Emotional Unavailability

“Fasten your seat-belt. It’s going to be a bumpy ride” - Bette Davis

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. Many of us hope to find a soulmate, a partner who can share and understand our feelings and ways of thinking on an intensely personal level. Others don’t expect such an intense level of involvement and feel more comfortable maintaining personal privacy within a more boundaries relationship. Conflicts may arise when the two partners differ in their expectations of how close they should become. 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 can possibly be given.

The course of a relationship follows a predictable path. The early weeks, months, or even years of a relationship, in fact, are a time of togetherness – when partners search for and experience the similarities that bring them together. It is common for a couple during this first phase to experience a level of emotional sharing so intense that they want to carry their relationship to a more committed level. The next stage, however, is when boundaries are established, when we focus on our differences and in maintaining our own individuality. Couples who can negotiate their way through both of these stages are 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. A solid relationship is one in which feelings can be readily expressed and shared while each of the partners is able to experience a sense of their own identities.

All too often, however, there is a discrepancy between the two partners in terms of how much of their emotional life they make available to the other. When one partner is able to share emotionally and the other is not, it 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, and intimate phone calls. Sweetness fills the air and it feels like a dream come true. You have finally met “the one” you had always hoped 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 is no fight. There is no discussion about why things are coming to an end.

After you accept that it’s over, you struggle 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 confused flattery and attention with emotional involvement. You may finally realize that your partner was unable 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 – that relationships entail reciprocal self-disclosure and sharing. The next time, you’ll have the wisdom to know this before being drawn in.

There are many other examples of partners who are emotionally unavailable. Consider a few of them –

• Some people seem to live to do things, the more exciting the better. They are 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.

• Beautiful people, unfortunately, sometimes grew up with the message that their looks are everything. They may have difficulty engaging in the mutuality of a sharing relationship because they have learned to search for gratification elsewhere. Time may change this, however.

• Addicts are attracted to a number of different objects (alcohol, drugs, work, food, television, shopping, gambling, sex...), and may not be able to sustain an emotional relationship – not with you, anyway.

• Some partners are more influenced by their over involved parent than they are with you. You may be seen as an appendage to the primary relationship – which is with the parent.

• To the intellectualize, emotions are turbulent and unpredictable. Everything has to analyzed, quantified and categorized. Control is everything. Sharing feelings within a relationship is seen as dangerous folly.

• A relationship with a person suffering from narcissistic personality disorder is one-sided, in favor of the narcissist. They have a sense of grandiosity, a sense of entitlement, and a lack of empathy – so that they are more interested in self-love than love based on mutual sharing.

• The keeper of secrets probably has some strong boundaries – or walls – in place, and is unable to engage in an emotionally available relationship. If your partner has a private life from which you are excluded, there are probably serious trust issues which undermine the success of a sharing commitment.

Working on Emotional Availability

Emotional availability refers to the ability of a person to share feelings with another person. In order for this to happen, a person needs to be in touch with his or her own emotions and able to define them. This person would have a good working knowledge of his or her own feelings and be able to identify when he or she feels angry, afraid, hurt, sad, happy, or content. Furthermore, the person needs to be able to read these feelings in other people. When these factors are missing, it is impossible for two people to experience an emotionally available relationship. Since people connect through their feelings, one who is out of touch with the emotional realm leads a lonely and isolated life, unable to engage in the processes of nurturance and trust that can be found within a healthier relationship. Fortunately, this condition is correctable.

We learn about emotions starting in childhood, and we continually refine our relationship with our emotions throughout our lives. We learn subtler versions of our basic childhood emotions during adulthood. We learn how to define them, how to categorize them, and how to express them appropriately throughout our development.

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 –

Throughout the day, keep a record of anytime you feel a certain emotion. Keep your list of emotions simple (e.g., “glad,” “sad,” “mad” or “bad – afraid or guilty”). Anytime you feel one of these emotions, identify the time of day, the emotion you’re feeling, and the circumstances surrounding the emotion (i.e., what was going on when you felt the emotion). Later, with your partner, a trusted friend, or your therapist, go through your list and share what you’ve written down. First identify what was going on when you felt a certain emotion. Try to understand why the event led to this emotion. Next, describe how the emotion feels within your body. Finally, after you have completed your list, talk about how it feels to share your emotional feelings with another person.

In addition to becoming familiar with your emotions, there are three other elements that are related to developing the capacity to be emotionally available –

Good Self-Esteem – The messages we have heard from other people throughout our lives – but especially during childhood when we are most vulnerable to the impact of these messages – have a profound influence on 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 are 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 in 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. 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.

Healthy Boundaries – Good boundaries show that you respect the individuality, personal space and privacy of other people – as well as your own. This ability, again, is developed most strongly in childhood, but is refined throughout our lives. People with poor boundaries intrude into the lives of others so that other people don’t feel safe around them. They gossip, reveal secrets, meddle into the private affairs of others, and, in general, fail to show respect for the dignity of other people – as well as themselves. People who grew up in households 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 in adulthood they have difficulty honoring another person’s space. 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 are able to protect the healthiest parts of both yourself and your partner.

