Emotionally Unavailable Quotes

The trick is not to get hooked on the highs and lows and mistake an activated attachment system for passion or love. Don't let emotional unavailability turn you on.

Perfectionism is the unparalleled defense for emotionally abandoned children. The existential unattainability of perfection saves the child from giving up, unless or until, scant success forces him to retreat into the depression of a dissociative disorder, or launches him hyperactively into an incipient conduct disorder. Perfectionism also provides a sense of meaning and direction for the powerless and unsupported child. In the guise of self-control, striving to be perfect offers a simulacrum of a sense of control. Self-control is also safer to pursue because abandoning parents typically reserve their severest punishment for children who are vocal about their negligence.

Nim handed me a mug of tea. I took a sip and it was just how I like it, strong and sweet. If you added psychotic and emotionally unavailable to that, it would also cover my taste in women.

Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world.

Now that may be a first. A girl who has no interest whatsoever in the handsome, emotionally unavailable, Dane Wright.

The poet lusts after emotionally unavailable people because she doesn't have to worry about commitment. The poet desperately wants commitment.

Tattoos. Tall, dark, and damaged. The more emotionally unavailable, the better.” She beams. “If he’s got a juvenile rap sheet and motorcycle, I’m open for business.

Luis Fuentes reminded me that I'm still vulnerable. If I'm emotionally unavailable, then I don't have to worry about ever getting hurt. [...] Nikki Cruz will no longer be vulnerable.

Trying to please someone unpredictable, someone emotionally unavailable, uncaring, unkind – trying to keep them happy, win their love – is this not an old story, Theo? A familiar story?

People often learn about starvation economies in childhood, when parents who are emotionally depleted or unavailable teach us that we must work hard to get our emotional needs met, so that if we relax our vigilance for even a moment, a mysterious someone or something may take the love we need away from us.

Emotionally unavailable men thrive because they have complicit, commitment resistant, emotionally unavailable women to accommodate their behaviour.

I think you’re just as emotionally unavailable as I am. I avoid men because I’m afraid I’ll lose my heart, and you go from girl to girl to keep from giving yours away.

List 2: Write down everything in your life that you don’t want, like more panic attacks, depression, or partners who are emotionally unavailable. Maybe you’d like to stop smoking, or overeating, or drinking. Be specific and personal. This is about you. This will be your “before” picture.

Love addicts often pick partners who are emotionally unavailable because deep down, they don’t feel worthy of having a healthy, loving relationship. A love addict craves and obsesses about becoming enmeshed or ‘one’ with another human being at all costs, even if it means putting themselves in potential danger.

Once you let a muthafucka slide, they start figure skating.” –Source Unknown

The narcissistic mother cannot give her child unconditional love. She’s not capable of being self-less, devoted, warm, mature, or attentive to you. Instead, everything is about her. Life revolves around meeting her unrealistic, immature needs. She expects your undivided attention. Your admiration. Your praises. Your loyalty to her. She demands you to meet her needs no matter how ridiculous they can be.

Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act - truth is always subversive.

A child can also feel emotional distress when the parent is physically present but emotionally unavailable. Even adults know that kind of pain when someone important to us is bodily present but psychologically absent.

You moon, I’m afraid. But she must find it endearing. Can’t say I understand the appeal. I like my men emotionally repressed and unavailable.

It takes confidence to be wholeheartedly intimate and passionately committed. Men who are emotionally unavailable have a self-confidence deficit, plain and simple. So man up and get rid of those insecurities or whatever it is that keeps you from opening up. Because if you're not man enough to talk about your own feelings, then you're not man enough to be in a committed relationship.

Trying to please someone unpredictable, someone emotionally unavailable, uncaring, unkind – trying to keep them happy, win their love – is this not an old story, Theo? A familiar story?’ I clenched my fist and didn’t speak. Ruth went on, hesitantly: ‘I know how

People THRIVE on positive reinforcement. They wither with criticism.

The mother’s unavailability to supply the emotional fuel dampened or thwarted the child’s desire to individuate and become his real self,

Trying to please someone unpredictable, someone emotionally unavailable, uncaring, unkind—trying to keep them happy, win their love—is this not an old story,

You just seem . . . I don’t know. Extremely emotionally unavailable.” I think maybe he was right, because it’s barely been a year and I can’t quite recall his face.

