The World of a Withdrawer, Part 2

6 Effective Tips for Becoming More Emotionally Available

In the previous article, you learned about what withdrawers, or emotionally unavailable people, typically struggle with. In this article, I’ll provide you with six practical tips to help you become more emotionally available to others.

1) Become more aware of beliefs you hold about yourself and your relationship.

• What makes you feel unworthy of love and belonging?

• Challenge the idea that if your partner gets to truly know you, they’ll reject you. 

• Sit down with your partner. Ask them to explore which characteristics they see in you that make you lovable and deserving of their affection. Do the same for them. 

2) Make your partner’s needs and feelings equal to yours

• This requires finding empathy for your partner’s feelings, needs, and requests for emotional closeness.

• This can be challenging at first. A good way to begin is to share with your partner how much you want to be there for them, but how it can be scary and difficult for you. 

• Sharing this helps your partner understand that you do care.

• Next step, make this powerful request: “Help me to understand your pain.” Learning to do so is a crucial step in developing empathy.

3) Choose to follow a ‘no secrets’ policy.

• Emotionally unavailable partners often have a secret second life—a backup plan for when their relationship fails. You may have someone you reach out to for emotional support outside of your relationship because you think your partner’s rejection is inevitable. But a secret life with others is just a way to avoid intimacy. If this sounds familiar to you, it’s time to consider that this creates emotional barriers for you, preventing you from fully investing and connecting in your most important relationships. 

• Keeping secrets—or secret relationships—interferes with your ability to connect deeply with your partner. Instead, a ‘no secrets’ policy requires both of you to offer each other complete transparency.

• Not keeping secrets requires courage and vulnerability, but it’s the only way to properly invest in your relationship and feel the love and acceptance you so desperately need.

• Transparency is one of the greatest gifts you can give to someone you care about. It sends the message that you are fully invested. While this might be difficult at first, over time you’ll begin to realize that transparency provides you and your partner with security and stability.

4) Prioritize spending time with your partner.

• Place your partner—and your children, if you have any—at the top of your priority list.

• Words are not as powerful as actions. Words might sound comforting to your partner, but without follow-through, they’re meaningless. Making time for your partner requires you to be available and accessible, most of the time.

• Often, withdrawers will avoid phone calls, ignore text messages, and reply only when they want to. They’re distracted by their own needs, which makes their partner feel even more starved for emotional connection—and more likely to reach out.

• If you reassure your partner that you’re there for them by spending time with them, they will feel more secure, as you’ve given them evidence that you’re still invested in this relationship.

5) Allow yourself to acknowledge, experience, and own your emotions.

• Become more aware of your stronger reactionary emotions, such as impatience, frustration, or even rage.  

• When you’re emotionally hurt, a mental alarm goes off that prompts you to react in certain negative ways. You might do or say hurtful things which cut to the core of your partner’s vulnerabilities.

• If you struggle with emotional connections, you might cope with emotional pain by deliberately exploiting your partner’s weakness, ultimately achieving the distance you’re so familiar with—all in a quest to find a relatively safe, familiar situation. Unfortunately, this strategy also prevents you from finding what you truly need. 

• You might even cope by threatening to leave your partner when you find yourself embroiled in relationship distress.

• Using anger and personal attacks like this can become a strategy for getting your partner to comply with your orders or do things your way.

• Avoidance and manipulation behaviors like these prevent you from achieving what you really need: a loving, lasting relationship with full emotional support.

• Even if you get your way, you’re still avoiding the kind of relationship that can change the deeply rooted beliefs you have about yourself.

• In contrast, a loving and healthy relationship requires two people who work together equally.

6) Commit to being more transparent in your communications with each other.

• Share your deepest fears. Ask yourself, “What do I fear most about our relationship?” Once you’ve identified that fear, share it with your partner. Then ask them what their greatest fear might be. 

• Share your greatest disappointments and your biggest dreams. Ask your partner what theirs are.

• Love requires more than just physical touch. Love requires emotional touching, including making eye contact, using a soft voice, and slowing down a conversation to include moments of silence and pondering. It requires both you and your partner to view your inner world.

• Over time, allow your partner to know your inner self. When your partner shows interest in you, accept those moments as a gift of love from them. 

Hope for Withdrawers

Implementing these suggestions will be challenging for you and will require consistency and courage on your part. You might occasionally feel overwhelmed; you’ll either want to criticize your partner, blame them, or withdraw from them to avoid conflict. When you feel like you can’t breathe from a lack of space, that’s a solid sign that you are doing the right thing. 

You are actually contradicting your negative, damaging beliefs that you don’t deserve love. In that moment of discomfort, take courage. Let your partner know about your struggles. Find the capacity to ask your partner for help with conquering your old patterns and ways of coping.

Your childhood and failed relationships may have been a great source of pain for you. But when you work to challenge your old patterns, you open the door to ultimate joy and fulfillment.