Episode #59 

How To Be Emotionally Available

Are you emotionally available? How can you know for sure?

Do you long for greater emotional intimacy with your partner?

Do you feel like your partner expects too much from you emotionally?

In this episode, Dr Julie gives you a fun, simple way to figure out whether you are emotionally available and how to use the power of CBT to improve the quality of your relationships.

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Full Episode Transcript

Hi, and welcome to My CBT Podcast!

My name is Dr. Julie Osborn, I'm a Doctor of Psychology and a licensed clinical social worker specializing in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

I'm here to help you bring the power of CBT into your own life. In this podcast, I’ll answer some questions and share with you some practical ways to apply CBT principles and tools so you can achieve a greater level of happiness and satisfaction in your life in relationships.

So, as always, I always like to share some feedback I get from my listeners. So I really appreciate you guys taking the time to reach out. And this is someone that responded to me on my Instagram page at MyCBTPodcast who listened to my episode on how to deal with work burnout.

So she says:

“This is incredibly helpful - thank you, Dr. Julie Osborn. I've been waiting for two years to understand what exactly I went through two years ago when I wasn't able to get up and go to my job anymore. I've attended therapy, including DBT and counseling, but nobody told me this is what I went through.

So I'm so glad I know what it is now. It’s crazy - I went through everything you mentioned and still not knowing what it was. I thought it was some other issues I have, but I now know it's just that I was a workaholic and a yes man kind of person. I'm trying to transition into a new career. I listen to the rest of the sessions and I'm sure they will guide me to the next step. Appreciate you and all the work you're doing and helping so many people.

Humans have to keep learning until we die. And I have a lot of basic things to learn myself, like setting boundaries and making decisions. If you can make a podcast on that, please - making decisions in moments of stress, I would really appreciate that. Thank you. Have a wonderful day and I’m going back to listen to the rest.”

So thank you very much. And I will be making a podcast about making decisions in moments of stress, because I know that's something a lot of people struggle with.

So as always, please reach out guys and send me your questions or ideas or feedback. I just love, love hearing from everybody. So today's podcast, I want to talk about when your partner's feelings don't show. So Betty Davis, the actress, once said, fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy ride because when we commit to a relationship, we usually expect that our partner will reciprocate with roughly the same level of emotional involvement that we put into it.

It's just an assumption we make. And many of us hope to find a soul mate. A partner can share and understand our feelings and ways of thinking and an intensely personal level. Others don't expect such an intense level involvement and feel more comfortable maintaining personal privacy within a relationship that has more boundaries. But conflicts may arise when the two partners differ in their expectations of how close they should become. So whatever relationship you want to you and your partner want to have is fine.

But again, it's just that the expectations are different. That's what I'm talking about and that's where the conflicts start. So one partner may feel emotionally stranded, feeling abandoned and craving more closeness while the other partner may feel smothered or pressured into providing more of his or her emotional self than they can possibly give the course. A relationship follows a predictable path in the early weeks, months or even years of relationship. In fact, ideally a time of togetherness when partners search for and experience the similarities that bring them together at the beginning, it's usually like the honeymoon phase we talk about, right?

It's common for a couple during this first phase to experience level emotional sharing so intense that they want to carry the relationship into a more committed level. The next stage, however, is when boundaries are established. We focus on our differences and in maintaining our own individuality. So couples who can negotiate their way through both of these stages are in the process of moving toward a successful long term commitment. Both of the initial stages typify a good relationship. The coming together phase, followed by the firming up of our own identities within the relationship and a solid relationship, is one in which feelings can be readily expressed and shared by each of the partners is able to experience a sense of their own identities.

All too often, however, there's a discrepancy between the two partners in terms of how much their emotional life they make available to the other. When one partner is able to share emotionally and the other is not is usually the emotionally available one who feels more pain. Take the classic example of a couple who have an intense courtship. One partner lavishes the other with flowers, expensive dinners out, intimate phone calls. Sweetness fills the air and it feels like a dream has come true.

