I hear the term emotionally unavailable repeatedly at the moment. It has become a common psycho babble term, but what does it really mean? How do we cultivate more? (we are in an era of moreness – might as well apply it to the good stuff).
I think about emotional availability in two parts:
- How deeply am I connected to myself and my story, how much work have I done to sit in and bear witness to my own shit, how close am I to my shadow? Essentially, all the things that sit in my unconscious mind that mostly, I’d rather not know about myself. Am I able to be with myself with humility, challenge myself and be honest? The more we are able to be here, the more emotionally available we’ll be for ourselves and others. You cannot meet anyone more deeply than you have met yourself.
- Emotional space and inner capacity
For the purpose of this notebook, I’ll mostly be talking about number 2, emotional space and inner capacity. For anything that resonates in Number 1, you should read the book Chance and I wrote on this topic, How To Grow Through What You Go Through, published by Penguin.
Do you often feel at your edges, at the limits of your emotional capacity, with little or no free space for the things that you’d like more of in your life? Maybe it’s more space for feeling, more space for deeper connection. The opportunity to be less quick to exit and to have more space to process deeply. To be less frayed, less emotionally exhausted, less backed into having to say no as a knee jerk, or not saying yes and meaning no. Craving more space for others and deep connection.
I think about my inner world as a container. Containing everything I’ve experienced in my past: my hopes, fears for the future, and of course everything that’s happening in the present. They all collide into each other, the good the bad and the ugly, our emotional responses to people, events, experiences. They all take up inner space, and the more unconscious or unprocessed, the more space they take up too.
As the world demands more of us; more money, more pace, more success, more hitting milestones, more global compassion, more insta glossy lives…all of the MORES can have us feeling full up. So full up internally that our actual emotional availability, any space that’s left can be very limited. Add to that a difficult or unprocessed past and a little bit of trepidation for the future, and we can feel completely at our emotional limits. In turn, this can make us hard and brittle, because hard doesn’t let anything in.
We mostly don’t let anything in because we are at our capacity, or feel we are. When we are at our capacity, we have no proper space available for processing things, or seeing things differently, and we certainly don’t have availability to deeply hold others. We have no or limited emotional availability left. This can keep us closed off from the expansive type of intimacy and connection we all need in our lives – a very common story for many of us. No space for what we actually are. Creating more internal capacity, in the space that we do have, is critical for our emotional availability and ultimately, our better mental health.
Where’s your emotional availability then?
The way I intuit and experience my own capacity is a visual affair. I consider my inner world as a container (today it’s an old school members club), with a certain amount of space, and when I’m emotionally regulated, I like to reserve different sized spaces within it for the different aspects of my life. Therapy has helped me become more attuned to what needs and deserves space. It has helped me acknowledge what is a space eater and does nothing for my overall wellbeing other than rob me of my emotional availability.
It has helped me identify what I might not be able to vacuum pack even if I wanted to, what might need more space, and what it is that just passes through. Sometimes I find it helpful to draw this out on a piece of paper to give me some clarity on what I might be experiencing and what’s demanding space because it needs it (e.g. a child going through a rough patch, or a challenge at work). Each has its own emotional orbit around it, which dictates how much space is being used, and will therefore offset against any space I have left (my emotional availability).
Imagine what the space inside looks like and break it into different sections, knowing that each aspect will take up oscillating space, depending on where you are at with it at the time, but you only have a finite amount of space for it.
For me, in my old school members club analogy, this looks like –
Starting with the VIP area (high property and things that depend on my holding space for their survival)
- My kids
- The dog
- My physical health
- My clients in analysis
- My personal work in Therapy (matter from the past, present, future)
- Money
In the Restaurant: (it’s not critical I hold space but useful if i do)
- My business/work
- My friends
- My business partner
In the Bar (still important)
- My family
- Joy
- Fun
- My purpose
- My home
- Hobbies
In the lobby (sometimes they deserve to have a seat, but sometimes there just isn’t space)
- Creativity
- Romantic relationships
- Travel
- Trying new things
The Private Hire room: This is effectively your emotional availability. It’s the space you have for the things that need more space and processing. These things might have been in other areas and just spill (sometimes things will get shoved in here and take up the whole space, when our boundaries aren’t firm or we hit some choppy life waters like grief and massive life change). Ideally we’d keep this room as free as possible more often than not so that we have a constant space to be available, but life is not ideal!
