S1 EP37 – Why You Are Attracted to Unavailable People

Transcript

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the inner bonding podcast. Happy new year. I hope all of you have health and peace in the coming year. And today I want to talk about why, if you’re looking for a relationship, you might find yourself often attracted to unavailable people. Now, do you believe that you are fully available for, for a relationship and that you and that maybe you have just not met the right person or do you find yourself in love with someone who’s emotionally or sexually unavailable?

And isn’t in love with you, but you’re convinced that you are available for a relationship. So I want to tell you about Jeannie who’s in that situation. And, and this is what she said to me. I’m in love with a man. Who’s my friend. Who’s not attracted to me in a sexual way. His rejection in this respect causes me great pain and sadness. It’s very difficult for me to let go of the expectations and hopes that he might love me and want me in this particular way. I’m afraid that these expectations in my pain might ruin this friendship.

I’d like to get rid of the expectations that he might fall in love with me, but I don’t know how I’d like to accept the situation as it is. I am also horribly jealous if he shows interest in other women. So while I’m certain that Jeannie believes that she is available for a relationship, it’s very likely that she is not available. She were available. She wouldn’t continue to hold the expectation that a sexually unavailable man will fall in love with her. As long as he is unavailable. It’s easy for her to believe that she’s in love with him, but it’s highly likely that if he were available, she might not be in love with him.

The fact is that she is horribly jealous. If he shows interest in, in other women. And this indicates that it is her wounded self, who believes that she’s in love because when we love someone, we want them to be happy. We’re not jealous. Even if it means being with someone else, when you’re truly available, you don’t continue a relationship with someone who’s emotionally or sexually unavailable. But if you have fears of commitment, fears of intimacy, and then to protect yourself from your fears, you might attach to someone who’s not available.

If you find yourself over and over attracted to and attracting unavailable people, you might want to question your own availability. You might want to deeply explore your fears of intimacy, your fears of commitment, as painful as it is to Jeannie, to want someone who doesn’t want her. This was a safe relationship for her and that she doesn’t have to face her deeper fears. Perhaps she has a fear of engulfment of losing herself in a relationship and wanting a man who doesn’t want her sexually as a way of protecting against this fear.

Maybe she has a fear of rejection and she would rather deal with a rejection that she knows rather than risk a rejection that she can’t predict by being in love. Quote in love with someone who’s unavailable and, and already sexually rejecting her. She doesn’t need to deal with the uncertainty that she might fear. Maybe the pain she knows is preferable to her, to the pain she fears. Should she be rejected by an available man? If you believe that you have just not met the right person, perhaps you need to explore whether you’re the right person.

I’ve seen it over and over that when a person does their inner bonding work to develop their loving adult self and heal their fears of rejection and their fears of engulfment, they begin to attract more available people as the law of attraction says like attracts like, so when you are available, you’re far more likely to attract available people and you become uninterested in unavailable people and available person does not hang around, waiting for an unavailable person to become a, My class Hands off and ask, why do I attach to an unavailable person?

My client wanted to ask, what about our wound itself causes us to attach so fiercely to an unloving unavailable person. There are two primary causes. If you were raised by an unavailable parent, then your wounded self might believe that if only you could find a way to have control over getting love from an unavailable person, then you would finally feel safe. Finally feel loved. The wound itself might believe that the own that only the love that comes from it. Unavailable person means anything.

When Love is not freely given by parents, then the child learns ways to try and have control over getting approval. Not only do they confuse as approval with real love, they believe they can earn love by doing things right. They don’t understand that love is always a free gift and can’t be earned or controlled approval can, but not love. And you can’t make an unloving person be loving. If you keep picking unloving, unavailable people under the illusion that you can control, getting love.

You’re never going to find a loving relationship. When you’re addicted to getting love, you can become fiercely attached to an unloving unavailable person, trying desperately to do things right in order to feel like you have control over getting love. Now, the second cause is the one I’ve already mentioned that you might also be unavailable. If you were truly available for a loving relationship, then you would likely attract a loving and available person. It’s quite possible that you’re not being loving to yourself since we attracted her common level of self abandonment or self-love, you will keep attracting an unloving person.

As long as you are unavailable due to abandoning yourself due to not loving yourself. As long as you as having control over, getting love is more important to you than loving yourself and sharing your love with a partner. You’re going to be stuck, attracting unavailable people. As long as you believe that only love from someone else will fill you and make you happy. You’re going to continue to abandon yourself in many different ways. So as long as you’re not loving yourself, you will not likely be tuned in to people who are loving themselves.