You have finally met, quote, the one who had always you would always hope to meet. But then almost as quickly as it began, your partner fails to reciprocate. When it comes to sharing emotional feelings, dating comes to a stop. Voicemail messages are not answered and it's over. There's no. Right, there's no discussion about why things are coming to an end, and that just feels horrible. I've talked to so many people like I don't understand what happened.

The person just stopped. Some people, you know, they call it they ghosted them. And it's very, very hurtful after you can accept that it's over. You struggled to make sense of the relationship and notice that the focus was always on you and that's why it felt so good. In fact, your partner knew a great deal about you, but you knew virtually nothing about him or her. You confuse flattery and attention with emotional involvement. I think we can all relate to this at some point, even at the beginning and maybe relationship we've been through or seeing someone else go through this.

Right. You may finally realize that your partner wasn't able to connect with you or anyone on an emotional level. He or she was an expert at luring people in, but had no ability to sustain an emotionally available relationship over time. It is a painful ride, but you can learn a valuable lesson from it. The relationships entail reciprocal self disclosure in sharing, and the next time you'll have the wisdom to know this before being drawn in because you will see the red flags.

So I'm going to give you some examples of different partners who are emotionally unavailable. So the first are some people seem to live to do things. The more exciting the better. So these are the adventure seekers. There's always one more trip to take, one more skydive, one more mountain to climb. These people get their attention from their conquests and not by making themselves vulnerable within an emotional attachment. Another one is beautiful people. You know, this might sound funny, but unfortunately, sometimes people have grown up with the message that their looks are everything.

They may have difficulty engaging in mutual relationships of sharing because they've learned to search for gratification elsewhere. Time may change this, however. Another would be addicts. They're attracted to a number of different objects alcohol, drugs, work, food, TV, shopping, gambling, sex. It may not be able to sustain an emotional relationship, at least not with you. They can sustain a relationship possibly with what they're addicted to. Some partners are more influenced by their overinvolved parents than they are with you.

You may seem as an appendage to the prime relationship, which is the parent. You will not get a close emotional connection with this person either. Another one is the intellectualize or emotions are turbulent and unpredictable. Everything has to be analyzed, quantified, categorized control is everything. Sharing feelings within a relationship is seen as dangerous folly. Also, a relationship with the person suffering from narcissistic personality is one sided in favor of narcissist. They have a sense of grandiosity, a sense of entitlement and a lack of empathy.

So they are more interested in self-love than love based on mutual sharing. And the last example I give you is the keeper of secrets. They probably have some strong boundaries or walls in place is unable to engage in emotionally available relationship. If your partner has a private life from which you are excluded, this is a red flag and there are probably serious trust issues which undermine the success of sharing commitment. So how do we work on being emotionally available? It's not always easy.

That's something all of us, you know, tortas or saw growing up in our homes. It refers to the ability of a person to share feelings with another person. In order for this to happen, the person's needs to be in touch with their own emotions and also able to define them. You need to be able to have a good working knowledge of your own feelings and be able to identify when you feel angry, afraid, hurt, sad, happy or content.

Also, you need to be able to read these feelings in other people. When these factors are missing, it's impossible for two people to experience an emotionally available relationship since people connect through their feelings. Right. Although I know I'm all about thoughts, but people do connect through their feelings. At the beginning, one who is out of touch with their emotional realm leads a lonely and isolated life, unable to engage in the process of nurturance and trust that can be found within a healthier relationship.

Fortunately, this is correctable. We learn about emotions starting in childhood, and we're continually refining our relationships with our emotions throughout our lives. We learn subtler versions of our basic childhood emotions during adulthood as well. We learn how to define them, how to categorize them and express them properly throughout our development. So I'm going to give you an exercise. If you or your partner feel that you need some work in developing your familiarity with your emotions, you might try the following as well is obviously thinking about what am I thinking about this?

