Emotionally Unavailable?
What does it even mean to be emotionally available?!
If you are reading this article, then at some time you’ve likely heard something similar to, “You don’t get me. You’re not hearing me. I don’t feel like you understand what I’m saying or feeling.” You might be having a bit of a visceral reaction as you read this. It is not fun to hear them directed at you and they can ignite frustration, anger, feeling sick to your stomach, sadness, and hopelessness. If you have tried to respond and “do better”, it might even feel like you are trying to hit a moving target. I’ve been there too and lost sleep over how to meet my wife and love her well.
While the statements above and others like them can seem a cruel riddle that you’ll never solve, your wife is actually speaking quite clearly. It’s just that we are coming at things from different paradigms. I’ll unpack this. Part of the difficulty lies in how men tend to be raised to view the world (rest easy, this is not a statement about masculinity). The cliché of men being problem and solution oriented has some truth. As men, we are socialized into a world where we are told to go and fix things. “If you have a problem, figure it out. I don’t care how you feel about it.” We are taught to be rugged individualists who “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.” Part of this is helpful because it encourages us not to stagnate. However, we are also told, “I don’t care how you feel about it.” Maybe it was explicitly stated by your family, a teacher, or a coach. Or, maybe it was never directly stated but was more absorbed by osmosis from the culture around you. This message comes from so many places.
Because of this, we underdevelop our ability to sense and name what we feel outside of angry, happy, hungry, or horny. Of course, this is an overgeneralization but the point is that for most men it has not been a focus as we grow and mature. We are less aware of our emotional experience. For some, we might not even be in tune with our physical sensations. Remember when you just played through the pain in high school? That helped to cut off and numb your connection to your bodily sensations. The fact that you didn’t receive encouragement toward emotional awareness in your childhood is not on you, but as an adult, it is for you to own and remake.
To be what is called “emotionally available,” you must be self-aware. This means being able to identify nuanced emotions within yourself and the behaviors attached to them. It means being an embodied individual where you are connected to yourself through your physical sensations and emotional experiences. This is a critical step to being able to understand and hold the experience of somebody else. If you have not developed your own ability to listen to your inner world, you do not have that to offer to your spouse. If you can’t identify your own emotions beyond a few general ones, then it will be impossible to understand and feel your wife’s experience. It runs parallel to the principle reflected in Jesus’ command to “love others as yourself” (Mt 22:39). The lynchpin here is that you are loving yourself. You are being responsive to your physical and emotional needs. You hear what your body and spirit are speaking and care for them. Within this, you come to a crossroads of either bringing compassion to yourself or re-hardening yourself and telling yourself to “get in line.” If you lean into compassion, it will be uncomfortable but it will also bring greater peace to your soul. Paradoxically this leaning into softness will open up greater strength and wisdom in your life. It is in weakness that God's strength works in us.
As you learn to listen to the softer parts of you and care for them, you will then be positioned well to care for your wife’s emotional space. Let me reiterate “For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:10). This strength says to your wife, “I can handle all the emotion that you bring. I can feel it and meet you in it. I will not turn away.”
Here’s where you can go with this right now. Our challenge is how to develop the underdeveloped emotional world. One of my favorite exercises utilizes the tried and true feeling wheel (click here to download). It is a tool developed by Dr. Gloria Wilcox in 1982. When you look at it, you will see a couple of concentric circles divided into a bunch of wedges. The inner circle is the core 6 emotions. The outer circle is divided into several more nuanced versions of the big six emotions. This is where the richness of emotional vocabulary and awareness sits. A simple exercise you can try is this: 1) pull out your journal and feeling wheel, 2) identify two specific emotions you experienced in the previous 24 hours about events in that timeframe, 3) write them down and journal about the emotions asking yourself why you feel the way you do. What is it about the day that elicited these emotions instead of others? Finally, ask yourself if you desire anything in response. Do this for the next 14 days and see what happens.
Don’t be discouraged if this is challenging. It will be! You haven’t been exercising this muscle and it will feel awkward and clunky. What has been present for a lifetime will not change overnight.