Emotionally unavailable men usually hover around, throwing in a little “I miss you,” occasionally hoping for a response or getting a reaction out of you.

The biggest problem with being with an emotionally unavailable man is that his words and actions tends to confuse women,

Trying to please someone unpredictable, someone emotionally unavailable, uncaring, unkind – trying to keep them happy, win their love

Trying to please someone unpredictable, someone emotionally unavailable, uncaring, unkind—trying to keep them happy, win their love

Parents who are emotionally unavailable, indifferent, uninterested, too busy and/or highly critical set their children up for self-rejection and the need for external validation.

Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent.

In therapy, when pathological defenses start to crumble, the patient lets in more material from their background that they've been defending against. Suddenly, memories emerge that were unavailable at the beginning of the therapy. When Laura had been intent on defending her father, she'd blocked many of her negative memories of him; but now, after two years of therapy, those painful memories began to flow like hot lava.

THE MISCONCEPTION: You know why you like the things you like and feel the way you feel. THE TRUTH: The origin of certain emotional states is unavailable to you, and when pressed to explain them, you will just make something up.

They have learned not to expect their father to attend to them or to be expressive about much of anything. They have come to expect him to be psychologically unavailable. They have also learned that he is not accountable in his emotional absence, that Mother does not have the power either to engage him or to confront him. In other words, Father’s neglect and Mother’s ineffectiveness at countering it teach the boys that, in this family at least, men’s participation is not a responsibility but rather a voluntary and discretionary act. Third, they learn that Mother, and perhaps women in general, need not be taken too seriously. Finally, they learn that not just Mother but the values she manifests in the family—connection, expressivity—are to be devalued and ignored. The subtext message is, “engage in ‘feminine’ values and activities and risk a similar devaluation yourself.” The paradox for the boys is that the only way to connect with their father is to echo his disconnection. Conversely, being too much like Mother threatens further disengagement or perhaps, even active reprisal. In this moment, and thousands of other ordinary moments, these boys are learning to accept psychological neglect, to discount nurture, and to turn the vice of such abandonment into a manly virtue.

you need to address your own availability because if you were truly available, a relationship with an unavailable man that detracts from you wouldn’t be attractive and you’d have ‘folded’ ages ago. You wouldn’t participate in the emotional dishonesty and avoidance because it would be in conflict with you being emotionally available and emotionally honest.

When a caregiver is emotionally unavailable, the child is left to learn how to interact with the world around them by themselves. They aren’t able to develop skills to connect with others and are left desperate for love, affection, and validation.

But even as I said that, I didn’t believe it. Neither did Ruth. “I don’t think so. I think her behavior suggests she is quite damaged—lacking in empathy and integrity and just plain kindness—all the qualities you brim with.” I shook my head. “That’s not true.” “It is true, Theo.” Ruth hesitated. “Don’t you think perhaps you’ve been here before?” “With Kathy?” Ruth shook her head. “I don’t mean that. I mean with your parents. When you were younger. If there’s a childhood dynamic here you might be replaying.” “No.” I suddenly felt irritated. “What’s happening with Kathy has got nothing to do with my childhood.” “Oh, really?” Ruth sounded disbelieving. “Trying to please someone unpredictable, someone emotionally unavailable, uncaring, unkind—trying to keep them happy, win their love—is this not an old story, Theo? A familiar story?” I clenched my fist and didn’t speak. Ruth went on hesitantly, “I know how sad you feel. But I want you to consider the possibility that you felt this sadness long before you met Kathy. It’s a sadness you’ve been carrying around for many years. You know, Theo, one of the hardest things to admit is that we weren’t loved when we needed it most. It’s a terrible feeling, the pain of not being loved.

And remember: if your boundaries are being crossed by your partner, it is not first and foremost your partner's fault, although they do carry responsibility for their own behavior and lack of awareness. However, it is your responsibility to ensure that your own boundaries are healthy.

You do not have to fix the whole equation. You do have to fix your part of it. This is done by accepting complete, 100 percent responsibility for everything you are thinking, feeling, doing, or not doing. It is letting go of blaming ANYone for ANYthing. It is growing up and being an adult.

