When I come across women who love(d) emotionally unavailable men, including myself, I always ask: Where the hell did we all go wrong?

A common thread with many of us is that at some point our heart took a pounding. Most of us have tale of man who let us down, broke our trust, put us through the wringer. Someone stomped all over heart and left us irrevocably (or so it seems) scarred forever.

I’ve heard tales of ‘first’ loves who in our teenage years took the innocence and trust from us. These experiences gave us cracked views of what should determine a relationship.

For most people, the first time we fall in love (or think we have) is our bravest. We have no prior experience of heartbreak unless we have some sort of life lesson learned from experiences with a parental figure.

When we were hurt, we rallied and railed against the pain and eventually we have moved on, or have we?

For every woman who loves an emotionally unavailable man, you can be certain there is unresolved residue from a critical heartbreak experience.

Think back and there is that moment when everything changed forever. Your attitude about love and who you were choosing to be with changed forever.

We stopped trusting, believing in love coming from a good decent man who is available, and believing in ourselves. We think we’re protecting ourselves from vulnerability but we’re just putting ourselves in line for more and more hurt.

The problem with us is that we’ve lost touch with ourselves. We’ve become reserved, distrusting and reliant on the safe bet of a man who always performs to type, hence reinforcing the cycle and keeping us down. We focus on negative emotions because there is a strange comfort and familiarity. Isn’t it odd that we’re more comfortable with lots of drama and negativity than stability and feeling positive and good?

• What if you’ve grown up with a father who you chased for attention but was really emotionally reserved?
• Or you have a mother who was physically or emotionally abused?
• What if you have important people in your life, such as parents, who systematically reinforced the notion that being with someone, anybody, is better than being with nobody?
• What if you decided that real love, real relationships are based on drama?
• Or what if you decided that love is something that hurts and that nobody can really be trusted?

All of these notions, and more, are exactly the types of beliefs that put you at the mercy of emotionally unavailable men and into a vicious cycle that keeps you down.

Discovering what drives your behaviour, challenging these beliefs and changing them will heal your heart and allow you to move forward.

You don’t just go from wanting emotionally unavailable men one day, to not the next. It is a process, a revelation of who you really are and a final acceptance of yourself and giving you the self love you’ve been missing out on. It can be difficult to do on your own unless you’re prepared to dig deep, do a hell of a lot of soul searching, find peace with those who you think contributed and with yourself and move on.

I found myself at peace when I focused on getting my health back in order. Part of this was working with a kinesiologist and an acupuncturist. During this work, I inadvertently stumbled across the root of my pain and behaviour. I’ve never regressed to those painful relationships. When you treat and regard yourself with love, care, trust and respect, you won’t accept less from others than you can already be and do for yourself. You reclaim yourself from your emotional baggage and set yourself free to enjoy more loving relationships.

Change can definitely be a good thing and is within your grasp.

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