How to Become Emotionally Available: 4 Steps to Self Connection

How do you become emotionally available so that you can break your cycle of always attracting unhealthy relationships, stop attracting the wrong kinds of partners, and most importantly, stop abandoning yourself every time you fall in love? By the end of this video, you'll know the steps to reset your emotional patterns by working somatically with your nervous system so that you can become emotionally available and be open to healthy, secure relational dynamics. I spent years being emotionally unavailable and always stuck in relationships that were either unhealthy or downright toxic. And although I met potentially healthy partners, my emotional patterns would repel them. Once I learned the skills to work deep in my body to rewire my emotional patterns, a whole new part of me opened up and I became available to deeper, more secure relating in my relationships. And I wanna help you do the same because this is the work that I do with my clients in Heal Your Heart School. If you wanna know more, please book a call with me on my calendar so I can best guide you on your journey. Let's firstly look at what emotional unavailability is. I want you to think of it like a layer of internal protection inside of you, just beneath your skin energetically. If you were to imagine a chocolate that has a hard shell on the outside and a soft, gooey center on the inside, that hard shell is actually serving to protect the very soft, vulnerable parts within it. So emotional unavailability works in the same way. It's a hard shell that's been created around you emotionally in order to protect your more vulnerable feelings, fears, beliefs, doubts, and trauma that you store deep within you. Now, emotional unavailability is a trauma response. Your shell has hardened over years because of childhood and relational trauma you've experienced in your earliest relationships and more recent relationships, and this trauma is locked away inside the shell. So only a small percentage of you is actually available emotionally to interact and connect in relationships. So you're living life and connecting with others from the surface of who you are, and there are these stored fears and insecurities inside you that you're unaware of, or maybe you vaguely know that they're there, but you really fear going in and finding out because those unconscious parts, unconscious fears, feelings, and emotions are actually running your life. It might make sense to lock them away so they get out of the way, but they don't get out of the way, right? They come through as your shadow, and they come through as your unconscious decisions and what you're attracted to. And being cut off from all of these parts within you is what gives them power in your life to run unconsciously. And because your emotional experience is limited, this is what makes you emotionally unavailable to show up fully in your relationships. So the reason you're cut off from your emotions is because as a child, you learn to cut off from your emotions in order to stay safe. Imagine if you were a child and you were curious about a hot stove, and you reach out and you get burnt by that hot stove. It's perfectly normal that you would not wanna touch that hot stove again, right? Someone who's emotionally unavailable has had that same experience with their emotions. You've learned to shut off from your emotions because at one point you felt them, and it was a very scary and unsafe experience for you because you didn't have safe relationships around you that allowed you to process those big emotions in a healthy way, which would have created secure attachment for you. Instead, you were left to process them on your own, which you couldn't because your child brain wasn't fully developed yet. And as a result, you couldn't process bigger emotions in your life, which you've now carried through into adulthood. Emotional unavailability in relationship is a sign of unresolved trauma in your earliest relationships. So you would have experienced emotional neglect or abandonment as a child, or perceived abandonment where your parents weren't emotionally available to you. So you were left on your own to figure out how to handle these emotions, but they just became this big internal hot stove within you, too painful to feel. So this internal hot stove is like an energetic clump of emotions you couldn't process as a child. Feelings of abandonment, grief, sadness, and loneliness, which I call your abandonment wound. And you learn that distance or avoidance or just disconnection from these emotions is the safest way to be. And soon, this habit of distancing yourself and cutting yourself off from your emotions becomes so strong that you lose your ability to sit in your full emotional experience and process them in a healthy way. Your habit becomes just to avoid them or bypass them. And the nervous system piece is key here because your nervous system actually grows up around this trauma response. It grows around the response you had to trying to feel safe and avoid those unsafe emotions. And your window of tolerance becomes narrow because of your nervous system and how rigid it becomes with this trauma response. And now you have an inability to regulate your nervous system when you experience strong emotions. Now, I want to introduce you to the concept of parts today because our internal parts gain significance when they are dealing with trauma like this. So we all have parts within us, our inner critic, our inner child, other younger parts organizing or directing the show inside, just like the films Inside Out or Inside Out 2. Inside Out 2 is way better. But in order to deal with these unsafe pockets of emotions and energy inside you, these parts learn maladaptive behaviors to avoid certain emotional patterns and experiences in order to stay safe. For example, your inner perfectionist starts to work overtime in order to feel a sense of control within you because control is a way you manufacture safety in situations. You know, I can't control the outside world but I can control my world and