Emotionally unavailable means not fully emotionally present. It’s struggling or being unable to access emotions healthily and as a result, being emotionally distant due to ‘walls’ which basically act as barriers to true emotional intimacy. Fully experiencing all feelings, whether good, bad, or indifferent, is avoided because they create vulnerability, so feelings are experienced often for a limited time and in bursts as opposed to consistently feeling on an ongoing basis. Emotionally unavailable equates to intimacy issues, which is being afraid of the consequences of getting truly emotionally close to someone such that to lose them would hurt.

Now that seemed like a blatantly obvious metaphor—his keeping a literal gulf between us, my readily meeting him each night. No wonder I'd gotten so confused. He'd been keeping careful boundaries and I'd been ignoring them. I was so bad at this, so unprepared to find myself drawn to someone completely emotionally unavailable.

Hardening the heart against vulnerability, trust and a new partner will either forever keep us from a truly emotionally satisfying, enriching, and growth-producing partnership, or will throw us unwittingly back into precisely the same type of painful thing again, because we have not examined what happened, except under the out-of-focus microscope of blame.

The bottom line is you must do your part to change the system. It will not get better without your active, loving participation.

aren’t you tired of needing things from those who are incapable of providing the things you need

Deviance of any type, she argued, was no more than a mismatch between an individual’s way of navigating through life and the catalog of behaviors and emotions that her society tended to prefer and value. Normalcy in any society was only an edited version of the grand text of all possible human behaviors; there was no reason to expect that every society would do the editing in precisely the same way. Ways of being in the world were abnormal only in the sense that the local context created “the psychic dilemmas of the socially unavailable.

Empaths may unknowingly get involved with toxic partners and become anxious, depressed, or ill. They give their hearts too easily to narcissists and other unavailable people. Empaths are loving and expect others to be that way, which doesn’t always happen. They also absorb their partner’s stress and emotions, such as anger or depression, simply by interacting with them,

Most people in the psychology field believe that if we do not get a child to bond at a deep level with someone by age eight, we have lost them. We can never recover them and teach them empathy. Never.

I chose people who made me feel anxious and insecure and re-created my childhood circumstances of getting erratic attention. I gravitated toward people who were either physically or emotionally unavailable to subconsciously ensure I was getting a constant hit from my “internal drug cabinet.” Instead of heroin or cocaine, I used to be addicted to cortisol and adrenaline (which turns into dopamine! Yay!). That drove me to pick people who couldn’t give me safety or stability, which caused those chemicals to go buck wild on my brain. You live in London? Yes, please. You work until three A.M., and when you are available, you’re super tired, so every time we have the chance to connect, your eyes are half closed? Sure, let’s move in together. One day you tell me you’re in love with me, but then you disappear and go on a week-long bender on Long Island? Absolutely. You travel for four months at a time in places that have horrible cell service? Don’t mind if I do marry ya.

What a set up for little girls! What a set up to be taught a wonderful prince will come along and meet all your emotional needs while at the same time we are teaching our little boys not to feel. To be tough. To cut off from their emotional selves. The

Sadly, it seems as though society encourages this type of behavior in which men pursue women, then back off when commitment appears imminent. It’s the classic playboy model and sowing-wild-oats excuse and such behavior leaves the emotional wreckage of confused and hurt women in its wake. It is perceived as a male prerogative—love them and leave them and don’t suffer any consequences. You may try to rationalize his behavior—perhaps he was engulfed by his mother, his father was emotionally unavailable, he was never breast-fed. The bottom line, however, is that he can’t commit and you’ve got a problem.

Sentimentality was used because other political avenues were closed, and authors hoped that through it they could bring about a political change that would fulfill the egalitarian promises of the Revolution. Real political venues were unavailable, so fiction became a medium for authors to appeal to audiences for change.

Why? Because we are setting up little boys to be emotionally unavailable men and, at the same time, setting up little girls to be emotionally unhappy women. How? By teaching our little girls that they are princesses. Special. And that someday their prince will come. Not only will their prince come, but he will be strong, smart, romantic and will take care of their every princess need and desire. Little princesses are taught the fantasy that they will be whisked away by the man of their dreams. That man being, of course, someone who will meet all of her needs — especially emotionally. That man will have undying love and devotion for the princess. And, by the way, no needs of his own.

Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done. If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act - truth is always subversive.

she had to question Mariana’s assessment of him as a loving parent. The man Ruth heard described sounded authoritarian, cold, emotionally unavailable, often critical and highly unkind—even cruel. None of these qualities had anything to do with love. “Love isn’t conditional,” Ruth said. “It’s not dependent on jumping through hoops to please someone—and always failing. You can’t love someone if you’re afraid of them, Mariana. I know it’s hard to hear. It’s a kind of blindness—but unless you wake up and see clearly, it will persist throughout your whole life, affecting how you see yourself, and others too.” Mariana shook her head. “You’re wrong about my father,” she said. “I know he’s difficult—but he loves me. And I love him.” “No,” said Ruth firmly. “At best, let’s call it a desire to be loved. At worst, it’s a pathological attachment to a narcissistic man:

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. (page 86) Even under the most horrific circumstances, Frankl reminds us that we all have choice. Everyday, at every juncture. Choice about our thoughts, our feelings, our attitudes

listening to Mariana, and saying very little … one day Ruth finally interrupted. What she said was simple, direct, and devastating. Ruth suggested, as gently as she could, that Mariana was in denial about her father. That after everything she had heard, she had to question Mariana’s assessment of him as a loving parent. The man Ruth heard described sounded authoritarian, cold, emotionally unavailable, often critical and highly unkind—even cruel. None of these qualities had anything to do with love. “Love isn’t conditional,” Ruth said. “It’s not dependent on jumping through hoops to please someone—and always failing. You can’t love someone if you’re afraid of them, Mariana. I know it’s hard to hear. It’s a kind of blindness—but unless you wake up and see clearly, it will persist throughout your whole life, affecting how you see yourself, and others too.” Mariana shook her head. “You’re wrong about my father,” she said. “I know he’s difficult—but he loves me. And I love him.” “No,” said Ruth firmly. “At best, let’s call it a desire to be loved. At worst, it’s a pathological attachment to a narcissistic man: a melting pot of gratitude, fear, expectation

Mike had taken the rest of the day off, and he had rested, but unfortunately, he had also shared his tale of the ghost in the beam with his girlfriend of fourteen months, Melody, who first suggested that he might have had a ministroke, because that had happened to a guy on the Internet. When he insisted that no, he had seen and heard what he had seen and heard, she responded that he needed to see a shrink, that he was emotionally unavailable, and furthermore, there were much hotter guys than him at the gym who wanted to sleep with her and she had known deep down that there was something wrong with him and that’s why she’d never given up her apartment. He agreed that she was probably right about those things and that she would probably be better off if she slept with the hotter guys at the gym. He’d lost a girlfriend, but he’d gained a drawer in his dresser, a third of the clothes rod in his closet, and all three shampoo shelves in his shower, so he really wasn’t all that broken up about the breakup. Once she was gone, he realized that he didn’t feel any more alone than he had when she had been in the room with him, and he was a little sad that he didn’t feel sadder. All in all, it had been a productive day off. He’d been back at

The conditions that breed a disorganized attachment adaptation are not specific to CNM by any means, but I have seen a variation that is unique to CNM. There can be something very disorienting that happens for some new CNM couples who were first monogamous together and were accustomed to being each other’s main source of comfort, support and relief from distress. As the relationship opens, a partner’s actions with other people (even ethical ones that were agreed upon) can become a source of distress and pose an emotional threat. Everything that this person is doing with other people can become a source of intense fear and insecurity for their pre-existing partner, catapulting them into the paradoxical disorganized dilemma of wanting comfort and safety from the very same person who is triggering their threat response. Again, the partner may be doing exactly what the couple consented to and acting within their negotiated agreements, but for the pre-existing partner, their primary attachment figure being away, unavailable and potentially sharing levels of intimacy with another person registers as a debilitating threat in the nervous system. As someone in this situation simultaneously wants to move towards and away from one’s partner, the very foundation of their relationship and attachment system can begin to shudder, and people can begin acting out in ways that are destructive to each other and the relationship. When this happens, I recommend working with a professional to re-establish inner and outer safety.

A higher form of communication, verbal language, is also unavailable or inadequate to describe the intensity of a cutter's inner state. As kids, by and large, self-injurers were not allowed to have or express their own feelings—especially anger. Instead they were forced to carry the feelings of their parents and grew up feeling responsible for their parents' anger, frustration, and unhappiness. They were expected to fill their parents' need for love and gratification, rather than the parents satisfying their children's needs. When a child's feelings and perceptions are actively denied or minimized by her parents, the child's ability to develop a language of feelings is stunted, and she is left with a mute hopelessness about the possibility of communicating in a way that will help her to get critical needs met. Words then seem to take on terrifying proportions; they are both too powerful and completely useless. Emotions are so damned up that sadness seems annihilating, rage often feels murderous.