Creating these emotions so throughout the day, keep a record of any time you feel a certain emotion. Keep a list of emotions, for example, glad, sad, mad or bad, afraid, guilty. Any time if you're one of these emotions, identify the time of day, the emotion you're feeling and the circumstance around the emotion. What was going on when you felt this and then what were your thoughts, obviously, that are creating the emotions that later with your partner or a trusted friend?

Or maybe if you have a therapist, go through your list and share what you've written down. So really, I'm talking about the record. Right. And feeling kind of sad right now. What's the situation? What are my thoughts? So you first want to identify what was going on, right, when you felt a certain emotion, try to understand why the event led to this emotion. So that's going to be what are my thoughts and try to understand why the event was such a strong experience for you.

Then you want to describe how the emotions felt within your body. So those are your physical reactions. And finally, after you've completed your whole list and talked about how it feels to share your emotional feelings with another person. So there's your thought record, right? Cognitive therapy is what environment your thoughts create your moods, your moods affect your behaviors. That also affects your physical reactions and then being able to share this with your partner, it's just a wonderful way to communicate.

So it isn't just about this is how I feel, but I'd be able to share how I think and to be able to go back and forth and get some feedback and maybe even some clarification. In addition to becoming familiar with your emotions, there are three other elements that are related to developing the capacity to be emotionally available. First is good self-esteem. The messages we have heard from other people throughout our lives, but especially during childhood, we're most vulnerable to the impact of these messages have a profound influence in how we see ourselves.

If people tell us that we have negative qualities, we eventually internalize this message and begin to see ourselves in a negative light. On the other hand, if we're treated with high regard from others as we grow up, we can develop positive self-esteem. People with good self-esteem value themselves are confident, expressing themselves and can engage in healthy, reciprocal relationships with other people. Positive self-esteem allows a person to treat other people with high regard and to value the accomplishments and achievements of other people without feeling threatened.

And people with positive self-esteem like themselves and in turn can like other people as well. They can make themselves emotionally available to another person. The second one is healthy boundaries. Good boundaries show that you respect the individual, their personal space and the privacy as well as your own. This ability, again, is developed most strongly in your childhood, but is definitely refined throughout your life. I recently did a podcast and boundaries, if you want to hear more about that.

But people with poor boundaries intrude into the life of others so that other people don't feel safe around them. They gossip, they reveal secrets, they meddle into the private affairs of others and in general failed to show respect for the dignity of other people as well as themselves. People who grew up in a household with poor boundaries have never been able to develop a sense of their own individuality or a sense of separation from their family members. So adulthood, they have difficulty honoring another person's space, and a person with porous boundaries may be emotionally unavailable because in a sense they are too available.

So available, in fact, that they lack a clear sense of who they are in order to be emotionally available to another person. You need a good sense of your own self that you protect. When you have good boundaries, you're able to protect the healthiest parts of both yourself and your partner. And the third is the ability to trust. This is a toughie for many people. One of the core attributes we develop from the families we grew up in is a sense of safety.

When we feel safe, we are able to trust in the world. But when we feel abandoned, rejected or controlled, trust can become an issue for us in later relationships. And when our ability to trust is damaged, we may feel safer by walling ourselves off from a partner and thus becoming emotionally unavailable. Trust is a deep issue that requires exploration and understanding as well as some courage. When we finally are ready to attempt to trust other people. The development of trust can be facilitated by working with a therapist in a setting that feels safe and it may be necessary.

Step in making yourself emotionally available to your partner. When a person makes a commitment to us in a relationship, we owe that person respect, and that means making ourselves emotionally available to those who love us. So I have a little quiz you can take. If you're not driving, be safe. Yellow piece of paper. You might want to write these down and write yourself. So they're true or false questions and the true. Dancers, you circle the likely you are to have difficulty with emotional availability.