this becomes a way to self-soothe and self-regulate when strong emotions come up and when you're feeling vulnerable. Or your inner critic becomes particularly loud and active when you lose control because you're feeling more vulnerable and it knows if it makes you bad, you can at least have a reason things are not going well, if you like. So our parts are what need healing and instead of healing like layers of an onion, a term you might be familiar with, you're actually healing parts of a garlic clove because of this fragmentation effect. Each of your parts have their own perspectives, feelings and behaviors and there are different categories of parts too. For example, in internal family systems, there are protectors, managers and firefighters. But for today, I'm gonna keep things simple and we're gonna focus on protectors and vulnerable parts. So one type of the part is the protector which is the hard shell of the chocolate and the other part is a vulnerable part within you, the soft gooey inside part that the protector is keeping safe. The shell, the protectors are working under the belief that by over-functioning, by doing the thing they believe is keeping you safe even more, they're actually doing the right thing by you. So your inner critic will pipe up even louder, your inner perfectionist will want to make things even more perfect. And the vulnerable exiled parts inside you that carry the emotions that you're unable to process will hold onto these unprocessed emotions like a burden. So emotional unavailability is an over-functioning of protector parts and the way we need to heal our emotional unavailability is to work with our protector parts to release their over-function so you can access and heal the emotions that the vulnerable parts are holding onto. That's a very simplified version of what we're gonna get into detail now. So let's look at the emotional patterns of your protector parts so you can understand why they're over-functioning, when they're over-functioning and what's causing you to be emotionally unavailable. Deflection is an emotional pattern where any trigger or emotion is immediately offloaded to someone else or assigned to an external source like a situation so that part doesn't have to take responsibility for it. For example, if someone brings up something you did that has made them feel unhappy, it may be deeply uncomfortable to acknowledge that something you've done has hurt them, particularly if it's someone you love. So that protector part will deflect taking responsibility and immediately assign blame elsewhere, saying it was an external situation that led you to do that rather than taking ownership for it. Another emotional pattern is to deny or minimize an emotion and this involves avoiding or stuffing down emotions, ignoring them and not processing them due to an inability to process emotions. Processing emotions is not a skill that someone emotionally unavailable possesses to an extent. Your protector may make the emotion smaller and more manageable, something more understandable that allows you to avoid going into the depths of your emotional experience because going that deep is unsafe in your body. Another emotional pattern is to alchemize or change an emotional experience or even to change reality in perception itself. This is really common amongst those who are in limerence or prone to fantasy bonding. An emotionally unavailable person will create a fantasy bond with someone to connect to something that isn't actually there. This gives them a sense of control around the relationship and allows them to create a story that isn't actually a reality so they can feel the emotions that are safe and manageable for them to feel, which is far more preferable than facing real, unpredictable emotions for a real-life person who is an unknown and who could potentially actually really hurt you if you loved them from a real place. For example, someone who's prone to limerence or love addiction can fall deeply in love with someone they've just met or maybe haven't even met, they've just been texting. What you're falling in love with in this case is a bond you've created in your mind. Take a scenario like chatting with a stranger on a dating app or going on a first date with someone you know nothing about. You'll transform that scenario into something of much more significance than it actually is based on all of your wishes, dreams, and desires, or your vision of a perfect partner. And then you attach to that vision, partially because of ego, but also because it's easier to love someone you've created in your mind than to put your actual feelings on the line for someone real and unknown. In fact, real love can't truly form without time passing and getting to know someone deeply. So this type of emotionally unavailable love remains at a surface level. Another emotional pattern is to project onto someone or something else. This involves attributing your own feelings, thoughts, and emotions to someone to make them more manageable. What you see in someone is actually what's inside of you. It's similar to a fantasy bond as it provides a known element, something that feels safe for you. But this stops you from truly seeing the real person because you're bonding with simply a projection of your own desires in a person. Lastly, there's the emotional pattern of internalization. This is where you take an external scenario like toxic relationship behaviors from your partner and make it about yourself, that it's your fault that he's acting like that. This contributes to your toxic shame as you take inappropriate blame for how bad and toxic your relationship is. Now, you might not be conscious of this, but if you're emotionally unavailable, you do this to maintain a bond with your partner, which actually acts to control your perspective on them. That's more digestible than recognizing that the problem might actually lie with your romantic partner, whose toxic behavior likely stems from their childhood and attachment trauma, which has entirely nothing to do with you. These are all unknowns for you and represent an immediate