CONFESSIONS OF A CLING-ON If a man is walking in a forest and makes a statement, but there is no woman around to hear it, is he still wrong? Or if a woman is walking in the forest and asks for something, and there is no man around to hear her, is she still needy? These Zen koans capture some of the frustrations people have with the opposite gender. And where is the dividing line between someone simply having a need, and someone being a needy person? Is it written in heaven somewhere what is too much need, too little need and just right amount of need for the “normal person?” Ask pop radio psychologists Dr. Laura, or Sally Jessie Rafael, or any number of experts who claim to know for sure, and you’ll get some very different answers. And isn’t it fun to see the new sophisticated ways our advanced culture is developing to make each other wrong? You better keep up with the latest technical terminology or you will be at the mercy of those who do. Whoever has read the latest most recent self-help book has the clear advantage. Example: Man: “Get real, would you! Your Venusian codependency has got you trapped in your learned helpless victim act, and indulging in your empowerment phobia again.” Woman: “When you call me codependent, I feel (notice the political correctness of the feeling word) that you are simply projecting your own disowned, unintegrated, emotionally unavailable Martian counterdependency to protect your inner ADD two year old from ever having to grow up. So there!” Speaking of diagnosis, remember the codependent. Worrying about codependency was like a virus that everyone had from about 1988 to 1994. Here’s a prayer to commemorate the codependent: The Codependent’s Prayer by Kelly Bryson Our Authority, which art in others, self-abandonment be thy name. Codependency comes when others’ will is done, At home, as it is in the workplace. give us this day our daily crumbs of love. And give us a sense of indebtedness, As we try to get others to feel indebted to us. And lead us not into freedom, but deliver us from awareness. For thine is the slavery and the weakness and the dependency, For ever and ever. Amen.

As I read on, however, the prose itself rather than the content became the center of my attention. It was unlike the books they had made me read at school and had nothing to do with the mysteries I used to check out of the library. Later, when I finally went to college, I would be able to trace Vanner’s literary influences and consider his novel from a formal point of view (even if he was never assigned reading for any of the courses I took, since his work was out of print and already quite unavailable). Yet back then I had never experienced anything like that language. And it spoke to me. It was my first time reading something that existed in a vague space between the intellectual and the emotional. Since that moment I have identified that ambiguous territory as the exclusive domain of literature. I also understood at some point that this ambiguity could only work in conjunction with extreme discipline—the calm precision of Vanner’s sentences, his unfussy vocabulary, his reluctance to deploy the rhetorical devices we identify with “artistic prose” while still retaining a distinctive style. Lucidity, he seems to suggest, is the best hiding place for deeper meaning—much like a transparent thing stacked in between others. My literary taste has changed since then, and Bonds has been displaced by other books. But Vanner gave me my first glimpse of that elusive region between reason and feeling and made me want to chart it in my own writing.

pretend to feel emotions that they don’t actually feel, as well as pretend they don’t feel ones that they actually do. They often believe that they only have two options in life: to be completely alone or to entirely give themselves up in a relationship. These children are often depressed, have anger that they may not be aware of, and feelings of emptiness inside of them. Often, they attract addicts, narcissists and other emotionally unavailable partners to them, which allows them to continually repeat the emotional abandonment they experienced in childhood. Although this is damaging to them, it provides a minor sense of comfort, as it fulfills their need to be codependent. In

So how emotionally unavailable are you?" "On a scale of one to ten, I'm an eleven. Or a zero, depending on which way your scale slides.

