Becoming More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship With Experiential Trauma Therapy

The focus of my last two articles has been on emotional availability (What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available? and How to Become More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship). The current article focuses on how experiential trauma therapy can help you overcome unresolved trauma so you can become more emotionally available (see my articles: How Unresolved Trauma Can Affect How You Feel About Yourself and How Unresolved Trauma Can Affect Relationships).

Becoming More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship

How Unresolved Trauma Can Affect Your Ability to Be Emotionally Available

In my last article I discussed how being emotionally available in a relationship can be more challenging when you have unresolved trauma. 

Emotional survival strategies that were adaptive during childhood trauma, including emotional numbing and suppression of emotions, are no longer adaptive in adult relationships (see my article: Changing Maladaptive Coping Strategies That No Longer Work For You: Avoidance).

How Unresolved Trauma Can Affect Emotional Availability

In addition, emotional triggers, which are part of unresolved trauma, add to the difficulty of letting go of these maladaptive strategies.  When triggers occur, it's difficult to know if your reaction is from the past or the present (see my article: When the Traumatic Past Lives on in the Present).

Self help strategies are temporarily helpful in the moment to manage triggers, but these strategies don't help you to overcome trauma.

Experiential trauma therapies are mind-body oriented therapies which include EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy, Somatic Experiencing, AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy), Parts Work, and hypnotherapy (see my articles: Experiential Therapy and the Mind-Body Connection: The Body Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind and Why Experiential Therapy is More Effective Than Talk Therapy).

A Clinical Vignette: Becoming More Emotionally Available With Experiential Trauma Therapy

The following clinical vignette is a composite of many different cases with all identifying information removed:

Ted

After his girlfriend, Sara, gave Ted an ultimatum that either he get help in therapy or she would leave him, Ted sought help reluctantly in experiential trauma therapy.

In the past, Ted attended cognitive-behavioral therapy to deal with emotional triggers that often overwhelmed him, and he learned strategies to use when he was triggered.  

But even though Ted had these strategies, the triggers continued to occur, and when he was triggered, he withdrew emotionally from Sara, which was upsetting to her (see my article: Understanding a Partner Who Withdraws Emotionally).

Sara was working on her own unresolved trauma in experiential therapy and Ted's emotional withdrawal triggered her own history of early childhood emotional neglect.  

Sara told Ted that she felt hurt and angry when he became emotionally distant and she couldn't remain with him if he didn't get help.  

Initially, Ted believed he could overcome his trauma on his own, but since his attempts continued to be unsuccessful, he knew he needed help.  

Ted's therapist got a detailed family history to understand the origin of his psychological trauma, which included a long history of childhood emotional neglect.

Working Through Trauma in Experiential Therapy

At first, Ted felt defensive about his childhood history.  He knew his parents were also highly traumatized people themselves because of their own family backgrounds, and he felt disloyal talking about them in therapy.  

But his therapist helped Ted to understand that therapy isn't about blaming parents, especially parents who were struggling to do the best they could (see my article: Moving Beyond Blaming Your Parents in Therapy).

Ted also learned about intergenerational trauma, which is trauma that affects one generation after the next in the same family.  Until then, Ted didn't know about intergenerational trauma, and it made him think of his maternal and paternal grandparents and their own psychological struggles. 

Ted didn't want to keep hurting Sara, and he didn't want to lose her.  He also thought about his future. He thought about the children he hoped to have with Sara after they got married.  He told his therapist he didn't want to pass on his trauma symptoms to his children.  He wanted these symptoms to end with him, which increased Ted's motivation in therapy.

As a first step, his therapist helped Ted to expand his internal resources and coping strategies.  

She also helped him to expand his emotional window of tolerance so that, over time, he developed a greater emotional capacity to handle his triggers when they came up.  

With increased emotional capacity, Ted decreased his emotional avoidance strategies.

Since Ted was a perfectionist, like his father, who demanded perfection from Ted and shamed him when he couldn't live up to his father's expectations, his therapist also helped Ted to see the connection between perfectionism and shame.  

At that point Ted had developed sufficient coping strategies and expanded his emotional window of tolerance enough so that his therapist knew he was now ready to process his childhood trauma using experiential trauma therapy.

They began by doing Parts Work (also known as Ego States therapy or Internal Family Systems therapy or IFS).  Through Parts Work, Ted developed a sense of empathy and compassion for his younger self.  

He imagined being able to nurture his younger self, who was emotionally neglected.  Even though Ted was using his imagination, he had a genuine felt sense of healing. He also meditated on his younger self between therapy sessions and journaled about his experiences (see my article: What is the Felt Sense in Experiential Therapy?).

The next stage of his therapy involved EMDR therapy (see my article: How EMDR Therapy Works: EMDR and the Brain).

Using EMDR, over time, Ted and his therapist processed his childhood trauma.  Although EMDR and the other forms of experiential therapy tend to work faster than regular talk therapy, Ted and his therapist worked for over a year to complete his treatment. 

