If you’ve spent any time in the mental health corner of social media, received counselling, or read relationship self-help books, you’ve probably heard of the term emotional availability. It’s a term that is thrown around often and one that may not be well understood by most.
Here is a brief, yet comprehensive, description of emotional availability, how it’s applicable in your relationships, and how to recognize and improve the degree to which you are available to yourself and others.
In short, emotional availability describes a person’s capacity to be present, attentive, and responsive to themselves and others at any given time.
Let's first start by naming that being emotionally unavailable has a negative connotation. It can be frustrating when we are not receiving availability from those who we expect to receive availability from. Likewise, it can be frustrating to be expected to be available when our capacity is low or we don't have an intrinsic desire to be available for someone.
Emotional unavailability is not inherently right or wrong.
That said, having discrepancies in - and expectations for - availability is an unavoidable experience in most relationships, and therefore needs to be managed.
In an ideal world, we would all be able to be emotionally available to everyone we interact with. This is not the reality that plays out because there are hundreds of things that can get in the way of our capacity and desire to be available. Sometimes the barriers are in our control and sometimes they are not.
Situations that can make it hard for someone to be emotionally available:
Physical fatigue
Emotional fatigue
Not knowing how to be emotional available because it has not been modelled to us
Being in survival mode
Prioritizing energy expenditure on other endeavours (e.g. achieving a goal)
Feeling the need to protect ourselves from getting hurt
Feeling afraid to be vulnerable
Task overload or being spread too thin
Specific mental health struggles (anxiety, depression, etc.)
Being consumed with an emotion (grief, anger, etc.)
Low interest in maintaining social connections
When any of the above factors are getting in the way of your capacity to be there for others, you can still manage the impact of that circumstantial ‘low capacity’ by communicating what’s going on.
Example: “Hey, I am so sorry I can’t speak with you this evening. I had a very stressful day and don’t have the emotional capacity to support you well. Can we talk tomorrow when I’ve had a chance to recover from my day?”
Contrary to what you may think, the above example represents emotional availability. This is because you are:
A) aware of what’s going on for you internally
B) aware it may impact your relationships
C) communicating your needs and limits in a way that still honours the relationship
As you may have gathered so far, exhibiting emotional availability to others requires that we are first emotionally available to ourselves. This means we acknowledge our emotional state and behavioural patterns and are present, attentive, and responsive to our own needs.
You may notice that someone appears extremely emotionally available (endlessly caregiving, attentive, and responsive to you). Some people may use this interpersonal style as a way to avoid or cope with distressing inner emotional states. While they may come off as emotionally available, their lack of attentiveness to themselves will alter the way they are available to you – usually in a way that impedes healthy functioning of the relationship in the long term.
It’s very easy to point fingers and blame others for relational breakdowns.
While it is important to be able to determine if someone else is capable of being emotionally available to us, we must also reflect humbly on our unique ‘flavour’ of emotional availability. There might be specific situations or times in which we are less available.
Blaming other people takes us off the hook for any accountability or responsibility in the part we may play in interpersonal dynamics (abusive dynamics not included). If we ignore that our level and type of availability may be relevant, we limit the potential for fulfillment, growth, and depth in our relationships.
Emotional availability can come and go over long or short periods of time.
For example, it might be hard for you (or someone else) to be available, in general, because longstanding anxiety or trauma shifts your focus towards managing perceived threats in your environment and away from genuinely and safely attuning to others.
Using a more situational example, managing the all-consuming impact of food poisoning may cause you to be emotionally unavailable for a matter of days.
You may also be less emotionally available to specific people in your life.
There may be certain people in your life who you feel you need to be on guard around, meaning your attention will go towards protecting yourself instead of being present and responsive to what they are bringing into an interaction. Interestingly, they may pick up on your lack of availability and become less available themselves due to a perceived need to manage a sense of being disconnected from you.
This brings up an important phenomena – that is, emotional unavailability, or availability, can become more pronounced in relationships as a result of how we adapt to someone’s level of availability over time. In other words, someone’s emotional availability can inspire us to become more available ourselves. Likewise, someone’s emotional unavailability can cause us to become less emotionally available.
Reciprocity of emotional availability often happens outside of our awareness. While there is an appropriate time and place for the idea of not putting in more effort than we are receiving, the above description also speaks to the circumstantial need to make courageous moves of emotional availability even when we are afraid to do so. One courageous act of emotional availability can make someone feel safe enough to let their guard down and show up with more authenticity in the following moment/future interactions.
What to do about emotional unavailability...
What can you do if you notice you may be emotionally unavailable to yourself or others?
Reflect on these prompts:
What keeps me from paying attention and being responsive to myself/others?
What might I be scared of experiencing if I were to pay attention and be responsive to myself/others?
What am I prioritizing over paying attention and being responsive to myself/others?
To what degree is it important for me to be paying attention and responsive to others? What values do I hold that may turn me away/towards being available to others?
If a relationship is one in which there is an expectation for emotional availability, and you are noticing unavailability on their end, you might ask them:
It seems like you aren’t able to be present/attentive/responsive with me. Do you notice that too? What’s going on for you right now that makes it hard?
What amount of presence/attentiveness/responsivity can I reasonably expect from you right now/in general?
If a relationship is one in which there is not an expectation for emotional availability, and you are noticing unavailability on their end, you might ask yourself:
What is happening inside of me that is causing an expectation for this person to show up in a specific way for me?
Is this expectation reasonable?
There are multiple variables at play that impact how we and others show up in our relationships. Relational patterns can change over time according to what each person brings into the relational field in an ongoing way.
This deeper, yet brief, dive into emotional availability shows the complexity of the concept and how we can improve our relationship to ourselves and others.
*Copyright notice: For requests to use this copyright-protected work in any manner, email emilywasylenko@modepsychology.ca. Sharing the URL of this webpage on social media is authorized use.