2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
If one of the partners refuses his share of aggressiveness, freezes feelings, the other is forced to show them in double size.
Someone has to show us: here it is cold, but here it is painful and dangerous. Someone should bring them to their senses, point out "frostbite", teach them to adequately express their emotions.
I often remind my clients that if they demonstrate indifference, pride, apathy, “do not pay attention,” then the partners have no choice but to provoke to the manifestation of life.
It's better than nothing at all. It is better to look at tears than to watch the included "frost".
Aggression, hatred, provocations are used.
Alas…
A man needs a woman's emotionality.
So he restores contact with his Anima (the female component of the male psyche), legalizes his emotions. If there is an emotionally frostbitten woman next to him, the man goes into a social stereotype - he expresses his masculinity through aggression.
How does the male anima manifest?
The formation of a man's anima is influenced by the mother.
She is the first and most important legalizing emotional figure.
If the mother's behavior was indifferent, cold, restrained, then the boy grows up without an example of showing his emotionality in communication.
The mother, who has failed to contain (contain) the strong feelings of the child, brings them back without explaining what is happening to him.
The child does not experience a well-established emotional relationship, a positive example of presentation and reflection of his feelings. It is difficult for him to deal with them, to cope with the strength of his emotionality, and then he concludes that feelings are superfluous.
Having lost contact with his Anima, the boy goes into a social stereotype - devalues emotionality, denoting his masculinity through strength and aggression.
The situation is much worse if the mother not only could not digest difficult childhood experiences, but also placed her own anxieties in the child.
When their own and maternal complex feelings become prohibitively many, the child is faced with intolerable mental suffering.
Protection is triggered - the psyche turns off the "problem zone".
Contact with sensitivity and emotionality (one's Anima) is prohibited, repressed as painful.
In adulthood, this manifests itself as emotional inaccessibility.
As an adult, such a man seeks to repeat the relationship that was in the parental family. Women's emotions will be unbearable for him. He will avoid pain from meeting emotions, protect himself from them: devalue, throw out projections, ignore, deny the woman's feelings.
What does a woman do?
More often, it is included in the "rescuer" mode, believing that it will be able to conquer the "piece of ice". She looks for the reasons for a man's emotional inaccessibility in herself, changes tactics and strategies of behavior, fights in search of a solution to the problem.
Only the reason for the emotional inaccessibility is not in her.
Another question is pertinent: why did she choose such a man?
Why, despite all the pain, maintains this connection?
So let's take a look at the main reasons.
1. Fear of intimacy
That's how it happens. With your mind, you want the most tender and happy relationship, and your subconscious mind waves a red rag and shouts: “Stop, don't go there. It's bad there."
If you remember that the basic principle of the unconscious is the principle of safety and pleasure, then we can assume that the relationship for you is associated with something where it is completely unsafe and little pleasure. The reason may lie in the model of the first relationship that you remember from childhood - the relationship between dad and mom or other significant figures.
Then bonding with an unavailable partner is a great way to avoid genuine intimacy, to protect yourself from mental wounds.
2. As a child, you felt unnecessary or abandoned
Lack of attention, care and warmth for you is more normal than pathology. In your picture of the world, love is conditional and without outbursts, care is at the extreme necessity (for example, illness). It never occurs to you that you can love without struggle and suffering.
As an adult, you unconsciously strive to reproduce a relationship model in which you will feel natural. You will find a partner with whom you will feel unnecessary and abandoned. You, without realizing it, read men, next to whom there is a chance to work out your childhood trauma.
By the way, an emotionally unavailable man “about you” will also solve his developmental problems.
You will complement each other with your childhood neuroses.
3. You have low self-esteem
If you grew up in a family where there were clear rules and distribution of responsibilities, and children were in the status of powerless family members, then it is quite possible that you consider yourself unworthy of love. A small child forms his image based on the messages that the outside world sends him. If he is praised and loved, he learns to love himself. If rejected and punished, he forms an image of himself as bad.