Becoming More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship

Along the way, Ted saw improvements in his ability to be more emotionally available to Sara.  Sara was also happy that Ted was more emotionally present with her.  Instead of numbing himself whenever difficult emotions came up, Ted now dealt directly with uncomfortable emotions and remained present. He was also more outwardly affectionate and emotionally attuned to Sara.

Conclusion

Self help strategies can help when you're trying to be more emotionally available in your relationship, but they're not enough to overcome psychological trauma, especially unresolved childhood trauma.

In order to cope with trauma, people develop emotional survival strategies that were adaptive at the time of trauma to keep them from becoming even more traumatized.  The problem is that those survival strategies also create their own problems, especially in adulthood when people enter into relationships.

Experiential trauma therapy therapies are mind-body oriented therapies that provide a window into the unconscious mind.  This is one of the reasons why it tends to be more effective than regular talk therapy.  

Getting Help in Trauma Therapy

If you have attempted to deal with unresolved trauma on your own without success, you could benefit from working with an experiential trauma therapist.

Once your trauma is resolved, you can live a more fulfilling life and be more emotionally available to yourself and your partner.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist

I work with individual adults and people in relationships.

I have helped many clients to overcome trauma (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

How to Become More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship

In my prior article, What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available?, I began a discussion about emotional availability, defined the term and compared it to emotional unavailability.  In this article, I'm focusing on how to become more emotionally available (see my articles: Emotional Vulnerability as a Pathway to Greater Intimacy in a Relationship and Emotional Vulnerability is a Strength in a Relationship).

Becoming More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship

As a brief recap: Emotional Availability includes being:

• Open
• Honest
• Emotionally vulnerable with each other

Being emotionally available looks like this:

• Having deep and meaningful conversations with your partner about your emotions where you allow yourself to be vulnerable.  

• Allowing yourself to get emotionally close to your partner.

• Listening and attuning to your partner's experiences and being empathetic to their emotions--even if their experiences are different from your own.

• Allowing your partner to comfort you when you're going through a difficult time.

• Comforting your partner when they're going through a difficult time. 

How to Become More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship

As I mentioned in my prior article, the healthiest and happiest relationships are between partners who are emotionally available to each other.

Becoming More Emotionally Available in Your Relationship

The reality is that emotionally availability isn't an all-or-nothing phenomenon.  

In other words, most people aren't either emotionally available or unavailable.  There might be situations where they're more open and other situations where they're not.  

No one is emotionally available 100% of the time, but a worthwhile goal for someone who tends to withdraw emotionally is to become more consistently open. 

Steps to Becoming More Emotionally Available

Here are some basic steps you can try:

• Become Aware of When You Distance Emotionally From Yourself: Emotional distancing or withdrawing often occurs within yourself before it occurs with your partner.  You can begin to recognize when this is happening when you feel cut off from your own emotions. You can practice checking in with yourself periodically throughout the day and asking yourself what you're feeling.  If you draw a blank or if what you sense is vague, you might be cutting yourself off from your emotions (see below: Learn to Identifying Your Emotions).

• Become Aware of When You Distance Yourself From Your Partner: Develop an awareness of when you tend to distance yourself emotionally from your partner.  Maybe it's when you feel criticized, ashamed, challenged, sad, angry, resentful or some other emotion.  Even if, at first, you don't recognize that you're withdrawing, think about it after an incident with your partner and be honest with yourself.  If you can do this by either journaling or meditating about it on a regular basis, you can eventually develop an awareness of when it's happening in the moment as a way to try to change your response.

• Learn to Identify Your Emotions: This can be challenging for someone who has spent most of their life suppressing or numbing their feelings.  Suppressing or numbing feelings might have been an adaptive survival strategy in a family that didn't tolerate the expression of emotions, but when you're an adult in a relationship, it's no longer adaptive.  By journaling or meditating, you can reflect on a recent memory of an uncomfortable emotion you felt.  Slow down and take your time. At first, you might only have a vague sense of the emotions in terms of feeling uncomfortable, but if you include bodily awareness (e.g., throat constricted or clenched fists), you can get a felt sense of what you were experiencing because you're tapping into the mind-body connection and possible unconscious feelings (The Mind-Body Connection: The Body Offers a Window Into the Unconscious Mind).

• Communicate With Your Partner: As you become aware and develop insight into how you withdraw emotionally and the uncomfortable emotions you're experiencing, talk to your partner about what you have discovered about yourself. This takes courage, so start with something relatively small and work your way up to sharing more vulnerable feelings. This will help you to feel safer over time. Being open and honest in this way will bring you closer and you're practicing being vulnerable.  Although this might be difficult at first, it's possible to get better at it over time.  Also, let your partner know that you're not asking them to fix you (in reality, no one can fix anyone).  Let them know that you're talking about it as a way to learn how to open up so you can get closer to them, and you just want them to listen. When you're sharing, stick to your own experiences as opposed to blaming or criticizing your partner (How to Improve Communication in Your Relationship).

