Have you taken time to consider why sometimes you’re better in the relationship and why you can’t recognize yourself at others?
One potential explanation is your emotional availability is cyclical, much like other aspects of life.
What is Emotional Availability?
This might come as a surprise, but in almost therapeutical terms (I have begun studying Somatic Experiencing™, the method developed by Peter A. Levine) emotional availability is the amount of room inside your nervous system to take in charge.
Yes, the patience, consideration, and connection that emotional availability requires all reside in your nervous system.
If your nervous system is free of heavy loads (stuff that happens in our lives but we do not get to process them all through) then you have space inside you to be there for others.
The charge means emotions, information, situations, that come from you, to you, or happen around you and you are there to witness them.
Emotional availability isn’t only for intimacy, but for family, friends, peers, or even strangers that you meet at a time in your life and you share a moment, a situation, or something meaningful with.
Emotional Availability is cyclical: just as we need to rest, recover at various times in our lives, or sleep on a daily basis, we also need time to withdraw within and recalibrate our… nerves! We’re not constantly emotionally available, neither should we be so.
What are the Building Blocks of emotional availability?
In my coaching opinion, it’s attention, sympathy, empathy, compassion, and compersion.
Attention here means our capacity to focus and tune in to others’ feelings or challenges.
Sympathy means understanding others’ feelings or challenges.
Empathy means to viscerally feel what others go through.
Compassion means we understand, feel but also help when others go through challenging moments.
Compersion is the next step in our human evolution: feel joy when others are happy and thriving without us. It’s the opposite of envy or jealousy. This does require a lot of free space in our nervous system, indeed.
How does emotional availability affect your intimate life?
Depending on how available you are, you enter your relationships fully present, more present, or in not such a good emotional (or nervous) shape.
One thing is sure: the more emotionally available you are, the more intense erotic experiences you are able to hold. Yes, the erotic is based on emotions mainly. So with your emotional availability, you can in fact hold fulfilling experiences, not just sexually satisfying. This is what many people still do not understand. Sex is thrilling, whereas the erotic is fulfilling.
Also, when emotionally available, you in fact care about the quality of experiences your partner has, what you leave them with. You care all through.
One caveat: an emotionally available partner is firstly emotionally available to themselves. Meaning they care about themselves and make sure they are in fact okay, in balance. Thus, they can be so for the other as well.
Also, if you are interested and have the nervous space, here is a longer exposé of this topic:
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