threat to your connection with them, which in a limerent relationship, connection is of utmost importance, more important than anything. Internalizing or self-referencing behavior in our romantic relationships come from unhealthy dynamics in childhood. A child whose primary caregiver was neglectful or abandoning will automatically assume it's their fault that their parent is neglectful, because the reality that the caregiver is neglectful is too damaging for the child's worldview. For the child, feeling safe in their worldview of connection in the safe family unit they have is more crucial than their sense of self or of what reality is. So assuming responsibility for a parent not showing up for them feels safer than seeing the parent as dropping the ball or being emotionally neglectful. This too is the underlying conditions for learning how to fantasy bond as an adult, because the fantasy bond acts again as a buffer and doesn't allow the child to see the reality or the truth of the situation. So these are all emotional patterns of protectors that work really hard to avoid feeling the deeper feelings held by the vulnerable parts, the soft, gooey inside of the chocolate. Now, you'll likely recognize the emotions and feelings of your vulnerable parts because your protectors aren't always successful. The hard shell has cracks, and in my experience with clients, when the vulnerable parts become strong enough or are forced to carry enough burdens, they will push through the surface and become the primary emotional home of a person. So emotional patterns like victimhood, the thoughts associated with this emotional pattern are I'm powerless and no one cares about me and life is unfair. When you feel this way, you constantly seek reassurance. You'll be very passive in your life, focusing on injustices in your relationship and feeling helpless and immobilized by any challenge that arises. Feeling stuck in a relationship and being unwilling to leave because it takes more effort to move out of a victim mentality than it is to stay in the relationship. Another pattern is abandonment or perceived abandonment. This includes beliefs like people will always leave me and I'm not lovable enough. The behaviors associated here are clinging to others, feeling deeply anxious in relationships, so anxious attachment style, and over-pleasing because you feel unlovable. If you have disorganized attachment, you might push others away with the belief that people will always leave me, so I'll leave them first so they can't do it. This results in emotions like sadness, panic, rejection, and self-blame. Another pattern is shame or toxic shame, which is tied to self-identity. This feeling of never being enough or that there's something deeply broken or unworthy about you. You might find yourself hiding or avoiding social situations or dating or relationships altogether, and you may downplay your own successes and the good things about you, always focusing on the negative, which leads to self-sabotage and harsh self-criticism. This strong inner critic or protector is directly connected to shame, shielding the deep shame that is held in your body in that soft, gooey center you've got. Your emotions in this pattern are centered around embarrassment, guilt, worthlessness, and anxiety. Another vulnerable parts emotional pattern is fear of rejection, the fear of being judged, rejected, or that you don't belong. With no sense of belonging and connection, you may work too hard to gain it through people-pleasing, trying to blend in, or over-functioning. Alternatively, you might just isolate yourself with thoughts like, I'm gonna be rejected, so I'll reject you first, in that disorganized way. Emotions related to this pattern include anxiety, insecurity, and loneliness, and hyper-vigilance. Another pattern is guilt, with thoughts like, I should have done more, or it's my fault. This is connected directly to the protector that internalizes situations, making them about you, even though they have nothing to do with you. By self-referencing, you hold onto deep guilt, resulting in behaviors such as over-apologizing, taking on too much responsibility, and blaming yourself, and just trying to fix situations that aren't yours to fix. Emotions associated with this are shame, regret, and chronic self-doubt. Another pattern is hopelessness and despair, a deep feeling that nothing will ever improve, and that making any effort seems pointless. And this leads to avoiding new opportunities and a passive stance, thinking that nothing will work. And you might even refuse help, feeling critical or dismissive of others, assuming that nothing is gonna help you. And this comes with emotions like numbness, sadness, defeat, and reluctance to engage, or make changes. Lastly, there is self-doubt, and this is the feeling of having lost trust in yourself, feeling unsure of what's right for you, and thinking, I can't do this. You may find yourself constantly second-guessing and turning to self-help books, becoming almost addicted to consuming self-help material without it truly helping. And this creates a cycle of trying to help yourself, but feeling like you're circling the drain, unable to fully heal and unable to escape the doubt. And emotions that go with this are anxiety, depression, insecurity, and fear of failure. So that's a very thorough look at the architecture of the emotionally unavailable self from an emotional standpoint and from the protector's standpoint, and how behaviors can result from these emotional homes that we live in, these parts we're in, whether it's the protector, the hard shell that's interacting with the world, or it's coming from the vulnerable soft shell within you, the part that feels very fragile. What's really essential to know is that in order to heal these parts, we need to identify the specific nervous system states associated with each. And it's actually through the nervous system that we can learn how to heal. The vulnerable parts within you, like the inner child, bring you into a dorsal vagal state when you're in those vulnerable emotional states. In this state, you