First question, true or false, I seldom cry no to true or false. If I feel like crying, I try everything I can to stop myself. Number three, true or false? I seldom saw my family express emotions when I was growing up. No for true or false emotions or embarrassing number five. True or false? There are many things in my childhood I don't like talking about. Number six, true or false. I think people who express their emotions are weak or silly.

No.7, true or false, people who get emotional at work risk ruining things for all of us. No great, true or false people do much better when they use logic, not emotions. Emotions are a waste of time. No.9, true or false? If my friends want to talk about the relationship, I change the subject number ten. True or false. When I hear people talk about how they feel, I'm not sure what they mean. No love.

True or false men have two emotions content and angry, and they shouldn't try to express anything else. No.12 twelve. True or false, I don't like you and my friends called to talk over their problems and not their therapist. A number thirteen. True or false, healthy people can keep things to themselves at all times. So as I said at the beginning of this quiz, the more answers that are true, the likelier you have difficulty with emotional availability.

So something to look at and it is wonderful to be emotionally available to your partner. And it's wonderful when you get that back. And I say, partner, I also to say, right, family, friends, who's ever important to you in your life when you can both connect on that level? I want to say one last thing. If you're if it is a partnership and you're dating and I know I talked about the beginning stages, middle stages, but I always tell everybody that starting to date or in relationships and I'm not sure which direction to go, I tell everybody, you know, really takes about 18 months to know in a relationship, is this the person I want to spend the rest of my life with?

And a lot of times, you know, we laugh when someone's just trying to date someone. They're like, oh, my God, Doctor, I was born like eighteen months. That's a long time. And I just say, well, it's not when you're thinking about being with this person the rest of your life. And it really does take that long to start seeing, you know, how do we deal with conflict? How do we get through our arguments?

How do people spend their money, what are their family relationships? What's really important to us? Because we are a lot of times just so consumed with each other again, which is the fun honeymoon part at the beginning. And you don't want to make decisions in the honeymoon stage because you don't even know each other yet and you really want to take the time. And I got to tell you, over and over and over again, people that I've been working with, and they're going through this relationships definitely about that year, Mark, they'll say, I know what you're talking about.

You know, we're starting to see each other for more, how we deal with conflict, how we handle life, what our goals are in eighteen months is nothing if you want to spend the rest of your life with someone. So it's just a number, but it really seems to work out that way. And it's just something to keep in mind. If you feel you're moving too fast, think about it for me to give myself more time. And it's just something, again, just to think about.

Maybe in your past relationships that I moved too quickly. I didn't give it that time to really know if we were a good fit or not. So I hope this podcast was helpful. I think it's a really positive thing to work on. Again, it might be scary. You might have, again, not seen this in growing up, or you might have been in a home where you saw one parent try to be emotionally available and the other person shut them down or made them feel bad.

And you might be like, why aren't going there? Am I going to do that? Because I'm just going to feel bad. Right? So you don't want you want to be mindful of maybe that was my experience, but I want something better in my life and I can get there and I need to understand what my thoughts are. They keep me from being emotionally available. Right. What is it that's making me feel fearful? What are my thoughts that made me feel fearful about opening up or getting close to this person?

And as I started a podcast, is understanding and knowing other people that won't be emotionally available for you and for you being able to see that early on so you don't get into the relationship too long and then it's harder to get out or you rationalize it away because you don't want to you know, you feel like you've put time to the relationship or it's just going to be so painful when it ends. So there's a lot of different tools I went over to do that I think can be helpful.

And again, it always comes back. What am I thinking that's creating my moods? And then my behavior would be holding back or sharing sharing too much. Again, I want to work and having that good self-esteem. I want to have healthy boundaries and I want to be able to trust.

So thanks again for being with me today. Keep working on yourself.

If you have a question that you want to answer, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at MyCBTPodcast@gmail.com. You can always be assured I won't share your name unless they check with you.

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Remember to always make decisions based on what's best for you, not how you feel.