In many ways, the treatment of animal homosexuality in the scientific discourse has closely parallelled the discussion of human homosexuality in society at large. Homosexuality in both animals and people has been considered, at various times, to be a pathological condition; a social aberration; an "immoral", "sinful", or "criminal" perversion; an artificial product of confinement or the unavailability of the opposite sex; a reversal or "inversion" of heterosexual "roles"; a "phase" that younger animals go through on the path to heterosexuality; an exceptional but unimportant activity; a useless and puzzling curiosity; and a functional behavior that "stimulates" or "contributes to" heterosexuality. In many other respects, however, the outright hostility to animal homosexuality has transcended all historical trends. One need only look at the litany of derogatory terms, which have remained essentially constant from the late 1800s to the present day, used to describe this behavior: words such as strange, bizarre, perverse, aberrant, deviant, abnormal, anomalous, and unnatural have all been used routinely in "objective" scientific descriptions of the phenomenon and continue to be used (one of the most recent examples is from 1997). In addition, heterosexual behavior is consistently defined in numerous scientific accounts as "normal" in contrast to homosexual activity... In a direct carryover from attitudes toward human homosexuality, same-sex activity is routinely described as being "forced" on other animals when there is no evidence that it is, and a whole range of "distressful" emotions are projected onto the individual who experiences such "unwanted advances"... In other cases, zoologists have problematized homosexual activity or imputed an inherent inadequacy, instability, or incompetence to same-sex relations, when the supporting evidence for this is scanty or questionable at best and nonexistent at worst.

You have choice whether or not to believe someone’s assessment of you. You have choice about how you respond to something or someone. You have choice whether to stand there and get emotionally battered. You have choice about your attitude, about how big or small you make something, about how good or bad you make it. You have choice about making the cup half empty or half full. You have choice about your relationship. If it’s bad you have three choices: make it worse (end it), keep it the same (stay in victim and act out), or make it better (get in your adult ego state and change things). YOU get to decide.

with him; and second, to challenge him not to spend one dime at the club for

The energy that can come from self-love will propel you into becoming the best version of yourself. No longer trapped in the pursuit of hopeless relationships, emotionally unavailable partners,

According to Thrivetalk, enmeshment trauma is a form of emotional damage that occurs when one or more parents project their values, needs, and dreams onto their child. This causes the child to abandon their own sense of self in order to please their caregiver. Ultimately, the child feels as though they must adapt to their parent’s needs to be worthy of love, and this, when combined with a caregiver who is also unavailable, leaves the child feeling emotionally abandoned.

When that person is emotionally unavailable or unresponsive, we face being out in the cold, alone and helpless. We are assailed by emotions — anger, sadness, hurt, and above all, fear. This is not so surprising when we remember that fear is our built-in alarm system; it turns on when our survival is threatened. Losing connection with our loved one jeopardizes our sense of security. The alarm goes off in the brain’s amygdala, or Fear Central,

She’s distant and emotionally unavailable. I could never go to her for support. She never loved me in the way I needed to be loved.” Tricia’s rejection of her mother was the culprit behind her relationship failures. What sat unresolved with her mother unconsciously resurfaced with her partners, eroding the bond they shared and the intimacy they desired.

I will no longer make room for emotionally unavailable individuals in my life.

Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done. If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

Being so obtuse, so emotionally unavailable, wasn’t a choice I made. I simply wasn’t capable. I wasn’t close to ready.

He had always been emotionally unavailable and not at all interested in love either as a topic for discussion or a daily life practice, but he was absolutely confident that he had something meaningful to say on the subject.

That’s why I am emotionally bankrupt these days – any love I had left for her is spent.

Back then, in every creative writing course the poets dedicated to the love poem were always male. Indeed, the partner I left after many years first courted me with a love poem. He had always been emotionally unavailable and not at all interested in love as either a topic for discussion or a daily life practice, but he was absolutely confident that he had something meaningful to say on the subject.

It had taken a lot of therapy for me to stop gravitating toward emotionally unavailable men, the kind who’d get a matching tattoo with you on week, and be dating your upstairs neighbor the next. I’d been so relieved when I finally fell in love with someone who actually wanted to love me back.

Several studies have shown that children with ADHD have a higher tendency to be raised in homes with less financial security. They are more likely not to get enough nurturing and emotional support, and their parents are emotionally unavailable. In addition, children with ADHD may be more likely to live in neighborhoods with toxic pollution levels, cigarette smoking, heavy traffic, and other potential sources of environmental toxins. In addition to environmental factors, certain lifestyle choices during

Jenna Peterson’s Guide to Dating Emotionally Unavailable Men: When dating an emotionally unavailable man, get ready for disappointment. Because there’s going to be a lot of it.

It’s like I have a sign on my head that says, Dump your problems on Jenna! Which makes me a magnet for emotionally unavailable men.

In our emotional lives this also leads us to be attracted - as we have seen - to those people who have attained (or stagnated at) the same level of emotional maturity as we

And because emotions create such inner havoc, this person will retreat from them, but in so doing, attract into his or her life precisely those people who tend to be needy or have poor boundaries, and in some fashion are the ones who will most push the emotionally unavailable person's buttons.

