Always with unavailable people? Here’s why

Do you confuse emotional unavailability with mystery and depth? I certainly know that I did for years. I really do understand how this feels and why, and unless we understand its origin, it can cause us always to live in a state of longing.

That doesn’t feel good. The reason I am writing this is that I wish things to be different for you. There is so much we are not taught in school about our emotions, and the navigation of them, alongside our formal education, that we are somehow left winging it when we are thrown into the pool of life and the living it.

So if you feel this might relate to you, and it rings any bells, do read on.

By definition

This can often be the plight of the empath, and the paradox is that the unavailability is the core wound that often places these 2 attachment styles in this difficult dance with one another.

The empath is drawn and attracted to healing, proving, fixing and understanding someone who can and only be fleetingly onboard, but after the initial flurry, then feels compelled to withdraw. This can trigger feelings of abandonment in many of us, or confusion and might well in all probability resonate from an early childhood wound.

Equally, the offer for the avoidant of potential unconditional love and understanding as well as perpetual acceptance, can be a reminder of their own suppressed emotional needs being met, whilst their own calibrated need for independence and distance keeps winning the day, even in spite of their own heart.

The wound is the same for both, but one’s oxygen is distance whilst for the other it is closeness.

Let me further define.

The empath most especially has a desire to nurture, which is perpetually unrequited in this pale exchange. Often, empaths have a tendency to be drawn to and found attractive by those who need distance and cannot hold love unless it is filtered through distance and the lens of how freedom is perceived. So the empath will often find the unavailability becomes both an allure and a quest; this can depend on how anxiously attached someone is.

Most usually, anxious attachment has empathy at its core and is initially very attractive to the avoidant, because they are fascinated by how love and vulnerability can be held by them without shame or limitation.

The allure is initial, but as soon as there is an expectation of love and vulnerability to become mutual, that will signpost how they can run to the hills just to breathe, as a mutual dynamic in emotionality will be felt as onerous, and they will want to park it.

Furthermore, ubiquitously, even socially, the allure of the unavailable, the hard to obtain, is so lauded and can so easily be confused with not only something so worth having, but more so with the elevated value you attach and might associate with it and feel by it.

Think of expensive designer labels here, and car manufacturers, and so many sought-after accessories. By feeling we are able to attain the best, we then somehow become the best by association. So if you can get the something, or the someone, then somehow your own worth feels so much better, and you enter some kind of temporary nirvana.

This, of course, is in reality an anathema, but what feels out of reach, either because of its high cost or the perceived worthiness that would secure its acquisition, feels like some kind of victory, or Holy Grail.

How the avoidant functions 

The avoidant confuses emotional closeness with danger and vulnerability with chaos. In turn, when someone has spent years from childhood doing this to protect themselves, this is hard to change without therapeutic unpacking.

It is also very hard for them to see how distance has proven to be an absolute ally, preventing hurt and rejection. This distance is just put into action as a behaviour they have had since childhood. It is not strategic, but their first response to survival.

They do not, however, know how to process loss. Too much closing down occurs to prevent that, and it is only when the space is left not by request, but by the absence of the empath, that it begins to surface.

So already we can see how this creates a push, pull exchange that is felt as hollow, and has an undercurrent of unrequitedness for the empath, which is also a familiar known state of being.

Avoidants' fear of discovery 

Avoidants fear discovery, and when they are in a paradoxical intimacy dance with an empath, and the offering of space to be heard and held feels threatening they often begin to bolt, which can feel confusing because it is the giving that is untrusted. The felt receivership can only be processed through and by distance.

The connection, therefore, never takes place for either one; there is an aspect of no man’s land about it, and often the endings and distance cannot be verbalised by either one.

So, where is the big why here?

The causation

Why do empathetic people often stay too long in their care, hope and nurture, and equally, why do avoidants have a perpetual script of “I don’t need”?

Their mantra: suppress, detach and delay.

It is eventually in the silence, not at first, as distance is not felt in the same way for the avoidant because their wiring is different to the empath. It is in this silence, when the distance and control have calmed, that the truth arrives for them with weight. Their fragility is what they are left with, as it is not built of peace or resolution, but instead of and through avoidance and distance, the patterns are still there.

Thereby, fragments of recall and recollection bring them to a place of loss, which allows emotions to resurface, alongside the patterns that still remain.

Memory becomes evaluative because it comes not from an appeal or need from another but from their own hidden vulnerability. Also, the visceral emotional experience is allowed by them to resurface in private alone.

Often, then, the realisation of what has not only been lost, but can never be found again, can be felt as true grief. This is what can bring an avoidant into therapy because the grief can finally be felt, both present and historical.

I, as a therapist, have had the privilege of working with avoidant patients, and I can assure you that it dispels the myth that they have no emotions; they just have to learn to hide their feelings to survive. The avoidant is therefore, through their historical experience, more calibrated emotionally for invasion, and abandonment and even if the quiet love, nurture and understanding of an empathetic person is given freely, it feels too much too close. It feels threatening.

Here, real love has never been held.

When the empath decides to call time

If this has been perpetually felt, the empty exchange, the inevitability becomes the writing on the wall. When this space is all that an empathetic person has to live in, they begin to realise, from within their disappointment, that the patterns they see again and again are echoes that are unlikely to ever change. It is with this sad realisation that the empath will ultimately decide to quietly leave.

I say quietly for a reason because when the longing, the disappointment and the waiting are done, they close, there is no need for question or chaos. There is a soft finality about it.

Here, it is the absence, and its required dignity that finally honours the reality and probability of this tragic dynamic. Their silence becomes loud without the necessity for drama because the clarity allowed in has the final word here.

The lack of honoured communication

I believe here that the dignity the empath leaves with is hard for avoidant people to process, as there is no rejection involved or punishment.

There is a perpetuation on both sides that persists. Whereby the avoidant will still be drawn to, but unable to stay, and the empath will continue to be drawn to another who offers the hope of fulfilment by nurture and understanding and healing another in an environment of distance and control.

But where in each is their heart’s safe harbour?

If closeness and its presence are not felt when it is needed time and time again, the well of the empath runs dry. However, if the allure is not therapeutically unpacked, it will surface again with another who is also unavailable.

At their core, empaths are highly adaptive. They learned how to allow in the hope they would eventually be loved. There is a lot of managing others' reactions, shrinking of self, always reading the room and the emotional longing and waiting for unconditional understanding that the sensitivity is developed as a protection.

Wired to notice everyone’s mood, the unavailable person becomes an opportunity to receive love because love is only understood as being available if you do something to please or save, but not because of who you are.

Being able to receive is the difficulty for both the empath and the avoidant. The empath has never received so cannot recognise it. The avoidant has never received either, but is afraid to. One has to prove, one has to deny.

The most relevant difference is that the empath feels this as depth that is misconceived, when in fact, instead of this being felt as enigmatic, it should be seen as potential pain and a fleeting union that will result in loneliness.

I do believe the more we can become aware of the why and try to see and understand what the causation is on both sides, the more we are likely to understand it through what another’s fear actually feels like. As in all things, what is felt is more likely to be understood and in that fears are more likely to diminish when they are replayed by the compassionate empathy of love.