• Provide Time and Space For Your Partner to Share Their Emotions: Becoming more emotionally available is a two-way street. In addition to sharing your emotions, you want to strive to get comfortable with listening and being attuned to your partner.  Once again, apply the same ground rules as when you're communicating with your partner: Your partner is sticking to their own experiences and not blaming or criticizing you.

When to Seek Help in Therapy

Becoming more emotionally available can be challenging, especially if you have unresolved trauma.

Emotional triggers from the past come up in a fraction of a second, which occurs before the logical part of your brain can determine if what you're feeling is from the past or the present.  This is part of what makes triggers so difficult to manage.

In addition, if you spent your early years surviving in your family by shutting down emotionally, you might not feel safe enough to be more open emotionally--even with a partner that you love and trust (see my article: How Unresolved Trauma Can Affect How You Feel About Yourself and How Trauma Can Affect Relationships).

Also, if you have a traumatic relationship history, being vulnerable with your current partner can be too scary to do on your own.  

If you have tried to resolve these problems on your own and you keep coming up against the same emotional blocks, you could benefit from working with a trauma therapist who can help you to process the traumatic events that are creating obstacles for you.

Working through unresolved trauma with a trauma therapist can free you of your traumatic history so you can be more emotionally available to yourself as well as your partner.

Next Article

In my next article, I'll provide a clinical vignette to show how experiential therapy can help you to overcome trauma and open up emotionally.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist.

I work with individual adults and couples.

I am a trauma therapist who has helped many people overcome unresolved trauma (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available?

The healthiest and happiest relationships tend to have one thing in common: Both people are emotionally available to each other.  So, I think it's worthwhile to define what it means to be emotionally available and contrast it with being emotionally unavailable in this first article about this topic (see my articles: Emotional Vulnerability as a Pathway to Greater Intimacy in a Relationship).

What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available?

What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available?

Basically, being emotionally available means allowing yourself to be open, honest and emotionally vulnerable with a loved one (see my article: Emotional Vulnerability as a Strength in a Relationship).

Being emotionally available means you're able to share your deeper feelings with another person who is close to you and you also make room for their feelings.

When you're emotionally available you're able to:

• Have deeper, more meaningful conversations with loved ones about yourself where you make yourself emotionally vulnerable.

• Allow yourself to get emotionally close to your loved ones.

What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available?

• Take in your loved ones' experiences and be empathetic to their emotions, even if their experiences and emotions are different from your own.

• Allow your loved ones to comfort you when you're going through a difficult time.

What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Available?

• Comfort your loved ones when they're going through a difficult time.

What Does It Mean to Be Emotionally Unavailable?

Let's contrast emotional availability with emotional unavailability.

When you're emotionally unavailable you tend to:

• Be uncomfortable with deeper, more meaningful conversations with your loved ones about yourself because you want to avoid feeling vulnerable. Emotional vulnerability scares you and you want to distance yourself from it (see my article: Fear of Emotional Vulnerability).

• Limit how close you allow yourself to get to loved ones. This is often an unconscious defense mechanism (see my article: Understanding Emotional Withdrawers).

• Be unable to take in your loved ones' experiences or be open and empathetic to their emotions, especially if their emotions or experiences are different from your own.

• Get defensive if your loved ones want to comfort you when you're having a difficult time because it makes you uncomfortable. You might even deny to them (and yourself) that you're going through a difficult time because being emotionally vulnerable feels unsafe for you (see my article: Pretending to Feel Strong to Avoid Feeling Your Unmet Emotional Needs).

• Have difficulty comforting your loved ones when they're going through a difficult time. You might minimize or dismiss their feelings because you're uncomfortable with difficult emotions.

Why Do People Become Emotionally Unavailable?

There are many factors that contribute to a person's emotional availability or unavailability, including experiences in their family of origin as well as experiences in prior relationships.

If a person is raised in a family where family members are encouraged to feel and express their emotions, all other things being equal, they tend to go into relationships being more emotionally available.  

But if they were discouraged from having and expressing more vulnerable emotions, they learned that difficult emotions are "bad" and if they express these feelings, they're burdening others and they won't be supported emotionally.

Even worse, they might be shunned or punished physically or emotionally for having and expressing vulnerable emotions, so they learned to suppress these emotions.

These experiences are psychologically traumatic (see my article: Understanding the Impact of Trauma on Emotionally Unavailable People).

In many families boys are especially discouraged from expressing their emotions or for even having emotions.  From an early age they're told they need to "be a man" or "boys don't cry."  So they are shamed for their emotions (see my article: Shame is at the Root of Most Emotional Problems).

As adults, they might not even know what they feel--with the exception of anger because in these families boys are sometimes allowed to feel anger, which is the one emotion they might recognize in themselves as adults.

Next Article

I'll continue to discuss this topic in my next article where I'll discuss how to become more emotionally available with loved ones: How to Become More Emotionally Available.

About Me

I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR, AEDP, EFT, Somatic Experiencing and Sex Therapist.

I work with individual adults and people in relationships.

I have helped many clients to learn to be more emotionally available in their relationships (see my article: What is a Trauma Therapist?).

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.