But speaking about sex with your partner is not what it is all about. You must make the conscious decision to want to grow together with your partner. This mutual endeavor, via the connection you have through the relationship you share makes the difference between a relationship that may ultimately fail, or lose its fervor, and a relationship that not only has a chance at long-term survival, but also one that – because of the energetic connection inherent in sex – does not eventually flounder and die a slow death of sexual strangulation. 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.

Absence due to death may occasionally even be easier to deal with both psychologically and emotionally, than the other absence in which the parent is very much alive but missing from the child's life in that meaningful way.

Becoming distant or somehow moving away from the partner sexually (sometimes interpreted as manipulative game-playing tactics by the needier person), or not being sexually responsive are furthermore ways of cutting off genuine relating and thus removing what many people with these issues consider to be threats.

If we are continuing to attract partners that are emotionally unavailable, then it’s essential that we observe our own addictive patterns rather than focusing on theirs.

-§ But just because we grew up in that kind of a culture does not mean we need to keep creating it in our present relationship. I recommend we ask different questions, like, “How could I make your life more wonderful?” and “Would you like to know how you could make my life more wonderful?” and “What are your needs right now?” and “Would you like to know what I need right now?” Now if none of this appeals to you because you prefer a relation-dinghy to a relationship, here are some suggestion to help you prevent your relation-dinghy from growing into a relationship: 1. Keep your attention focused at all times on who is right or wrong in a discussion, fair or unfair in a negotiation, selfish or unselfish in giving (it helps to keep a list of who has done what for whom), kind or cruel in their tone of voice, rude or polite in their mannerisms, sloppy or neat in their dress, and so on. Be careful not to realize that your attempt to be right is really an attempt to protect yourself from thinking you are wrong and then feeling shame. 2. If you need some support for this I recommend certain selfhelp groups who can give you the latest scoops on the most powerful, politically correct labels with which to overpower and confuse your partner. Members of these groups will collude with you in validating that your partner really is a man or woman who is commitment-phobic, emotionally unavailable, counterdependant, needy, spiritually unevolved, dysfunctional, immature, judgmental, sinful, bi-polar, OCD, clinically depressed, or adult-onset ADD. It is important to keep your consciousness filled with such terminology to prevent any fondness from developing. This also helps in keeping you caught in the “paralysis of analysis” and clueless about what you or your partner are needing from each other. 3. Adopt this test for love: If your partner really loves you, he or she will always know what you want even before you know—and then give it to you without your having to go through the humiliation of actually asking for it. And your partner will do this regardless of the sacrifice it requires. If your partner does not give you what you want, choose to believe it means he or she does not love you. 4. Ask for what you do not want instead of what you do want. I heard of a man who asked his wife to stop spending so much money shopping. She took up gambling on the internet. 5. In case your relationdinghy starts to grow, here are a few torpedoes guaranteed to sink it again: “It hurts me when you say that.” “I feel sad because you…fill in the blank (won’t say ‘I love you,’ or ‘I’m sorry,’ or won’t have sex, or won’t marry me, etc.)” If you really want to choke the life out of any relationship meditate on “I need you.” Then you will know how I felt for about thirtyfive years of my life. I felt like a drowning swimmer and I would grab hold of anyone who came near me and try to use them as a life raft. Now I want relationships to be flowers for my table instead of air for my lungs. When I Come Gently To You by Ruth Bebermeyer When I come gently to you I want you to see It’s not to get myself from you, it’s just to give you me. I know that you can’t give me me, no matter what you do. All I ever want from you is you. I know your fear of fences, your pain from prisons past. I’m not the first to sense it and I’m plainly not the last. The hawk within your heart’s not bound to earth by fence of mine, Unless you aren’t aware that you can fly. When I come gently to you I’d like you to know I come not to trespass your space, I want to touch and grow. When your space and my space meet, each is not less but more. We make our space that wasn’t space before. Chapter HEALING THE BLAME THAT BLINDS

Apparently you haven’t gotten the memo. I am the Ice Man. Rude, honest to the point of brutal and emotionally unavailable. Women aren’t exactly throwing themselves at me.” A pause. “Anymore.