The Ability to Trust – One of the core attributes we develop from the families we grow 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 our partner – and thus become emotionally unavailable. Trust is a deep issue that requires exploration and understanding, as well as some courage when we are finally ready to attempt to trust other people. The development of trust can be facilitated by working with a professional therapist in a setting that feels safe, and it may be a 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.

Punctuality – Getting there On Time

“I’m always late, I’m always late, and it’s not because I procrastinate. – The White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland (the play)

Some of us have a pattern of being late for appointments, social events, classes, and project deadlines. No matter how hard we try, no matter how strong our resolve to be on time, it just doesn’t happen. We are always late. Researchers estimate that 15 to 20 percent of the population is afflicted with chronic tardiness. Thankfully, with some self-examination, motivation, and practice, people who suffer from this affliction can deal with it successfully and learn to be on time.

The problem of tardiness affects all portions of the population equally – young and old, male and female, the wealthy and the poor. Research shows that people who are chronically late score lower on tests that measure nurturance, self esteem, and self-discipline, and score higher on measures of anxiety and distractibility. Another finding from research is that people who are consistently late underestimate the passage of time.

If you are a late-comer to appointments, you are probably familiar with the embarrassment you feel when people, all of whom seem to be able to get there before you, begin to see you as a problem. You know well the jolt of anxiety that comes as you walk into a room late and notice glances between those who have arrived on time, and perhaps the dreaded rolling of eyes. You know the humiliation of being the target for someone’s sarcasm – “Well, we’re glad you could join us.” You know the experience of making up excuses.

 “The traffic held me up.” “I had to take an important phone call and the other person wouldn’t stop talking.”

“I had a family emergency.” “I couldn’t find my keys.” But the excuses only work a few times – and then the raw truth sets in. People learn not to take you seriously because, frankly, they feel that you don’t take them seriously. If you did, you would be there on time. People can see through the excuses, especially if these excuses are part of a repetitive pattern, and they resent being misled. Chronic tardiness affects not only the way others see you, but also the way in which see yourself. It compromises your integrity.

Our culture encourages tight schedules and gives timeliness a high priority. Industrialized nations value productivity, discipline, achievement, and the coordination of activities. North Americans, the Japanese, the Swiss, and the Germans all place a high value on being on time. To deviate from these values is to invite resistance from others. These values are not universally found across all cultures, however. Indeed, in some less technologically advanced societies, there is a different concept of time, and their languages don’t provide words for hours, minutes and seconds. Hispanic societies traditionally have a siesta time during the afternoon – a couple of hours to take a nap. And even in England, there was historically a time for a leisurely afternoon cup of tea, although this custom is fading as the British become more highly scheduled. In some societies, being “on time” is defined flexibly. Invite people to your dinner party at 7:00, and expect them to start rolling in at 8:00 or 9:00. This would hardly work, however, in our society, where everything moves like clockwork.

Experts recognize that the problem of tardiness usually has no single or simple cause. Instead, it is a symptom of complex underlying issues that often manifest themselves in other areas of the person’s life as well. Several causes of chronic lateness have been identified, and most people find that two or more of these conditions account for their consistent tardiness. Consider the following causes of tardiness to see if you can come up with a strategy for understanding and dealing with the problem.

Rationalizing Lateness

Many people with a lateness problem rationalize it away – they come up with an explanation for their lack of punctuality every time. The explanations might focus on external circumstances, like the traffic. Or they might blame the other person (“Gee, I was only fifteen minutes late. So why is this person so angry with me? This other person must really have a problem with their anger.”). Or they might engage in denial (“Yes, I know I’m late this time, but I don’t really have a problem.”). They may even minimize the seriousness of the problem (“Sure, I know I was half an hour late for my presentation and people had to wait, but they probably didn’t mind. After all, we need to be flexible.”).

Unfortunately, rationalizing the problem away by finding excuses prevents you from addressing the difficulty and making headway in correcting it. By using rationalization to deal with the anxiety you might otherwise feel when you are late, you blind yourself to the impact your lateness has on other people. And it leads to a distorted definition of yourself – by rationalizing, you will continue to think of yourself as a thoughtful, considerate person, even though your behavior indicates exactly the opposite, especially to other people. Rationalizing prevents us from seeing the reality of a situation.

Too Much To Do

Our society places a great premium on staying busy. Busy people are seen as more productive and successful. You may believe that you must be productive at all times and that if you are not busy, you must be wasting time. You try to squeeze as many activities as possible into the time you have available. To arrive early for a meeting or appointment would mean just sitting there, doing nothing, and that would be unacceptable. So you strive to arrive exactly on time – but then you find several little jobs to do before you leave the house (taking out the garbage, sweeping the front porch, watering the seedlings). And your plan to get there on time is now gone. You are late again.

