This Is Why You Are Emotionally UNAVAILABLE
Dear Self,
Please stop disconnecting from your emotions.
It is hurting you.
Allow me to show you how…
6 Emotional Defenses:
1. Avoidance & Distractions
Staying so busy that there is no time to feel or focusing on other people’s feelings
Having television on in the background and/or mindlessly scrolling on your phone during any down time
Conditions that create this pattern: Feeling a lack of safety- you do not feel safe, so you try to get away; highly sensitive people
2. State Changing
Using external tools such as sex, porn, drugs, alcohol, and food to change how you feel emotionally
Conditions that create this pattern: Emotions that are too strong to avoid and distract (i.e. trauma symptoms), desire to "feel something", emotional or intellectual neglect
3. Analysis
Over analyzing and intellectualizing your feelings rather than feeling them
Conditions that create this pattern: Your environment values intellect over feelings; there is a lack of safety and ability to hold emotions in your environment
4. Blaming Others
Blaming the outside world for your feelings (i.e. “they make me mad”) to protect you from feeling the more vulnerable emotions beneath the anger
Conditions that create this pattern: Being shamed for having feelings, coming from a family culture that does not allow for certain feelings to exist, being raised in a blame culture
5. Empath
Taking on other people’s feelings (i.e. the fawn pattern) as your own feelings; getting overwhelmed by feelings
Conditions that create this pattern: Creating safety by merging and being able to manage, predict and attempt to control other people's emotions; learning to merge with others because there was not enough space for your feelings (i.e. if you were the second or third child)
6. Somatic Display
Your unprocessed emotions manifest as physical issues
You unconsciously express your emotions as physical symptoms because you are out of touch with your emotions, but the emotions still have to go somewhere
Conditions that create this pattern: Learning that your feelings are not safe or that they feel too big to process
My dearest self, please do this instead…
What does a healthy relationship with our emotions look like?
Feel your emotions but do not get stuck in them.
Emotions are like waves in the ocean, they flow through you. Let them flow.
Welcome all of your emotions but have appropriate boundaries of what to express depending on who you are with, where you are at, and what time it is.
Feel your emotions; do not vomit your emotions.
That’s all for now.
I love you.
You’re doing great!
xoxo,
Self