experience freeze or shutdown. You might feel sensations of immobility, numbness, disassociation, or intense fear in your body. Then when a protector part is active, you move into fight or flight response, which is the sympathetic state. Here, you'll feel intense vigilance, a need for control, people-pleasing behaviors, over-preparation for a situation, and extreme anxiety. Now, let's contrast this with a regulated state where you're in a healthy, secure attachment with others, which is what I call the true self. In nervous system language, this is the ventral vagal state. In this state, you feel calm and connected. Your parasympathetic nervous system is activated, so you're in rest and digest mode. And you experience feelings of compassion, curiosity, and calmness. And relationships feel safe for you in this state. So if you've looked into nervous system work before, you might have come across this image. When we're in the green state, we're in social engagement mode. And then moving into the red state puts us in the sympathetic state, which is our fight or flight response. And this is the nervous system home of our protectors, our hard shell. Then when we go into our vulnerable inner child states, the parts within us that hold deep, heavy emotions we've been suppressing, our bodies move into the dorsal vagal state where we feel freeze responses like disassociation, shame, numbness, and shut down. Now, how we move in and out of these states is really important to know because there is good stress. We are naturally designed to move in and out of our parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system. So this is what a healthy regulation looks like. Trauma or stress or overwhelm happens, and we might get pushed out of our window of tolerance briefly. And then we come back into fight or flight and settle into our parasympathetic state. And then something might stress us again, and then we're able to move back in and out. And we just move between these states throughout the day. But if you didn't learn this natural kind of nervous system regulation, this is what your state would look like. A trauma, stress, or overwhelm occurs, and you get pushed way out of your window of tolerance, and you actually get stuck on. You experience all of these symptoms here, and you might start to try and down-regulate and experience a little bit. And then you might just get pushed back into that state, which then causes you to crash into this off position, which is the dorsal vagal state, where you experience depression, lethargy, and low impulse. And this is the state at which these deep emotions that your inner child, your vulnerable parts, are holding will come up. And then you flick back across to this stuck-on state, and you are outside of your window of tolerance this entire time. Your nervous system is just crashing from one state to the other, rather than staying in this nice, healthy, regulated flow. So we can learn how to be in the green state while working with our protector or vulnerable states using a tool that I've developed called RAIN. Now, this tool was originally developed by Tara Brach. I've adapted it over the years of working with clients to function as a somatic and healing tool for abandonment and attachment trauma. It specifically addresses your parts and the over-functioning quality of them, and works interrelationally to allow them to release their trauma and relax their over-functioning. RAIN also allows us to work with our vulnerable parts by bringing safety into our nervous system. So the acronym stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, and Nurture. And before diving into this tool, I want you to start by tracking your nervous system state throughout the day, as it's natural to experience fluctuations between the parasympathetic and sympathetic states, as you saw in that previous diagram. So I want you to notice when you're in that natural fluctuation, as opposed to when you get stuck in the on state, where you're unable to access a healthy regulated state, whether it's for a short period of time or a long period of time. And I also want to caveat that you might have been stuck on for years, and so you may not be able to access your parasympathetic state. So working on RAIN is going to allow you to start to down-regulate your nervous system. Now, instead of running your usual pattern to deal with your trigger, like fleeing from discomfort, dissociating, watching Netflix for hours, or overeating, or going into fantasy, I want you to pause before engaging in those behaviors and do this tool. Now, this is something you can learn to do consciously, recognizing that your nervous system often reacts before you can consciously respond. But by consciously practicing this tool, you'll increase your chances of diverting to doing this instead of your usual responsive behaviors. So just before you typically react, try using RAIN. Or practice RAIN consciously so that the next time you're triggered, there's a higher chance that you'll move into this practice instead of going into automatic behaviors. So firstly, recognize the presence of something arising within you. If possible, identify which part it is based on that previous table of emotions and behaviors. Is it your inner child, a vulnerable part within you? Or is it your inner critic, a protector, with critical thoughts towards yourself or others? Or another protector that's just deflecting, or denying, or minimizing, or alchemizing, fantasy bonding, projecting, or internalizing? Recognizing if an emotional pattern is starting to take over. At this point, you need to practice unblending with the part. So seeing the part as just one part of you, not all of you, and not identifying with this part as well. We go our lives blended with our protector and our vulnerable parts, not even realizing that there are different aspects of our personality that are actually running the show. So unblending is really the first step to giving yourself this inner space. Now, the way I do this is to imagine that there's a self within me observing my inner critic, my protector, or