Many people have learned to say the right things such as I want a permanent relationship, or I want to get married and have a family or open communication is very important to me. But once in the relationship, they shut down, get angry, or it becomes apparent that they’re self absorbed and narcissistic the way out of continuing to attract unavailable unloving people is to diligently practice, inner bonding and learn to stay present in your body. To be open to learning, learn from your feelings, learn to connect with your personal source of love and truth, and be willing to take loving action for yourself until you learn to fill yourself with love.

You have no love to share, and you’re going to continue to believe that you need to have control over getting love from someone else. And as you learn to love yourself, you become far more tuned in to the energy of real love. You can more readily feel when someone is coming from their heart or when their words are hollow. There is there’s an energy that emanates from people who are open and loving and a very different energy that emanates from people who are closed unloving or unavailable.

You’re going to be able to discern this energy when you’re open and loving to yourself and others, and you’re emotionally available, but not when you’re abandoning yourself. The more loving you are to yourself, the clearer your communication is with your spiritual guidance and your guidance is infallible in discerning who’s open and loving and who isn’t it make, take time in knowing someone, but within a few months, you’re going to know whether someone is really open and loving or whether they’re just acting that way.

So you’re going to have stopped attracting and attaching to unloving or unavailable people when you practice inner bonding enough that you’re consistently being loving to yourself. And as I already said, it’s often the fear of engulfment of being controlled and losing yourself. That’s causing you to be unavailable in a relationship. So here’s an example of that. My client, Roger who’s 33 years old is a successful engineer, married with one child. Roger called me because his marriage was falling apart. His wife, Laura had recently told him that the marriage was over, unless he got some help.

She told him that she just couldn’t take it anymore. Roger and Laura were both on Skype for their first session with me. Laura described what the problem was for her in the marriage. Roger has never present, not with me, not with, not with our daughter. He just does his own thing. And doesn’t consider what anyone else might need or, or want. If I get upset or irritated, he completely retreats and waits for me to fix it. He can retreat for days at a time and the energy around the house. It’s just awful. I try to take care of myself, but I just can’t stand being around his negativity anymore.

And on top of that, if I ask him to do something, he either refuses to do it, or he says, he’s going to do it. And then he doesn’t or ends up messing it up. I know he’s competent because of the work he does, but he sure doesn’t act confident at home. The only thing he’s really interested in me is when the only time he’s interested in me is when I’ve completely pulled back. If I want anything from him, he just retreats. I just can’t live like this anymore. Roger. I said, do you know what Laura’s talking about? Yeah, I know what she’s talking about, but I don’t see it the way she does.

I just feel like she always wants something for me. I ended up feeling criticized and trapped a lot. I shut down to get away from feeling trapped. Roger, you, you still feel this way now that she wants out of the marriage. Roger Kim gave, gave a kind of little laugh. You know, it’s funny that you should ask that. No. As soon as she said she wanted out all of my feelings for hurricane back, I just can’t figure it out. Roger was wondering both of your parents controlling with you? Oh yeah. My mother was, she was incredibly controlling.

And did you learn various ways of resisting her? Yes. Roger laughed. He obviously got pleasure out of being resistant. Roger has a deep fear of engulfment of being controlled and losing himself. As soon as someone wants something from him, his terror of losing himself is activated and the automatically resist doesn’t even stop to ask himself if he wants to do whatever it is the other person wants. Whenever it is Laura wants, he does not stop to think about what he wants or what is in his highest good. He just resists your resist because not being controlled and protecting against his fear of losing himself is more important to him than anything.

Not being controlled is more important to Roger than loving himself or loving others, not being controlled is his God has guiding light while Laura can certainly be controlling at times, we all can. She does not cause Roger’s resistance. His Joyce to resist rather than care about himself. And others started as a small child and has continued into adulthood and into his marriage. As long as not being controlled and protecting against losing himself is more important to Roger than being loving.

There’s nothing Laura can do. The real issue is that Roger has never developed a loving adult part of himself, capable of even thinking about what’s best for him or even caring about others. He’s operating from a small child aspect of himself who automatically resist engulfment in the face of Laura’s requests, just as he did with his mother, until Roger is willing to do the inner bonding work necessary to develop his loving adult self. He’s going to continue to respond on automatic pilot and Laura will continue to feel unloved by him.

The irony of the situation is that Roger is being controlled by his fear of being controlled and his resulting unavailable unavailability to love. He’s not deciding for himself what he wants or doesn’t want. He’s just automatically resisting. He’s not even conscious that he’s choosing to resist because Roger did not want to lose Laura. He was willing to learn and practice inner bonding. The first step was, as I’ve said, in other podcasts to become aware of his resistance.

Roger, I said, I suggest that you consciously choose to resist Laura rather than just doing it automatically by choosing it, you’re going to become aware of it. Are you willing to try this or do you want to resist this to Roger laughed? He could already feel his desire to resist doing what I asked him to do, but he did say he would try it within a few months of practicing in her bonding. Roger was very aware of his fear of losing himself and choosing to resist. Fortunately, he was also aware that it was no longer, much fun.

