions.
Like many people who perceived their childhood environment as often-times threatening (don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel!), I learned at a very early age to tune out of my feelings. Yet the ability to feel, to name, and to dance with our feelings as they emerge at any given moment are the prerequisites for emotional availability.
Naming the feelings may require more than one language lesson. The Emotions Wheel in the photo above has proven invaluable in improving emotional literacy.
Only when emotionally available to myself, can I be emotionally available to others. This sounds easier that it looks. Obviously, we cannot transmit what we haven’t got.
Part of the original process of suppressing my feelings was the creation of a kind of mélange in which feelings, emotions, beliefs, and interpretations were all mixed up together, leading to confusion, or zero emotional visibility, to borrow a phrase from meteorology.
„I feel neglected“ is not a feeling. It is a belief that we hold.
„You are disrespecting me“ is an interpretation.
„She’s plain evil“ is a judgement.
„You make my life miserable“ is an accusation.
„I feel deeply sad“ is, indeed, the expression of a feeling.
To make matters even more complicated, the boundaries between me and the other (Mother, Father, sibling, etc.) became fuzzy, so I couldn’t be really sure if that which I was feeling belonged to me or someone else. This is especially true in families where parents lean emotionally on their children and where guilt tripping and shaming are the order of the day.
Another key element of emotional literacy is vulnerability. My experience in childhood regarding vulnerability casts shadows on my life even to this day. It is as if we were a family of twelve turtles swimming in the warm ocean and, every time one showed any vulnerability, the others ganged up on her, turned her over, and stuck a dagger into the soft flesh of the underbelly. The lesson was clear: „Never show the soft side to the world, keep everything protected behind the hard shell.“
Unfortunately, this also began to shape my relationship with self. I denied my own vulnerability to my self. I adopted the persona of the stoic, the tough guy, the dominator, Captain of the Universe. Hegemony appeared to be the best protection available. This approach not only failed to achieve the sense of safety and belonging for which I so yearned, it alienated me from precisely those I wished to share my life with, just as I am. It is a recipe for extreme loneliness.
The good news is that life has a way of drawing our attention to what has gone awry and provides us with the people and resources to help us heal, recover, and grow. It begins with the awareness that the addictive dynamics (both substance and process-related) are now killing us, the decision to try a new approach, subsequently engaging in compassion, abstinence, learning new ways of doing things and new things to do, and then daily practice to further cultivate and maintain Emotional Sobriety.
Any transformation, if it is to be successful, is roughly made up of 20% insights and 80% practice. This underscores the need for regular, daily practice. A ton of insights without practice will not transform the caterpillar into a butterfly.
Unfortunately, in today’s consumer society, healing and recovery are often touted and regarded as just another commodity, often with a hefty price tag. Lots of insights on offer, promising instant „success“. This approach may make some people rich but will never deliver the promised results, so sought after by the clients.
The way out of the suffering is through the pain. Nobody wants to voluntarily feel pain. I get that. „The cave we fear to enter holds the treasures that we seek,“ says Joseph Campbell. I, too, have loitered at the entrance of the cave for long periods, afraid to enter.
When we do enter, we begin to work with the various aspects of the younger self, the Inner Child. We cannot undo the pain she experienced back then, and we can choose to be available today, with gentle attentiveness and compassion. The teething phase of this relationship may be fraught with resistance and conflict. After all, my five-year-old was, understandably, very angry about the fact that I had ignored him for over fifty years.
Over time, however, the relationship – to which I could bring my fledging emotional availability – warmed, and all the other Inner Child aspect began to come out of hiding. There is no way to re-establish the inner relationship without feeling, once again, some of the original pain. This is the crux of the matter. After all, who wants to voluntarily experience pain? This is why we need encouragement, support (sometimes even professional and/or medical assistance), community, and – at times – an embrace to hold us or a shoulder to cry upon.
In the process, our awareness of an entire world of feelings and emotions, which we thought had been numbed forever, begins to infiltrate our somatic experience.
„Emotions, Motion, Ocean, Om“ is one of the mantras I use each day while greeting the Four Directions. It is the Greeting of the West, usually performed as I look out over the majestic River Rhine on my morning walk.
As a man with a strong hyper-rational disposition, I have developed an appreciation for motion, i.e., all forms of movement, as a lubricant for the pent-up feelings, allowing them to emerge and be experienced. This movement may take the form of dance, running, cycling, swimming, climbing, walking, yoga, EFT Tapping (Emotional Freedom Techniques), chi gong, or any form of movement that eases us back into the body we left all those years ago.
As part of my daily practice, my contract with self includes „at least one hour of movement in the fresh air – hail, rain, or snow!“ I can highly recommend this as a component of the daily practice of recovery and healing. To make the deal more feasible, I grant myself one Joker Card per month. I rarely have used up all twelve by the end of the year.
To recap, these components – movement, mindfulness meditation, cultivation of emotional literacy, somatic activation, and the courage to revisit the original pain – they all help us become emotionally available to our selves. Once that process has been initiated, we can grow in our capacity to be emotionally available to others.
The psyche can be cunning, baffling, and powerful in its efforts to maintain the status quo. Ego is quite happy to continue in the old script which puts ego at the centre of things. In resisting change, it is simply doing its natural job.
So, we can choose emotionally unavailable people as our relationship partners to mask our own unavailability. This way, when (not if) things go wrong, we can place the blame on the emotionally unavailable other. A cheap trick, you might say, yet no rarity among the people I meet in everyday life. This points to another sure sign of emotional availability, namely the readiness of both partners -whatever the nature of the relationship – to journey in healing together in recovery, in mutual vulnerability, helping and encouraging each other along the way.
