When you feel as though there is a wall between you and someone you care deeply about, either you or this person might be emotionally unavailable. It can be challenging for people to recognize or identify emotional unavailability or why it exists. Emotional unavailability can happen for a number of different reasons. It is important to know what it is and what you can do about it to ensure that you have the healthiest possible relationships.
Identification
Emotional unavailability is a person's inability to communicate and openly discuss and share his feelings with another person. Emotionally unavailable people tend to have difficulty with committed relationships. They tend to be ambiguous and vague about the status of their close relationships and have difficulty directly addressing problems within themselves and in their relationships.
Features
When talking with others, emotionally unavailable people tend to like to listen and give facts and nothing more. In arguments, these people tune the other person out or shut down themselves. Emotionally unavailable people are likely to have large emotional outbursts due to suppressing their feelings in their relationships for so long.
Types
LIfeEsteem.org classifies emotionally unavailable into several different categories. Adventure seekers receive attention from others due to their conquests, but do not make themselves vulnerable when having an emotional attachment. Beautiful people can be emotionally unavailable due to growing up with a belief that their looks are the most important aspect of themselves. Addicts tend to be emotionally unavailable because the vast majority of their attention goes into their addiction: drugs, alcohol, work, shopping, sex, gambling or television. Intellectual people can be emotionally unavailable because they find that sharing their feelings causes them to lose control. People with narcissistic personality disorder are emotionally unavailable because they are more interested in having people love them than in providing others with love. Secretive people have strong trust issues that prevent them from being completely emotionally available.
Causes
One major cause of emotional unavailability is that a person has grown up in a household that does not encourage its members to express their emotions or views feelings as a weakness. Even if someone has not been explicitly told that expressing emotions is a sign of weakness, growing up in an environment in which people rarely cry or reveal their feelings can influence people to become emotionally shut down and unavailable.
Considerations
Emotionally unavailable people need to first get in touch with their own feelings before they can be able to share these feelings with other people. They need to learn how to identify when they feel sad, happy, angry, scared, hurt or content. It can help for emotionally unavailable people to meet with a therapist to begin to identify, understand and practice sharing their feelings with another person in a therapeutic and healing context.