Outside in the queue: This is where a number of these things can be pushed out to when others need more space and you find you have no room. This is when you might hear or find you are ‘emotionally unavailable’. When people are outside in the queue – though I don’t think this is always generic – I think we can be emotionally available to some things, or some relationships, and not to others.
For example, we might find we have emotional capacity for our kids but not much or any for our partners (a common story for new parents). Or we might move to a new city and our entire capacity is used up on the basics, like understanding the area, regulating in a new place, meeting new people etc. In this instance, this might not be a time where you have the capacity to say start a new diet, or get a dog. Equally, you might and might feel that you do have room, or that these new things will give you space, rather than take it up. It’s deeply personal, and the more in tune you are with yourself, the more you’ll be able to regulate this.
Emotional availability eaters…..
There is a certain amount of matter that is going to take up more space and will need your emotional capacity at different times. You may have little or no control over this, and it might actually be the greater win to allow it that space, so that it can be processed properly. In allowing this space, it is worth watching out for:
- Constant and consuming ruminating thoughts/feelings
- Neglecting your emotional world and ignoring feelings/leaving them unprocessed
- Not holding boundaries and allowing things to take up the space you don’t have
- Giving too much attention or space of things/relationships that do not replenish you, but instead drain you
- Indecision, as this might take up space
- Disorganised thoughts and trying to sort them alone. This will make it hard for you to manage your availability
- Worry – this is useless in what it does for your capacity
How to create more emotional space:
What I have come to realise over time is that the capacity I hold for things in my orbit is limited. There is only a finite amount of space, but space can be shifted, in that the things that fill me up, the relationships that give me more than I give or are equally reciprocating give me more space not less. These things that fill me up vacuum pack themselves, and shrink fit, so while they metaphorically fill me up, they actually help to expand and deepen my emotional availability.
This means that we need to have a heightened understanding of the tug of war on our internal capacity and how it’s fairly normal for most aspects in your inner world to go from consuming space to giving space. But when that balance is constantly offset into the negative – taking up more or too much space, over prolonged periods of time, taking up space that could be used for other, more fulfilling things, this will have an overall negative effect on your emotional availability.
Ultimately over time impacting your wellbeing. It is also important to know that some things will take up more space at different life stages and that you might not be able to balance that out immediately. In these moments, you need to take the capacity from elsewhere, meaning you’ll need to deploy more space creators in order to keep the internal balance. For example, parenting in the early years, a particularly difficult work project, grieving the end of relationships or a death, ill health – all of these things will take up broader emotional availability.
Therapy, the gym, a supportive what’s app group, a voice noting friend that just fucking gets it, space and time on your own, proper rest… will all help you create more availability. It doesn’t matter what works for you as long as it gives you space, space will give you the opportunity of choice and autonomy. Both are significant for our better mental health. There will of course be times where having the capacity to survive is all we have and this needs to be ok too. But striving to remain emotionally available with capacity is the way to go.
We need to fight for the things and the relationships that give us our capacity, because the more space we have, the better we’ll feel. We need to have more clarity on what is not giving us capacity, and really importantly, we need to know what is a defensive act against allowing other people and things that might bring us more in, for fear they might take more space they can offer.
When we have lived through any kind of trauma, particularly in childhood we will have most likely been fighting our entire lives for recovery and repair from whatever we came from. We may have experienced people, places and/or things that dominated our inner and outer worlds for the worse; caregivers with no or little space or capacity for us, or emotional, physical and or mental space eaters who we had little defence against as children/young people.
This might make us very difficult to reach, or make it impossible for others to find space within us as adults. We become over workers, addicts or dependents, or co dependents on the partners/children – we’ll do anything we can to fill the space where others or other’s stuff had receded over the years, as a fantasy that we have control now, where we didn’t before. What this essentially does mean though, is that we have little or no space for anything or any more of those who might offer us a safe refuge, more space… MORE of the good stuff, not less!
Space Creators:
- Therapy/psychological processing
- Moving your body/physical wellbeing
- Routine and ritual
- Replenishing relationships/reconnecting with people that have emotional availability for you
- Creativity
- Proper rest: For example booking yourself onto our Ibiza retreat at Nobu Ibiza Bay, more info here
- Therapy and sharing: Why not try one of our MOT sessions. 90 minutes of deep reflection with a qualified therapist. Coaching meets therapy. Imagine this session as your personal emotional (and emotional availability) satnav.
The psyche is a self regulating function, but we have to give it the opportunity to balance itself. Don’t be too quick to judge yourself as emotionally unavailable. This needs deep space, work and is a complex dance with the outside and inner world.
Come and chat it through with us.
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