my inner child. And even the very fact of me naming it as the inner critic, you already have this capacity to do it. If you've heard that term before, you've considered your inner critic as a part within you. So you're connecting with it, you're getting to know it, rather than letting it run the show or you identifying with it as you or fighting with it unconsciously, which is something that we tend to do. Instead of blending with it or criticizing yourself for this part's presence, take a step back to create space for a conversation. Just like you would invite a stranger in for a cup of tea, they're not gonna be staying forever, it's just a visit. You're just taking a chance to get to know them. The second step is to allow this inner part to be here. Your inner child, your inner critic, or your protector parts are actually intelligent, important, vital parts of you that need acknowledgement, not criticism or shutdown. So saying things like, thank you for being here, thank you for protecting me, I'm listening to you, or I wanna know more. Allow this part inside you to feel fully seen, heard, and understood. And try to discover why it feels the need to act in this way. It will have a story and a narrative for why it's doing its protecting. For instance, when a protector arises, it might be because you're feeling discomfort in your body. I want you to not only get to know why that protector is doing what it's doing, but also to lean into the somatic sensation that's coming with this feeling of discomfort. If it's overwhelming for you, just focus on the edges of the sensation, gently familiarizing yourself with it, and investigate those sensations, track them. If you've accessed a protector, you might feel a fast beating heart, shallow breathing, nervousness, tension, or anxiety localized in one area. Repeatedly feeling a certain sensation like pain or sharpness somewhere can actually indicate where the emotion is stored in your body. This is your body preparing you for fight or flight in response to addressing the emotion within you. So we're actually accessing it just before that state is occurring. Now, if you've accessed a vulnerable part, you might feel heaviness, disassociation, or low energy or cold extremities, which are signs your body is preparing to shut down to conserve energy in that dorsal vagal state. Once you've located the sensation, place your hand on it if needed, and ask it questions like, what do you need me to know? What's important right now for you? What do you need to feel safe? So as you do this, keep 50% of your attention on that part and whatever feedback you're getting, and the other 50% on your body, on the somatic responses that are going on. If the sensation is changing like tingling, or you feel like crying, or just feels like there's some movement and energy going on, these somatic movements should come with some feeling of relief afterward. If you're not feeling relief, please stop and use self-soothing practices to bring yourself back into your window of tolerance. Finally, nurture this part. Internal connection and co-regulation is what truly heals abandonment and attachment trauma, as trauma originated in relationships, right? So we have to heal it in relationship. So we're replicating a supportive relationship in this step, within yourself. You're cultivating a sense of belonging and safety. Since it's relational trauma, healing it in relation to another part within you is essential. You can also heal in relationship to others, but this is all about self-healing and this is entirely possible. So for example, you can nurture your inner child by connecting to it from your higher self, or you can heal your inner critic by embodying inner compassion, which acts as an antidote to criticism. Nurturing sounds like saying to this part and truly feeling it in your body, it makes sense what you're doing right now, which can soothe the inner critic. When protectors feel seen and loved, they relax their grip. Or words like, I love you, thank you for being here. When was the last time you told your inner critic or your inner saboteur that you love them and thank you for being here, right? You don't. So when protectors feel seen, heard, and loved, they relax their grip. Vulnerable parts will also begin to release their burdens because a burden shared is a burden halved, as the saying goes, bringing relief to you as they trust you enough to share their deepest fears and share their somatic trauma that's trapped inside of you so that your body can disperse it. In the nurturing step, love this part as if it was a young, vulnerable, scared child because these young parts are often pre-verbal, most of them are pre-verbal, and they hold trauma from a very early age before you could speak, but you could feel. So trauma is stored in the body from these young stages, so you're connecting to young, vulnerable parts within you. So visualize sitting with this part, asking it what it needs and giving it affection, a hug, or eye contact, or love. Even go so far as to sense its nervous system, its breathing, and co-regulate by breathing with it. This might all sound really esoteric, but you're actually working with different energetic pockets within your body that shift and change in your nervous system, and this is entirely possible to do. So I just want to caveat, this explanation I'm giving you is verbal, but the actual practice is non-verbal and somatic. So those with somatic skills may be able to apply this themselves, but ultimately, this practice is most effective within a supportive container. And I would love to teach you this tool in a container that supports your healing, which is Heal Your Heart School. So if you're interested, please go ahead and book a call with me so that I can best guide you on your healing journey and help you, your body, and your nervous system heal from your trauma. In the meantime, here are some next-step videos for you to watch so you can move one step closer to being emotionally available, peaceful, present, and authentic in all your relationships. And for now, I'll see you in the next video.