What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Unavailable?

Do you find that your relationships feel surface-level, even if you want to be more emotionally connected? Or, are you experiencing a feeling of distance from your partner? You may be dealing with emotional unavailability.

Emotional unavailability is sometimes framed as indifference or a lack of interest, but sometimes, emotional unavailability comes from your earliest attachment experiences.

In this article, we’ll explore the psychology behind emotional unavailability, how it relates to your childhood patterns, and how to be more emotionally available.

What is Emotional Unavailability?

Psychologists define emotional unavailability as when “the inability to recognize, categorize, and be conscious of one’s feelings frequently prevents expression and the growth of a strong emotional bond”.¹ Note that the problem starts with blockages to a person being able to understand their own feelings, which goes on to impact their ability to connect with other people.

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Emotional unavailability can range from a mild sense of emotional guardedness to a complete emotional shutdown. Emotional unavailability isn’t a diagnosable disorder, so there are no well-defined “cut-off points” to establish whether someone is or isn’t considered emotionally available.

People who are emotionally unavailable do experience emotions, and sometimes intense ones, but they find it difficult to name, tolerate, and express them.

The Internal Experience: Struggling with Your Own Emotions

When you find it difficult to understand your own emotions, it’s understandable that you can find it difficult to understand someone else’s. Even if you can cognitively empathize (understand someone’s point of view), you can find it challenging to understand and connect with their emotional response. This can make it especially difficult to resolve conflict.

Even outside of conflict, being emotionally unavailable can prevent genuine, deep connections in your relationships. If you’re unable to express your emotions, whether positive or negative, it’s difficult to feel understood and truly seen by others. You still feel emotions, and you still want those emotions to be understood – it’s just that others cannot be expected to understand them if you aren’t able to express them.

The Psychology Behind Emotional Unavailability

Emotional unavailability is sometimes learned in childhoood. If you grow up in a home where emotional expressions are discouraged, ignored, or even unsafe, you may learn to suppress your emotions as an adaptive response.

Childhood Origins: When Emotions Were Suppressed

When you’re an infant, your primary caregiver acts as your emotional regulator.² If your caregiver is emotionally absent, you have no way of learning to emotionally regulate. Therefore, your sensitivity to stress may heighten; but with no way to manage this, you might learn to suppress it.

In one study, infants with more emotionally unavailable mothers showed an increase in baseline levels of the stress hormone cortisol.³ However, even though their baseline cortisol was higher, they showed a lower cortisol response than children with more emotionally available mothers to the threat of separation, indicating emotional suppression on a physiological level.

Defensive Reactions: Shutting Down, Blame, and Anger

When someone who’s emotionally unavailable faces emotional demands, they could respond by shutting down or becoming frustrated. This frustration can look like anger or defensiveness.

This can become particularly destructive when someone who’s emotionally unavailable isn’t able to place the source of their frustration, and might blame it on another person.

How Your Attachment Style Creates Emotional Distance

If you’ve been reading about attachment theory, you might have recognized parts of it in how emotional unavailability can form.

Your primary caregiver in infancy is not only your emotional regulator, but your first attachment figure. Their emotional availability plays a significant role in your attachment system’s development as well as your emotional regulation – as a result, your emotional availability and your attachment style may be strongly linked to each other.

Avoidant Attachment and Emotional Unavailability

Attachment avoidance is easily linked to emotional unavailability. Key features of attachment avoidance are emotional inhibition, conflict avoidance, and less depth in relationships – overlapping with our definition of emotional unavailability in several ways.

When emotional unavailability is linked with attachment avoidance, it may signal that your caregiver was consistently unavailable. You therefore learned to suppress your emotions because no one was there to help you regulate them.

It makes intuitive sense that emotional unavailability can go hand in hand with attachment avoidance – but what about attachment anxiety?

The Hidden Emotional Unavailability of Anxious Attachment

It might seem that people with high attachment anxiety are more in touch with their emotions, but they actually show emotional regulation difficulties that fit the same definition of emotional unavailability.⁴

Being able to recognize and label your own emotions is key to emotional regulation and emotional availability, but this is difficult to do when these emotions are sky-high. This is what people with high attachment anxiety tend to experience – if you have high attachment anxiety, relational stress can send your attachment system into overdrive, triggering emotions that are bigger than your capacity to regulate them.

This can happen when your caregiver was inconsistently available – they may have been unpredictably over- or underattentive, so you weren’t able to learn secure emotional regulation.

The Impact of Emotional Unavailability on Relationships

Emotional suppression has been linked to lower relationship satisfaction, even in cultures where emotional suppression is expected.¹ If only one partner is emotionally unavailable, the other may feel that the relationship is one-sided or that they are doing all of the emotional work. This can quickly become confusing and frustrating.

