"Why Low-Effort Men Don’t Deserve You! Advice I'd Share If You Were My Daughter "

If you always attract emotionally unavailable men and keep having unfulfilling, unhealthy relationships, there's a strong chance you yourself are emotionally unavailable too, which is a subtle chronic state of disconnection and dissociation in your body when it comes to healthy vulnerability and intimacy. Many women think they're emotionally available yet still attract these same patterns. And when they really dive into themselves, they realize they have blocks to intimacy that are stopping them from having the healthy relationships they desire. The key to becoming emotionally available so you can attract and be attracted to healthy relationship dynamics is actually learning how to regulate your emotions and nervous system when you're attaching to someone. You can probably regulate and be okay on your own when you're single, but when it comes to romantic relationships, your unavailability subconsciously causes you to disconnect from parts of yourself that are essential to building a healthy relationship. Today, I'll walk you through how to regulate yourself so you can become emotionally available because that is where it starts in the body. And these tools are useful for you even if you think you're already emotionally available because there are always ways you can become more vulnerable and connect more deeply through this work of healing your own blocks to intimacy. Like my client, Mary, who despite having done all the therapy and spoken about her patterns and trauma was still not able to attract a healthy relationship and show up with authenticity and vulnerability. Once she learned how to heal the trauma that lives in her body and was then able to regulate her emotions, she became emotionally available to all her relationships, including friendships and family. And if you want help with that, this is the work that I do with my clients. If you're interested in finding out more, click the link to my calendar below so we can see if we're a fit to work together inside my program. Now, you attract all types of people, but there's something in you letting in the unavailable ones. And that's because their surface level of preference for the way that they operate in relationship matches with the surface level of the way you operate in relationship too. The kind of relationship you have with someone who's emotionally unavailable is always safe. It doesn't require you to show up with deeper intimacy, deeper truth and vulnerability from yourself. And you learn this surface level way of relating in romantic relationship in your childhood because your caregivers were likely emotionally unavailable too. And this all feels very normal and familiar to you as an adult. But if you're stuck in a cycle of having unhealthy relationships, you have to address your own blocks to intimacy and vulnerability. And that's what we'll dive into today. Think of your ability to regulate yourself in intimate relationships as the foundation of the house that you are, right? Who you are in the way that your body regulates and the way you show up in relationship. When you're raised by emotionally unavailable caregivers, your emotional house that contains all the ways that you regulate yourself, your emotional literacy and resilience is like a house that's built on sand. There's not enough concrete in your foundation and this kind of has cascading effects on your ability to regulate your nervous system when it comes to healthy relating and being in relationship. So instead of the resiliency and the strength that your house would need when it's built on concrete, where you can have deeper conversations and connections and you're feeling very strong and resilient, you actually collapse each time vulnerability is needed from you and you revert to these old maladaptive behaviors like people pleasing or being a caregiver in relationship. Now, if you have a house that's built on sand that collapses easily, the walls of your emotional self, which is the way that you show up to others, the parts of you that meet others in relationship are often extremely rigid and have a strength behind them that doesn't invite inflexible, healthy, open, vulnerable relating. Instead, you have these solid immovable structures that are overly built because of this shaky foundation that your house is built on. And they almost act as a way to keep people out from seeing the real you and seeing behind those walls of who you actually are. Because behind those walls is someone who is deeply insecure about themselves and not actually doing well. So the strength here actually needs to be reversed. We need to have a strong foundation here, which is where the nervous system and the body comes into play, so that the walls of your house, the way that you relate emotionally to others can be flexible and open to respond to them and from them with presence, rather than this past trauma of rigidity. So you have that internal security here, therefore, you don't need to have external security. So to strengthen and bolster your foundation, you need to find the missing element for yourself in your development as a child. What did not happen for you in childhood to get a sense of empowerment and connection? Like what was not happening for you? Did you not feel enough with your parents? Did you not feel seen or understood in those relationships? Perhaps when there was a rupture in an argument or disagreement. In your family home, your parents didn't repair well with you. And then through a series of many ruptures, you got really good at holding onto your emotions and your emotional experience, because your parent wasn't available to you to help guide and move you through and metabolize those emotions of experiencing those ruptures. Think also about what did your parents require you to do in order to fit into the family unit? Did you have to make yourself smaller to fit in? Or did your parent require you to be more and take on a role like a caregiver in order to get love or were you parentified where you're given way too much responsibility for a child to help regulate and soothe your parents? And so what were your parents conditions to get love and connection? Whatever your answer is to any of those questions became maladaptive behaviors you developed to cope with that environment