Ep. 334: How to Change Your Love Life by Becoming Emotionally Available

For most of my adult life, I believed I had a pattern in relationships. I thought I attracted emotionally unavailable men. I saw that pattern very clearly. What I didn’t understand until much later was that I was only seeing part of the picture.

I was 52 when I entered 12 step recovery. I’d never been married. I’d been engaged once. I’d lived with several men. I’d had many relationships that were clearly defined as boyfriend and girlfriend. I’d also had some friends with benefits. And when I really looked at my history, I realized something surprising. I’d been telling myself a story about my relationships that simply wasn’t true.

That realization came through doing a relationship inventory in step 4 of ACA. step four in ACA is the same as in other programs in that we take a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Where it differs from other 12 step programs is that we get down to causes and conditions. 

That is, in ACA we understand that we are a product of our environment. in other 12 step programs you’re not allowed to look at other people, you’re not allowed to look at family systems etcetera. 

But in ACA we understand we are a product of our environment, so in step four and ACA there are 12 inventories. 3 of them are about things that i did and nine of them are about things that happened to me. these helps us to understand what we did based on our conditioning (the causes and conditions)

Before recovery, I believed emotionally unavailable men were the problem. I believed they were drawn to me and that somehow I was unlucky or cursed or attracting the wrong people. I also believed I was generous, loving, flexible, and long suffering, and that I just hadn’t met the right person yet.

I knew I stayed too long. I knew I tolerated things that weren’t okay with me. I knew I found it almost impossible to leave relationships until they became completely intolerable. But I didn’t understand why.

Then I went to my first ACA meeting and heard a line from the Laundry List that landed like a punch to the chest. “Will do anything to hold on to a relationship. “I knew immediately that was me.

What I came to see in recovery is that this wasn’t magic and it wasn’t bad luck. It was conditioning. It was my nervous system doing exactly what it had been trained to do.

Yes, I was attracted to emotionally unavailable men. But what I couldn’t see was that they were a match for me because I was emotionally unavailable too.

What I mean when I say I wasn’t emotionally available is that I didn’t know what I felt. I didn’t allow myself to feel. I buried emotions. I numbed them. I used substances and behaviors to avoid them. I wasn’t emotionally available to myself, so of course I couldn’t be emotionally available to someone else.

And what emotionally available person is going to stay in a relationship with someone who can’t feel, speak, or tolerate emotional truth?

That’s when the victim story started to fall apart. I wasn’t being targeted. I was participating. Not consciously. Not maliciously. But deeply, subconsciously, and predictably.

One of the biggest shifts for me came when I started to understand emotions as signals rather than verdicts.

For example, resentment. I used to think resentment meant the other person was a problem. That they were an inconsiderate  dick or a selfish jerk. What I understand now is that resentment usually means I’m not speaking up.

It means something isn’t okay with me and I’m expecting the other person to magically know that and change without me having to say anything. When that doesn’t happen, I resent them.

Learning to feel emotions, interpret them correctly, and let them guide me changed everything. That’s where boundaries entered the picture. Boundaries weren’t about control. They were about clarity. They were about self responsibility. They were about becoming emotionally available to myself first.

As I mentioned above, In ACA, the fourth step includes multiple inventories. Most of them focus on what happened to us. A smaller number focus on what we did. The goal isn’t blame. It’s understanding. Causes and conditions.

One of the inventories I found most powerful was the relationship inventory. I’m not going to share details from mine, but I do want to share the categories because this is something you can do on your own and it can be incredibly illuminating. I’ve also shared the categories in the show notes in case you want to use them yourself.

The first is who the person was. Then, What you expected from them or from the relationship. What you actually got. What your dependent behavior was. And how the relationship ended.

I also chose to track additional things. Who I was truly in love with. Which relationships were clearly defined on both sides. Where substance use played a major role. Where infidelity was present. And who ended the relationship.

What I saw over time was unmistakable. My codependence didn’t improve with age. It got worse. I lost myself more and more. And very early on, I received a message that landed deep in my nervous system. That I couldn’t be loved if I was fully myself.

Seeing that pattern on paper changed me.

I’m in a healthy romantic relationship today because I no longer expect a partner to be the be all and end all of my existence. We have separate lives, separate interests, and shared ones too. That’s healthy. That’s interdependence.

His problems are his. Mine are mine. We support each other without fixing or rescuing. When something bothers me, I say it. When something bothers him, he says it. We don’t mind read. We don’t keep score.

And I don’t take things personally the way I once did. Not just in relationships, but everywhere.

Closing takeaway

If you want emotionally healthy relationships, the work starts with emotional availability to yourself. Not perfection. Not fixing your partner. Not choosing better people.

Feeling your feelings. Listening to them. Speaking your truth. Setting boundaries when something isn’t okay.

That’s where everything changes.