personal thoughts and feelings with people you hardly know is telling too much. Sharing things with other people that were told to you in confidence is telling too much. Sharing the arguments and discussions you have with your partner with friends and family is telling too much. All indicate poor boundaries. All indicate a need for boundaries. You

You really have three choices with your relationship: leave it, keep it the same, or make it better. Keeping

Avoidantly attached children tend to have parents who are emotionally withdrawn and psychologically unavailable. They

Thirteen Recurrent Domains of Human Concerns: Possible Breakdowns 1. BODY: health, sickness, injury, availability and unavailability for meetings and appointments. 2. PLAY or AESTHETICS: entertainment, recreation, art, and appreciation of art. 3. SOCIABILITY: opening new conversations, making new friends, maintaining friendships, breaking friendships, trusting what others say, establishing trust for yourself. 4. FAMILY: having children, education of children, marriage. 5. WORK: completing actions you have committed to take, doing your job. 6. EDUCATION: gaining competence, skill in some area. 7. CAREER: choosing a direction to take in life, choosing a career or profession to prepare for and follow. 8. MONEY or PRUDENCE: having sufficient money to support yourself, your salary, reputation among others you deal with. 9. MEMBERSHIP: participation in club, professional, organizational, or government institutions; gaining membership in societies, clubs, or other organizations; becoming a citizen. 10. WORLD: politics, the environment, other countries or cultures. 11. DIGNITY: self-respect, self-esteem, lack of self-esteem, conflicts between your standards of action and your actions. 12. SITUATION: disposition, temperament, outlook, emotions, judgments about “how things are going.” 13. SPIRITUALITY: philosophy, poetry, religion, humor (laughing about our nonacceptance of the facticity of life, not being burdened by it).

I’ll let myself wallow for a day or two. My roommate will cry with me. She’s basically an empath. Tess cries when actors on TV cry. She cries when cartoon animals cry. Meanwhile, I’m an emotionally unavailable, closed-off clam (her words, not mine).

Bottom line: In order to be our Self, we must feel. This is why we are all looking to experience something in our lives, regardless of whether we are seeking it on a date, in our careers, or through our children. Most of us are desperate to feel life, but also terrified by the prospect. So we often keep our Self at arm’s length. Some of us have chosen to remain lost—emotionally unavailable—because we are too scared to face what, and who, we will find inside ourselves. Others have made an unconscious habit of numbing their emotions by having a packed social calendar, religiously drinking that one glass (or bottle) of wine as soon as they get home, or depending on social media to take their minds off things. We may not be aware of it, but most of us run on emotional autopilot. Most of us have not been taught or encouraged to observe, validate, or express our emotions, so it’s not surprising that we don’t know the person that embodies them, or that we don’t enjoy living our lives.

IT TAKES TWO TO BE TOXIC Often in our karmic love, we project all the negativity onto our partner and paint them as an asshole, a fuckboy, or maybe just emotionally unavailable, without actually taking responsibility for our part in the dynamic.

Next, stand strong. Your daughter needs a wall to swim to, and she needs you to be a wall that can withstand her comings and goings. Some parents feel too hurt by their swimmers, take too personally their daughter’s rejections, and choose to make themselves unavailable to avoid going through it again. Of course, in some ways it does feel better to avoid certain emotional whiplash. But being unavailable comes at a cost. Unavailable parents miss out on some wonderful, if brief, moments with their daughters. Worse, their daughters are left without a wall to swim to and must navigate choppy—and sometimes dangerous—waters all on their own.

When we choose to fall for emotionally unavailable partners who cannot show up in our lives in the way we want, or physically unavailable people - those who you literally do not share the same physical space with - it actually is a sign that you are emotionally unavailable for a relationship.

We don’t like emotionally unavailable men.

The shadow hides in our secret shames. To uncover the feeling of shame is to discover an arrow pointing straight toward shadow material, toward sexual taboos, bodily defects, emotional regrets—perhaps toward that which we would not dare to do but would secretly love to do. When shameful feelings are tucked away from those we love or even from ourselves, the shadow remains in the dark, out of sight of loving eyes and therefore unavailable for healing. What private thoughts or feelings most embarrass you? What trait do you wish to be rid of? In what ways do you feel unacceptable, dirty, or shamefully different?

Even if you had a rough start to life, even if you had parents who were emotionally unavailable, just like every other baby who has ever come into this life you affected people so deeply as the embodiment of love.