Why Emotionally Unavailable People Keep Showing Up and What You Can Do About It

Issue 154, February 13, 2026 ✨ Higher Power Coaching & Consulting ✨

One of my clients recently asked me for concrete examples of emotional availability and vulnerability.

She said something like this:“I show empathy. I validate people. I listen. I’m curious. I really try to be there. So why do I keep ending up with emotionally unavailable people?”

It’s such an honest question. And it’s one I was perplexed by for years before recovery.

Back then, I believed emotionally unavailable men were attracted to me. That part was true. What I didn’t see at the time was the other half of the equation.

That I was not just attracting them, I was also attracted TO them.

What I eventually figured out was that the reason all that was happening was the *I* was emotionally unavailable. And that makes total sense, because what emotionally available person would be attracted to and stay in relationship with someone who’s emotionally unavailable?

This was completely subconscious, of course.

It took some time, but I eventually realized that I wasn’t emotionally available to myself.

I was disconnected from my own emotional world. I didn’t really know what I was feeling or why. I buried a lot of emotion, even though I cried often. I cried about whatever was happening in front of me, but I typically cried in a way that didn’t match what was going on. My crying seemed way out of proportion to the current situation.

What I didn’t realize then was that I was carrying years of unexpressed grief. There’s a passage in foundational ACA literature called The Solution that says, “When we release the burden of unexpressed grief, we slowly move out of the past.”

That grief wasn’t some amorphous grief. It was the grief of the difference between what I could have had if I’d grown up in nurturing, safe, emotionally attuned family and what I actually received in my dysfunctional family instead.

For most of us, that gap is enormous.

Doing the 12 steps, especially step 4 in ACA, allowed me to finally become able to grieve that difference because I came to see just how much I didn’t get. And not because my parents were bad people, but because they couldn’t give what they didn’t get.

I came to understand all this on an emotional level, not just intellectually. I learned what I’d been crying about all those years. It was like I had this deep reservoir of sadness that I didn’t even know was there, so when I cried about current event,s I wasn’t just crying about those events. I was crying from that deep pool of grief. However, that grief was never relieved because I didn’t know what the fuck was crying about!

When I felt that grief fully, something shifted. I wasn’t crying all the time anymore. Any my crying no longer felt infinite. It had a beginning and an end. The well was no longer overflowing because it wasn’t being ignored.

Releasing unexpressed grief didn’t just reduce my tears. It released old patterns. As the solution says, “When we release the burden of unexpressed grief, we slowly move out of the past.” The way I think of it is that I’m no longer anchored in the past by my grief.  Tt’s like the grief was so weighty and heavy it had its own mass and was metaphorically dragging me down, holding me in the past, tied to my old patterns. Both behavioral and emotional patterns.

I came see how much of what I reacted to in the present was really about the past. How often I blamed people and situations in the present for feelings that were actually reminding me, at least subconsciously, of the past.

That awareness changed how I related to my emotions. I started paying attention to them instead of fighting them, ignoring them or pushing them down.

For example, I sometimes used to feel resentful of people for asking me for help. It usually went like this: I offered help. They accepted (of course). They kept asking. I kept giving. And then I resented them. Even though I’m the one who offered!

At the time, I thought that resentment meant they were taking advantage of me. What I eventually saw was that my resentment was also directed at myself.  I was angry that I kept giving when I didn’t want to anymore. That I said yes when I wanted to say no.

The resentment wasn’t a moral judgment about them. It was information about me. It was my nervous system saying, “This isn’t okay with you Barb.”

But I was so emotionally unavailable to myself that I couldn’t hear that message. Instead, I stayed in my victim mentality about what others were doing to me.

Here’s the truth that took me a long time to accept. People can’t take advantage of you. You give them the advantage. That realization didn’t make me bad. It made me powerful! Because it meant I could change something.

When I started really listening to my emotions, I also began to see how this showed up in my relationships. I expected other people to be emotionally available to me in ways I wasn’t even capable of being for myself.

I wanted them to tell me how they felt (but only if I agreed with their feelings!). If I didn’t, I tried to talk them out of them. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing at the time.

Emotionally available people don’t do that. They don’t argue with emotions. They don’t defend against feelings they don’t like. They don’t try to convince someone that their emotional experience is wrong.

They allow emotions. Their own and others’. They can say, “I don’t really understand what you’re feeling, but I accept that this is what you’re feeling.” That acceptance doesn’t require agreement. It requires boundaries.

And that kind of presence starts internally.

When I became emotionally available to myself, something profound changed. I stopped abandoning myself. I stopped making myself wrong when someone said something cruel or dismissive. I stopped internalizing other people’s behavior as truth about me.

There’s a relationship from my past that I only understood clearly years later. At the time, I believed this man was a “nice guy”. Everyone said so. And most of the time he was a nice guy. But because of that story, when he occasionally said deeply hurtful things to me, I assumed I must be the problem.

I made myself wrong to protect the image of him being “nice.” It wasn’t until I shared those moments with other women in recovery that I saw the truth. Truly kind people don’t say hateful and hurtful things.

And even if they do, I don’t have to carry that. I wouldn’t tolerate that now. Not because I’m tougher. But because I’m emotionally available to myself. I support myself. I don’t throw myself under the bus anymore.

That internal availability changed how I show up in relationships. I can stay present when someone is upset without taking responsibility for fixing them. I can take a pause when emotions go haywire and then return to the conversation in a grounded way.

I know the difference between  my feelings and yours now. And that separation creates safety.

Being emotionally available isn’t about managing other people’s emotions. It’s about knowing yourself well enough that emotions don’t scare you. They can move through you without taking over.

If you’ve just come out of a difficult relationship, there’s wisdom there if you’re willing to look gently. Not to blame yourself. But to understand yourself.

• What felt familiar?
• What felt unsettling?
• What did you tolerate that you wouldn’t tolerate now?

That kind of reflection builds discernment. And discernment is one of the strongest emotional boundaries we have.

Emotional availability begins at home.

And when you stop abandoning yourself, everything else changes. You stop being terrified of abandonment. That’s because you’re not abandoned. You have your own back. You can count on yourself to follow through for yourself and stand up for yourself, which is the opposite of self-abandonment. And if you add a Higher Power to that, you’re even more NOT abandoned!

If you’re reading this and realizing that emotional availability starts with you, not with finding a different kind of partner, you’re not alone. This is exactly the work I’ll teach in my upcoming workshop, Boundaries for Real Love: How to Stop Shrinking in Your Relationships, on February 26.

We’ll talk about how to stay connected to yourself in relationships, how to stop abandoning yourself when emotions run high, and how to build the kind of internal safety that makes real intimacy possible.

Not by changing who you are.
But by learning how to stay with yourself when it actually matters.

If this essay stirred something in you, that’s probably not an accident.

You can learn more and save your spot here.