that now come up when you collapse, when intimacy is required of you and you now need to neutralize those behaviors and actually invite in the opposite of that experience in your life in order to start developing a strong foundation within you. So to actually anchor this in the body so that body develops a secure attachment, you need to develop agency within yourself, which is knowing what works and what doesn't work for you in relationship, what actually feels right to you in your body. So when you go into people-pleasing mode here, notice what your somatic experience is of that, like what is your body actually feeling? Does it make you feel good to make yourself small? No, of course not. So a big part of regulation and becoming emotionally available is actually finding safety in your body in order to become aware of your somatic experience because without feeling safe in your body, your body is not a fun place to be and that collapse takes over as a result because ultimately emotional unavailability is a type of dissociation which is brought on by over-regulation and freeze, right? It's an experience of excessive emotions that you just can't process in that moment and so you over-regulate and freeze in that state which results in this excessive rigidity and control in the form of those walls at which we meet other people in relationship. So externally from other people, you probably look fine holding it together when inside you are absolutely not. Your foundation is sinking, you're insecure, you're doubting yourself, you're losing yourself because you're built on this quicksand from experiencing so many triggering emotions in your body from childhood that you couldn't process. So now you shut down, you disconnect and numb as a response which is emotional unavailability. Now this might all seem very exaggerated in the way that I'm explaining it but this is a very subtle process that's happening within you. You may not be or probably not gonna be consciously aware of this collapse, of this shutdown but if you're aware that you feel like you have to be someone else to people in your relationships and you can't and don't show your true self, that you're afraid of people finding out who you really are and that you feel you need to hide parts of yourself, these are signs that you're emotionally unavailable and that you dissociate when vulnerability would be the healthy response. Instead you shut down or go into people-pleasing or deflect or any kind of those maladaptive responses you learned originally in childhood. It does take a lot of effort for you to stay in the relational part of your nervous system and that's because your window of tolerance is narrow. Throughout your life there have been too many landmines in your body when relating to other people that got triggered so your window is narrow because of your historical experiences in relationship. You would have experienced a degree in which you can attach to someone but then something shifts in that relationship and you get triggered and you feel unsafe or you think am I too needy and then you pull back and that's the dysregulation coming in, blocking healthy development of intimacy in the relationship container. So in order to stay in that relational part of your nervous system, you need to widen your window of tolerance which is your ability to be with the discomfort and uncertainty of a changing landscape and what that looks like inside your body. And at first it's just the process of allowing, of staying with something that your body experiences as discomfort. Like how can you stay with this wave as it's happening and the more you practice doing this and regulating yourself and self-soothing, you will develop a stress tolerance. So you can stay with the experience more without becoming overwhelmed by it. You can ride the wave more before you have to get off and then dissociate and shut down and there's more awareness around when you do need to get off the wave and go into shutdown. So find opportunities in your life where you can feel some degree of safety with another person which is what we call co-regulation. The best place to heal this is in a relationship container, whether it's with a friend, a therapist or coach because we can't ultimately regulate ourselves on our own. We can do a lot of self-soothing work. There is a lot of internal healing work that can also be done on our own but a quick way to learn this is to lean on someone else and their nervous system for co-regulation because all of this trauma happened in a relational sense, this is really where it needs to be healed. So let your nervous system be guided by a safe person and in that container, where there exists already some safety, start to reveal more. As you start to practice the process of revealing a bit more of the things you hold close to your chest or the things you feel shame around, in that container where someone is holding space for you to have that emotional experience, safety will develop in your body, in your nervous system. Not only in that relationship but in all parts of you, you will feel more seen and more heard. Also find opportunities for your own self-reflection and self-regulation. Whether that looks like a creative practice or journaling, voice journaling, which I love or writing about an experience or creating some kind of meaning, there's a level of safety that our nervous system feels when we create a construct around our experience that has some kind of thread of a story or meaning. We are meaning making machines, right? Particularly if it's in the context of something that someone else has gone through. For example, I remember reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey and that arc of someone needing to change their patterns, to go through a dark night of the soul to speak and then returning home all the more wiser and more whole, gave me a real thread that I'm not on my own here doing this work. Others have done it before me, that means I can do it too and that's actually what's happening to me. So connection, whether it's self-connection or connection with others is essential to build an internal ally within yourself that you can connect to. This is really, really important. That's really what the anchor of this foundation is in our house. A way that we can be with ourselves that keeps us grounded when we're in that