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You notice I didn’t say “picking up” or “choosing” or “attracting” married or unavailable men.
In fact, you don’t choose them, but your nervous system does.
And no, most of the time, it’s not because you are unavailable yourself.
Let me take you through the journey of my client, let’s call her Diana, a smart, aware, and attractive woman. She is in her 50s now. She wanted to have children, and a family, but she kept meeting men who were unavailable—freshly separated, not over someone, or even married. Actually, the three men she had the strongest feelings for in her life were married.
Each time, she was the one ending the relationship, despite the heartbreak she would experience, only to take months, if not years, to get over it and recover…only to finally meet someone else not available.
Since her mid-20s, she has been interested in spirituality and growth, so she worked on herself early on. She keeps hearing it: “you, or a part of you, isn’t available.” But it doesn’t resonate with her. She heard as well that there must have been a kind of triangle with her mother and her father, and that she and her mother would fight for the father’s attention…but this doesn’t resonate either.
Let’s narrow her experience to the three married men she “felt madly in love with” and see why it took her so long to move on each time.
“Madly in love” is how she described what she felt. First, “madly in love” is a collection of sensations. The chemical dance in the body is strong at the beginning of a relationship, and it shifts when familiarity starts to install itself. This doesn’t happen with unavailable people. So even when you are strong enough to stop, you didn’t get to the point of knowing each other well enough that it makes the chemicals wind down. So it’s harder to get over with, and move on, because you don’t have enough information. You stay stuck in the “it could have been perfect if” fantasy.
It’s important to come back to the self and not trust the chemicals, which is counterintuitive at that moment and difficult. The little bits of attention and affection, in between the long periods of not knowing, second guessing, or waiting, are so addictive for a woman who doesn’t have in her nervous system’s database the collection of sensations and emotions related to the satisfaction of being fully met.
If it’s you, and you want to cut contact or get over someone, here’s a little practice. The addiction to the crumbs is so strong your nervous system might want to swipe the bad parts under the carpet. Well, spend time with it. Bringing the felt sense of disappointment is powerful. Write a list of all the things that hurt—that time he said he would recommend you a list of nice restaurants in Paris and you don’t hear back from him before your trip and he never followed through, that time he ghosted you for one month before contacting you again saying he has been so sick, and so on.
You read one every day, and take the time to fully stay with what it feels like. Do this every day until your body registers how painful this is (or was).
Diana said to me, “I don’t want the crumbs. I don’t want to hurt another woman. I hate this anxiety when I wait. But letting them go felt like death; each time, the hole of despair I am falling into gives me the darkest thoughts.”
When she came to me for sessions, she was in that hole. Something really unexpected happened. It had been one year since breaking up with married man number three. She still thought about him, but she was doing really well with her life, and she felt positive about what’s next. Until one day, big coincidence (or not), because she isn’t part of this man’s circle and has no chance of bumping into him, she hears that he and his wife separated nine months prior.
She was devastated: “I can’t believe he didn’t get back to me after the separation. I feel so much disbelief and pain. And even if I know it’s certainly linked to childhood trauma, I am scared that it will be the story for me, over and over again, and I don’t see the point anymore because it hurts so much.”
So first I offered my help to hold all the emotions related to this announcement. Of course, there were a mix of the usual themes—abandonment, shame, not feeling good enough, despair, loneliness, anything you can imagine along the lines of not being chosen, wanted, loved.
But as we slowed down, something else appeared. She said, “There’s a kind of panic that wants him to remain married.”
“Oh, how interesting,” I said. “Let’s slow down there.”
As I guided her to slow down and really focus on the sensations of that panic, I asked, “If that panic could speak, how would you complete this sentence? Stay married, because….”
She replied: “Stay married because…if you stay there to preserve your family, it’s not because I am not good enough that you don’t come with me.”
Ah-ha moment, followed by a fountain of tears flowing.
Through the embodied experience, she understood with all her cells that choosing men who were not available was a (false) protection mechanism.
Diana’s mother was constantly criticizing her; her whole body would be highly activated from that pain, and it stayed like that for many years. She internalized her mum’s voice as an unbearable inner critic. As she was doing well in most of the areas of her life, this voice was more likely to show up in her love life when she would be rejected, throwing her back to that unbearable childhood pain, which felt like death.
So her nervous system chose a strategy to prevent that pain from arising again. Let’s go with unavailable men; then if they don’t choose Diana, it’s out of duty, it’s because they’re not brave enough, it’s because they are compulsive liars…anything but Diana not feeling loveable again.
The relief was immense, and the shift almost instant.
It took an extra week for the craving to reach out to him to completely fade.
It took two months to meet someone available at a music festival.
So far, it’s going amazingly.
Is Diana’s story resonating with all of you who are in the same situation? Probably not. But what’s important is that each time some teachers or therapists diagnosed the causes of the pattern, they were wrong.
And from a bodily experience, she knew it.
Do not let any practitioner gaslight your nervous system. Find someone who can help you to feel, not only understand, but feel how it tries its best to protect you from ancient pain.
A light bulb moment is an embodied experience.
~
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