Are You Emotionally Available? One of the complaints I often hear is “He (or she) is not emotionally available,” but what does this really mean and how do you know if it is how you are described behind your back?
Emotional unavailability means that for whatever reason, you are choosing to honor protection of your heart, instead of love. Understandable, and sometimes even wise for a period of strength building and rejuvenation. However, if you've made yourself unavailable to love and be loved for an extended length of time, take a look at whether your “defense mechanism”-designed to protect you- is now working against you.
“Emotional availability” means that you are ready, willing and able to love. This may sound simple, but it requires a willingness to take a risk, the willingness to open your heart to another, knowing full well that one way or another your heart will experience loss. There is no escaping it-just like life can not escape death, love can not escape pain. You will eventually lose or leave your beloved-whether by choice, circumstance or death. There is no “happy ending.” This reveals the reality that the choice to love is a courageous act!
To be “emotionally available” simply means that you are courageous enough to enjoy the benefits of loving, regardless of the potentiality of loss. It means that you are one who knows that it is indeed, “better to have loved and lost, then never to have loved at all.”
Let's look at courage for a minute. Courage is not the absence of fear-to do something you are not afraid to do requires no courage at all! Courage is to move forward in the face of fear.
Since being afraid isn't “cool” and it isn't what we generally want to present to others, a lack of “emotional availability” shows up, instead, as an indifference or withholding. It is like taking someone on a tour of your home but keeping the door closed and locked on your favorite room. You'll let them into the kitchen, living room and even the bedroom, but not in your most treasured room in the house. The “heart of your home” is off limits leaving the other to feel as if they never really know you completely or feeling left out of an important part of your life. In order to be fully emotionally available you have to be willing to invite the other in and allow them to explore the whole you…and you have to be willing to explore all of them, too. This is intimacy-“in-to-me-see.”
Steps for enhancing your emotional availability:
1) Decide: The first step is to set the intention of being available to love. If you don't want to expand your capacity to love and be loved, the steps won't work. Expansion of the heart begins with the decision to make it so.
2) Trust: Trust yourself enough to know that no matter what life dishes out to you, you can handle it! Promise yourself that-no matter what-you will not abandon yourself. This means that regardless of whether you are in a relationship or not you will take, or continue to take, active steps toward strengthening yourself-doing the things you love to do, staying connected to family and friends, learning new things, expressing your creativity, honoring your spirit, and taking care of yourself physically. You need to agree (with yourself) that you will seek professional assistance if you are unable to do so yourself. Note: when you master this step, you have greatly diminished the need to trust others over whom you no control.
3) Take Reasonable Risks. Use your head and your heart together to assess when it is wise to move forward into love and when it would be wise to pull back. Surviving reasonably taken risks is what grows our confidence and capability. If you aren't sure whether you should move forward, pay attention to how you feel. Embarrassment over your decisions is an indicator that you aren't comfortable with what you are doing. If so, look at the situation like a “strategic planner” and see if there are steps you can take to make the risk safer or better thought out, or if it is something you'd be wiser not to do at all.
4) Learn From Your Mistakes: The real “moral of the story” is never “Never love or trust again.” If that is what you “learned” then you missed the real lesson and thus may have to endure the experience again until you get it right. The lesson may be to “pay more attention,” or “to tell the truth faster,” or “not to take happily-ever-after for granted,” or “to honor yourself enough not to allow mistreatment,” or “to choose more wisely who to trust,” or even “to be more trustworthy yourself.” You will know if it is the “real lesson” if it points you toward love and trust, not away from it.