uncomfortable feeling or discomfort. And when you have that internal ally within yourself, you're able to sit in that ally role and observe the emotions that you're experiencing within you and witness them without blending or identifying or merging with them. For example, feeling angry or feeling pain, rather than like merging with an anger or pain feeling with you, just sit in your internal space and observe that anger, observe that pain, observe it as an emotional state that is going to pass, that it doesn't define you. So if you come into this parts view where there are different kind of parts of you, you're able to eventually know that there is this higher true self within you that exists. It's like the adult in the room. And the emotional states that we're having are just happening around us, they're not necessarily who we are. And observing from this role gives us this real internal anchor that allows us to know an adult has got their hands on the steering wheel whilst we're having this strong, uncomfortable emotional experience. And that wise adult self is in charge of driving whilst these younger parts within us might be panicking or trying to get away from an emotion, like a firefighter kind of role. So having this internal ally is essential because these younger parts within us actually have direct access to our nervous system. In fact, you'll notice that when you're triggered, you feel like a different person. And we call that regression when you're turning into a younger version of yourself. Perhaps you've been in a situationship and the guy has ended the relationship and you just go into this obsessive thinking state where you have no control over yourself, right? You're stalking him on social media, you're thinking about him all the time. There's a younger part of you alive now when you're in that state and they have access to your nervous system, right? You're in your nervous system as your younger self. It's not you, the wise adult self part of you, it's this younger version that's frozen in time from the side of the original trauma and that age. Some people call this the inner child. So if you're in that and you have no control where there's no adult in the room, so to speak, know that you've got to develop this sense of the adult being in the room that's holding the scared child in their arms and soothing them, right? Because often these vulnerable child parts that are stuck in our basement, they're in our subconscious. We don't even know they're there, we're blended with them, but they're the ones that have their sticky hands on the steering wheel. So find this internal wise adult self within you. And this comes through empowerment and empowered experiences in relationship, feeling a sense of agency that I know what to do, I know my parts, I know what's right for me and the confidence that I can ride the waves of my nervous system without being taken over by them. Instead of being taken over by these younger parts of us where we just don't have any internal strength and foundation in our house, right? That's when the house is just on quicksand and we have to pull emotional resources from other people to confirm that we're safe, right? We're just falling down in the quicksand, we're holding onto other people, telling us we're okay, and that's when we're seeking external validation. And that's why we people please because we wanna be liked by people. Another aspect of the internal adult self we need to develop is coming into presence. So if you've experienced complex PTSD in your life where you've had these intense emotional experiences that back up in your body, in your nervous system, you can feel really fragile and you bring all of your past into your present. You often live in your past or in the anxiety and fear of the future. And the only way you can regulate your body through CPTSD is to be in the present moment. So presence is what gives you access to this part of you. So bring your awareness and your attention back into the here and now because that's where the wise adult self lives in presence, in the presence of awareness, in the presence of somatic sensation and orientation in the room and the world and in relationship to others, not in the fear of the anxiety and the fear of the past and the shame of all of that, which is where your other parts tend to live. So find practices that put you in contact with presence in your body, whether that's movement, yoga, body awareness, a workout class, get out, get active, go into nature, bring yourself back into your body and find your emotional state in the present moment through mindfulness practices where you track your inner state and map where you are during the day and how you're feeling. Get as much of yourself in your awareness as you can and stay within yourself as it's happening rather than collapsing, going into overthinking and then shut down. This practice will build over time and a more solid foundation and structure for your house will develop, which means then that the walls you've built up around you with this strength and rigidity that cause you to be emotionally unavailable and to keep attracting unhealthy and toxic relationship partners, they will eventually soften. And within that softening comes a higher level of sensitivity, of intuition and more awareness, which means that you will start to meet more people. And when you're dating, you'll have a higher degree of awareness when someone else is emotionally unavailable, when they have those walls or maladaptive behaviors that are not in alignment and in the truth with who they are. That strength of your foundation within you that comes from this part will afford you that level of greater and heightened awareness in the way that you relate to other people. But you've got to start within yourself, in your nervous system, co-regulation with yourself and with others, building an internal ally, that adult self within you and staying in presence in order to achieve that. And if you want more help with that, that is the work that I do with my clients. So please go ahead and apply for my program. Click the link to book a call with me in the link below. In the meantime, here are some next step videos for you to watch so you can move one step closer to having a beautiful relationship with yourself and others. And for now, I will see you in the next video.