Mental Health Consequences

People with emotionally unavailable partners report feeling dependent in their relationship, anxious about the uncertainty it brings, and exhausted from unsuccessful attempts to reach their partner.

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For the emotionally unavailable partner, the want for connection but difficulty achieving it can feel isolating, lonely, and frustrating. If both partners are having difficulty communicating about the problem, it can grow into a sense of distance or resentment without resolution.

Am I Emotionally Unavailable? Self-Assessment

If you think you might be struggling with emotional unavailability, recognizing this is the first step toward change. Take as much time and space as you need to be self-reflective, and try to be honest without being critical. Self-compassion can help you to see your challenges in a more realistic light, without the filters of guilt and judgement.

Signs of Emotional Unavailability

Remember, there’s no checklist or threshold for emotional unavailability. Psychological scales for emotional availability generally focus on parent-child relationships, which are difficult to map onto adult-adult relationships.

Anecdotally, people report the following 10 signs of emotional unavailability:

• Being self-sufficient as a way to avoid intimacy
• Avoiding commitment: dodging relationship labels(sometimes leading to situationships), frequently canceling plans
• Getting defensive easily when discussing relationship dynamics or hurt feelings
• Minimizing others’ emotions
• Avoiding in-depth conversations, persistently keeping topics “light”
• Difficulty expressing vulnerable emotions like fear or sadness
• People-pleasing and connecting through a “mask” rather than authentically
• Lack of clear boundaries or difficulty expressing needs
• Pattern of choosing partners who are also emotionally unavailable
• Discomfort when relationships deepen or partner seeks more intimacy

How to Stop Being Emotionally Unavailable

If you think you’re emotionally unavailable and want to change, you can learn emotional regulation and emotional availability and deepen your connections.

Emotional regulation is a skill, just like any other – for some it comes more naturally than others, but everyone can practice it and learn new ways to get better at it.

Building Self-Awareness and Authentic Connection

Learning to pause when intense feelings arise is usually the first challenge. Our emotions override our logical brains, so overriding them is a skill that takes time and practice. Once you’re able to take a pause, you have time to consider what it is you’re feeling and give it a name.

This is something that can be especially helpful to practice in therapy, where a mental health practitioner can help you to identify emotions based on where and how you feel them in your body. When this happens, your mental health practitioner is modelling emotional regulation in the same way that your earlier caregiver might not have been able to.

Therapy for Emotional Unavailability

There are lots of different kinds of therapy, and the right option for you depends on your individual needs and preferences. Psychoeducation can help you to build emotional regulation skills through learning and understanding theory, focusing on the present without needing you to dig deep into your past.

Alternatively, attachment-based therapy can help with emotional unavailability by modelling the secure attachment relationships and emotional regulation you might not have experienced yet. Talking therapies that feel validating and safe can often provide this secure attachment relationship that gives us the scaffolding we need to practice healthy relationship patterns outside of therapy.

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Can an Emotionally Unavailable Person Change?

We all have the capacity to change and grow, even if our difficulties are rooted in childhood. With time, effort, and motivation, an emotionally unavailable person can improve their emotional regulation skills – but they have to want to do it themselves.

Conclusion

Emotional unavailability is intrinsically linked with attachment styles, and, just as you can learn attachment security, you can learn to be more emotionally available. It takes time and practice, and change will not be instant, but self-awareness and motivation are two of the most important steps toward change.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does it mean to be emotionally unavailable?

Emotional unavailability describes an inability to emotionally regulate that prevents you from forming strong emotional bonds with others.

Q: What causes emotional unavailability?

Emotional unavailability can have a variety of causes, including early attachment experiences with an emotionally unavailable primary caregiver.

Q: How do you date an emotionally unavailable person?

If you’re dating someone who’s emotionally unavailable but wants to change, give them time and patience as they learn. Whether they do or don’t want to change, make sure you’re clear on your boundaries around communication and connection with them.

Q: Is emotional unavailability a mental illness?

Emotional unavailability is not a mental illness, though emotional regulation difficulties can be linked with other mental health difficulties.

References

1. Khanna N. Impact of Emotional Unavailability on the Happiness Level of Indian Couples and the Happiness Pie Chart as a Tool Towards Resolution: Qualitative Analysis of Case Studies. Social Behavior Research and Practice Open Journal. 2023(8):1.
2. Field T. The effects of mother’s physical and emotional unavailability on emotion regulation. Monographs of the society for research in child development. 1994 Jan 1:208-27.
3. Sturge-Apple ML, Davies PT, Cicchetti D, Manning LG. Interparental violence, maternal emotional unavailability and children’s cortisol functioning in family contexts. Developmental psychology. 2012 Jan;48(1):237.
4. Mikulincer M, Shaver PR. Attachment orientations and emotion regulation. Current opinion in psychology. 2019 Feb 1;25:6-10.