Stress in response to being emotionally unavailable

Being emotionally available is an active disposition that responds to empathic understanding.

The development of this emotional availability according to attachment researchers Emde and Sorce (1983) is built on the relationship between caregivers by providing emotional security to infants and promoting their curiosity in situations in which they feel undecided.

Emotionally available people are those who were able to establish a secure attachment relationship with their caregivers, while insecurely attached people show greater difficulty in regulating themselves emotionally, so they may not be emotionally available.

• Related article: "The Attachment Theory and the bond between parents and children"

Characteristics of an emotionally available person

Emotionally available people are capable of an affective regulation that corresponds to secure attachment.

This attachment style is characterized by being flexible and open, which enables the experience and expression of a wide variety of emotions and which includes both the expectation that the person they interact with will respond sensitively and the ability to adjust their own reactions.

These are the main characteristics of emotionally available people:

• These people recognize and express their emotional states of distress, anguish, discomfort... relatively open and uninhibited, much greater than insecurely attached people.
• They initiate the resolution of conflictive situations that may have been triggered, allowing themselves to be more open to new information even when it is threatening and develop realistic and effective strategies for action.
• Emotionally available people have greater confidence in their own resources and in achieving successful regulation of emotions and stress.
• Seeking support from significant others to allow yourself to ease emotions, especially if they are upsetting and can cause stress.
• Securely attached people tend to review their mistakes and wrong beliefs without fear of rejection or criticism.
• Therefore, they use fewer defensive maneuvers that distort their perceptions of the outside world and their self-evaluations and avoid generating negative reactions from others.

Causes of being emotionally unavailable

One of the main reasons why a person may not be emotionally available is because their attachment style is insecure.. This attachment is characterized by a maladaptive regulation of negative affects (Diamond & Aspinwall, 2003).

The cause is associated with early experiences with caregivers who were not very participative or unpredictable in the interactive regulatory processes of the child's affections (Schore, 2003a).

People with insecure attachments have maladaptive strategies when it comes to emotional regulation.

1. Problems recognizing and expressing emotions

Arise Difficulty recognizing and expressing your emotional states, and those of others. Because of this, they appear to lack empathy and emotional coldness.

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2. Avoidance of conflict situations with evasive strategies

They can be from not being present or not being close, or dramatizing their emotional state by not being able to regulate the information perceived as threatening.

3. Cognitive distortions arise

These cognitive distortions about your selfconcept They get to trigger negative reactions from others, reinforcing the ideas of rejection or absenteeism that have been the source of emotional distress during the formation of the attachment style, so further reinforce these defensive behaviors by perceiving affect as hostile.

• Related article: "The 8 types of cognitive distortions"

Emotional immaturity in emotionally unavailable people

Daniel Hill (1944) in his theory of the regulation of affect, points out that people with insecure attachments tend to develop a narcissistic personality, understanding the narcissism as a personality bias that can be in the mild end of the spectrum or in the most severe.

Emotional immaturity is the difficulty in making decisions, committing, or assuming responsibilities according to their chronological age. It is manifested in the fear of developing as a person: fear of commitment, lack of intimacy, ambivalent attitude in their behaviors that They range from extreme closeness to maximum distance for no apparent reason, contradictory communication, tendency not to give clear answers, etc.

Emotionally immature people can be like this because they received unstable or hostile and critical affects, or the opposite. Emotionally immature people seek to maintain a state of well-being based on the absence of the challenges of adult life.

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Emotional availability and stress

These behavior patterns are transformed only by the nature of the relationship in which they are involved.. This relationship can be affective, like the couple, or in therapy, where they develop the ability to reflect on their own patterns of worry.

The capacity for emotional regulation is the most important aspect and the one that will determine how a person will do in life, both in their affective relationships and in the workplace. Therefore, this ability should be enhanced in stressful situations.

Stress is the adaptive effort in front of a problem and the nonspecific reaction. To avoid negative stressors, which are usually associated with stress, it is a priority to know how to distinguish between an event important and not so important, and approach them from a correct perspective of their relevance to give a more healthy. However, everyday life involves situations of suffering or disturbance, as well as positive everyday events.

According to attachment theory, the internal feeling of insecurity raises the need for a decision to seek proximity as a strategy for emotional regulation. If this decision turns out to be negative, the person has no alternative but to make use of the strategies defensive, such as: excessive dependence, hypervigilance, hyper-activation and deactivation of the attachment.

The strategies that allow emotional regulation are based on safety, and on the management active and constructive of negative affects and creativity that gives access to emotions positive.

Concluding

In conclusion, emotional unavailability supposes the activation of stress as a response of preparation, defense and activation to cope more or less adequately with life situations.

Finally, to keep in mind is that this article does not include an analysis of people who suffer alexithymia or other types of psychological disorders, which interfere with emotional availability.