Wasn’t making him happy. Roger decided that it was more important for him to be loving to himself and to Laura than to resist being controlled. He was on the road to healing. The fear of losing oneself is just one of the issues leading to being unavailable underneath that fear underneath the fear of engulfment lies of fear of rejection. And here is an example Of this. Jim was attending his first five day in her Bonnie intensive because he could not seem to commit to a relationship.

He was very lonely and he wanted to be in a relationship and he had no trouble meeting women that he was attracted to. But as soon as he started to really like someone, he would find any number of reasons to back out. So now in his early forties, he was so tired of this, but he couldn’t seem to break out of this pattern soon, became apparent that Jim was absolutely terrified of losing himself in a relationship. He was a very kindhearted man and enjoyed giving, but invariably he found himself giving way too much, actually giving himself up.

Eventually he’d feel controlled and engulfed and smothered in the relationship. He’d start to feel resentful about giving more than he was receiving. And then he would end the relationship. The same pattern happened over and over. As much as Jim wanted a relationship, he was not emotionally available due to his fear of losing himself. Jim was very aware of the fact that he kept giving himself up in relationships, but he believed it was because he was attracted to strong controlling women. He never found himself attracted to Tim and to timid women who gave themselves up. So we felt stuck.

He was stuck because he was operating out of the false belief that he was giving himself up because the woman was controlling. In fact, her behavior had nothing to do with Jim giving himself up. Jim gave himself up because underneath his fear of engulfment was a deeper fear. A fear of rejection. Jim feared that if he didn’t give himself up and do what a woman wanted him to do, she would reject him. His intent in giving himself up was to have control over the woman, not rejecting him, but in giving himself up, he was rejecting himself.

So he would always end up feeling resentful and rejecting the woman. These fears led him to being unavailable, to being in a committed relationship. Even though this is what he said, he wanted this pattern would start. As soon as a woman became important to him. As soon as he started to really like her, he would begin to fear losing her in order to have control over not losing her. He was willing to lose himself, but once he started to lose himself, he stopped feeling attracted to her.

The underlying issue was that Jim had never learned to handle the loneliness and the heartbreak of rejection. Having experienced rejection early in his life from his parents. He was terrified of it as children. None of us could handle rejection. Well, all of us learned to pray. All of us learned protective ways of handling the pain of rejection. We learned to comply and resist and get angry or shut down or withdraw in response to rejection. When we carried these protections into childhood, We Continue to do this in our adult relationships.

And we did this because we never learned healthy ways of managing the pain of rejection. Jim was invariably attracted to women who used anger as their way to protect against rejection. While Jim continued to use compliance and withdrawal as his protection, in order for Jim to be available for a healthy, intimate, committed relationship, he needed to learn to manage the pain of rejection. We all need to learn to manage the loneliness and heartbreak of rejection in order to stay open and create intimacy in a relationship because no matter how good our relationship is, there’s always going to be rejection.

There’s no such thing as a relationship where you never feel rejected. So in order to learn, to manage the pain of rejection so that he would no longer give himself up, Jim needed to practice inner bonding. So he would stop abandoning himself in the face of his fear of rejection. He needed to develop his loving adult self who could speak up for him and help him to not take rejection personally, as well as CU, as well as so that he could bring in spirit to comfort the heartbreak Jim needed to practice in her Bonnie until he, he felt strong enough to love, which means strong enough to keep his heart open in the face of rejection, strong enough to be willing to lose the other person rather than lose himself and strong enough to be open and available to intimacy.

Jim did practice in her bonding on a daily basis, and he gradually learned to speak up for himself and to not take rejection personally, as a result, his fear of rejection diminished to the point where he was no longer willing to give himself up or withdraw in the face of a woman’s controlling or rejecting behavior as his fear of rejection and his fear of engulfment healed. He became emotionally available for a loving and committed relationship. Now, Jim is happily married and looking forward to starting the family.

He always wanted. I hope you can see how very important it is to learn to love yourself. And inner bonding is a fantastic process for learning this. I encourage you to go to the inner bonding website, take our free course, take advantage of all that we offer on January 13th, I’m offering my live version of the love yourself course, which is such a powerful course in learning to love yourself, or you want to do it without my help. You can do it at any time.

There’s so many ways to learn inner bonding, joining inner bonding village, assigning up for self quest, many, many ways of learning the inner bonding process. And I also encourage you to take my wonderful 30 day relationship course wildly, deeply joyously in love whether or not you’re in a relationship, you will learn so much about creating a loving relationship from this course, sending you my love, my blessings for a wonderful New year.