(If you know you go for unavailable people and why, skip to 4.30 mins to the end to hear about your possible process and what I will be exploring in future posts to help you)

If we are having or have had relationships with emotionally unavailable people, we can consider them to be ‘the problem’ and blame them for any relationship difficulty. We miss our own part in the relational dynamic.

What is going on for us when we go for emotionally unavailable people? It is familiar to us. It is a learnt behaviour around relationships. We’ve been taught by our primary caregivers how relationships feel and also how to relate.

Our parent’s generation didn’t know about emotional needs and nurture the way we do now. We also demand more from our relationships now – we want to be loved, cherished, looked after, seen and have a deep, deep connection.

They did not generally provide a lot of emotional nurture. Our experience therefore is then learning to relate to someone unavailable and imprinting those dynamics, feelings and reactions. And this becomes the *only* way we know *how* to relate.

So yes, we will inevitably be attracted to these recognisably/familiar unavailable people.

We need to realise however that we will recreate what we know and expect in relationships. We evoke what we know from the person we’re with.

We also view the world through an unavailable lens – viewing and experiencing most relationships as somewhat rejecting, somewhat disappointing.

We will ‘put on’ the relationship and person what we expect and what we project.

We need to develop new relating behaviours, ones that are based in the reality of now, not the fearful pattern from our past.

In this Video I discuss my Emotional Unavailability Teaching in greater detail.

FIND ADDITIONAL TEACHINGS AND BONUS WORK THAT RELATE TO THIS VIDEO BELOW

Often it’s our fathers who were and are emotionally unavailable. Our parents' generation and beyond were more focused on providing for the family in practical and financial ways.