If you have low self-esteem, you are ashamed to take other people's time, to express your opinion. You are sorry to buy things or jewelry for yourself. You sacrifice your own interests for the benefit of others, believe in what others say about you, adjust to their expectations. Your self-worth is in the light of your partner's reflected perception of you. If he is happy, you are great. Dissatisfied - "samaduravinovata".
Deep down, you don't believe you deserve to be happy; rather, you believe you must earn the right to enjoy life.
4. Relationships are not valuable to you
Perhaps at this stage, your life priorities are not relationships at all, but a career, study, self-development, friends. Or something else. Perhaps your value is freedom and self-realization, and relationships make it difficult to get it. When goals and values contradict each other, you will choose partners who will keep you at a distance from each other.
5. Since you have failed to get warmth and affection from your parents, you react sharply to the type of emotionally unavailable man you are familiar with
You are trying to change him with your love. You want to be useful and needed. You believe that the responsibility for building good relationships lies entirely with us.
Therefore, choose emotionally absent men who reinforce the feeling that everything depends only on you.
Perhaps you fought unsuccessfully for the love of your parents and are now trying to restore "justice" with your partner.
But whatever is absent or painful in the past, in any case, this is what you are trying to "fix" in the present.
6. A relationship with an emotionally unavailable man is an attempt not to take responsibility for your life
You are a pro at guessing the feelings and actions of a man, a clairvoyant of his needs, but you do not want to know anything about your needs. You have lost touch with your own feelings. You are afraid to make decisions about your life, to take responsibility for the consequences of choices.
In fact, you do not know anything about yourself, you are afraid to face unpleasant realizations about your life, so it is easier for you to escape into “improving” the life of another person.
As you delve into a dramatic relationship, you refuse to look inside yourself.
Is it possible to get out of the vicious circle of relationships with an emotionally unavailable partner?
At this point, I propose to stand and look at the situation from a different angle.
As you know, everything is in ourselves.
The external world is a reflection of the internal world. Therefore, the unavailable partner reflects what is already in you. He cannot bring into your perception of himself anything that was not there before him. He can only strengthen what is.
There is happiness and interest in life - a partner will enhance this.
There is dislike for oneself - it will increase.
There is a fear of intimacy - you will never feel safe with your partner.
There is no belief that you deserve care and love - you will be strengthened in your belief.
As I said, you respond to a familiar type of emotionally unavailable people.
You are trying to recreate a childhood emotional experience of relationships with loved ones who once behaved similarly to you. You are used to changing the reassuring and repulsive behavior of a loved one. In your life scenario, this is "about love."
In a relationship with an inaccessible man, there is always a place for the dream that this time everything may turn out differently. You “fall back on a bad object” out of fear of ending the hopes of understanding and caring that you desperately need.
You live in a world of dreams, where the man with whom you are unhappy turns into the man he should be from your point of view and who he will definitely become thanks to your efforts.
This means that by overcoming its inaccessibility, you will acquire what you need - unconditional love, security, intimacy.
Do you understand?
Those. there is always a place for the hope of "winning" a partner and getting personal happiness as a prize.
I repeat that everything is in you.
There is nothing in your relationship that is not about you. "Relationship problems" are problems of inner trouble, which is formed from unresolved psychological problems.
It makes no sense to remake a partner, save, win, “do good”, heal his psychological trauma, acting as a therapist. You cannot be responsible for the decisions and actions of other people, but you can always tell them about how you can or cannot do with you.
The most frequently asked question in such cases is “What to do?”.
The answer is - to understand yourself, to abandon the usual life scenarios, to work with your limiting beliefs.
Sounds abstract and not clear what exactly needs to be changed?
Then there are some practical tips: increase self-esteem, determine what you want from your relationship, monitor compliance with personal boundaries, do not place the responsibility of “for two” on your fragile shoulders, keep an eye on the give-and-take balance, contact people who help you deal with your fears and beliefs.
To get a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of unavailable partner selection, I recommend reading the books:
Robin Norwood "Women Who Love Too Much"
Macavoy E., Israelson S. "Marilyn Monroe Syndrome", David P. Selani, The Illusion of Love. Why does a woman return to her abuser”.
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