People who need to stay busy claim that constant activity makes the day go by faster. They believe that they are living life to the fullest or that they are more successful than other people. Studies of the natural cycles of our bodies, however, our biorhythms, suggest that continuously staying busy simply creates unneeded stress. Nature calls for us to intersperse busy periods with down time in a cyclical pattern throughout the day. Arriving a few minutes early to a meeting, sitting with nothing to do, gives us some time to reflect on the day and to sort things through. It gives us a rest so that we can then focus more clearly on the meeting.

Seeking Stimulation

Some of us are unable to get going unless we have a deadline. When we are running late, our anxiety builds, the adrenaline flows, and we feel fully alive. Tardiness is a way of combating the lethargy we experience during the day. An adrenaline rush is exciting, to a point – our thoughts seem to clear and our actions become precise. We imagine that we are functioning at our best. Unfortunately, the reinforcement that comes from this frenzied state perpetuates our problem with lateness. It feels good, as if we are living in the moment, and we want to do it again and again.

Research indicates that stimulation seeking may be a hereditary characteristic. There is a gene linked to the production of brain chemicals associated with the feelings of euphoria and pleasure that are released under conditions of excitement. So, some people seem to need more stimulation than others. Being late, however, is only one way of achieving this stimulation. You can learn other, more constructive ways to enliven your experiences – and they have fewer social consequences than tardiness. A regular exercise program is one way of doing this.

Lack of Self-Discipline

Some of us find it difficult to change whatever we are doing at the time. If we are sleeping, we want to continue to sleep. If we are reading, we don’t want to put the book down. If we are working on a project, we hate to put it aside to do something else. Breaking our momentum is stressful. We struggle everyday between doing what we feel like doing and doing what we know we should do. We seem to want both. Ironically, some people who lack the self-discipline to be on time are highly disciplined in other areas of their lives, so it might be hard for them to accept the fact that they need to work on self-discipline – in other words, accept limitations, consequences and boundaries. There is comfort to be found within a more structured life. The unstructured existence, although it may feel pleasant, can carry a huge price.

Self-discipline in adulthood is often a reflection of how we learned to manage responsibilities in childhood. The expectations learned within our families as we grew up influence the way we structure our activities in adulthood. Did we learn to make up our beds every day, to pick up after ourselves, to get homework assignments in on time? (Conversely, were these tasks so formidable, or even used as punishment, in childhood, that we gave them up altogether once we left home and felt we could finally take it easy?)

Some Other Reasons for Lateness

There are several additional factors that might be associated with a person’s problems with punctuality.

• If you are destructible, have difficulty with focusing, or have problems with attention, you might be prone to tardiness. For example, people with attention deficit disorder sometimes have problems with their punctuality.

• Anxiety or the fear of having panic attacks may dissuade some people from getting to places on time.

• Depression saps our energy, and this may make punctuality difficult.

• Some people play a power game with others. If they can make others wait for them by being late, it gives them a false sense of power and control.

• People with self-esteem issues may have trouble engaging in positive actions, such as getting to their destination on time.

A consultation with a professional therapist can help to clarify the causes of tardiness – and it is a positive first step in conquering a problem that holds many good people back.

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Are Selfies a Sign of a Mental Disorder?

 

Selfies are more then a recent trend, they are a phenomenon. From celebrities, to friends, to kids and even pets you can find just about anyone posing in a selfie these days.

What are Selfies?

A selfie is a photo taken either solo or with other people with a camera held at arm's length or pointed at a mirror.  That photo is then posted to social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Defining Narcissism

According to the DSM-V, "the essential feature of narcissistic personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and lack of empathy that begins in early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts."  Additionally, narcissistic traits can include a sense of entitlement, may take advantage of others, can be arrogant, may be envious or lack empathy.

The Link between Selfies and Narcissism...

Research into the world of selfies is relatively new and minimal however, early results are indicating strong correlations between selfies and personality traits.  In 2015, Fox and Rooney conducted a national study from a sample of 1,000 men ages 18-40.  These men were asked how many selfies they posted on social media in the past week, how many other types of photos they had posted and how much time was spent on social media.  The results of this study indicate that posting numerous selfies was related to higher narcissism and psychopathy.  Fox and Rooney suggest that "narcissists are more likely to show off with selfies and make extra effort to look their best in these photos..and psychopathic men posted selfies but did not tend to edit them suggesting a level of careful self-presentation that you would be unlikely to find among those high in psychopathy".

It is important to note that the study of narcissism as it correlates to selfies is in its infancy and the study conducted by Fox and Rooney was the first of its kind.  The results of this study do not indicate that men who post selfies are narcissistic or psychopathic, it simply means they scored higher on the assessments then those who do not display these traits.

So before you go to post your next selfie after your long run or your new manicure think about your own purpose in posting.  We are all guilty of wanting to share and connect with others but it may be helpful to starting taking note of when you may be looking to meet a deeper need through a selfie and is there a better way to do it?

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References 

American Psychiatric Association, (2013).  Diagnostic and      statistical manual of mental disorders.  Washington, D.C:        American Psychiatric Publishing.

Fox,J. & Rooney, M.C. (2015).  The Dark Triad and trait self-    objectification as predictors of men's use and self-presentation  behaviors on social networking sites.  Personality and Individual Differences, 76, 161-165.