Stress as a response to being emotionally unavailable.

This is how emotional availability is linked to stress and emotion regulation.

Being emotionally available is an active and responsive disposition to empathic understanding.

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

Emotionally available individuals are those who were able to establish a secure attachment relationship with their caregivers, whereas emotionally attached individuals are those who were able to establish a secure attachment relationship with their caregivers.The insecure attachment persons show greater difficulty in regulating themselves emotionally, so they may not be emotionally available.

Characteristics of an emotionally available person

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

This style of attachment is characterized by being flexible and open, allowing the experience and expression of a wide variety of emotions and including both the expectation that the person with whom they interact will respond sensitively and the ability to adjust one's own reactions.

These are the main characteristics of emotionally available people:

• These people recognize and express their emotional states of distress, anguish, discomfort... in a relatively open and uninhibited way, much more than people with insecure attachment.
• They initiate the resolution of conflictive situations that may have been triggered, allowing them to be more open to new information even when it is threatening and to develop realistic and effective strategies for action.
• Emotionally available people are more confident in their own resources and in establishing successful regulation of emotions and stress.
• Seeking support from significant others to allow them to relieve emotions, especially if they are upsetting and may cause stress.
• Securely attached people tend to review their mistakes and erroneous beliefs without fear of rejection or criticism.
• As a result, they employ 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 his or her attachment style is insecure.. This attachment is characterized by maladaptive regulation of negative affect (Diamond & Aspinwall, 2003).

The cause is associated with early experiences with caregivers who were uninvolved. caregivers who were uninvolved or unpredictable in the child's interactive affect regulation processes (Schore, 2003a). (Schore, 2003a).

Insecurely attached individuals have maladaptive strategies for emotional regulation.

Problems in recognizing and expressing emotions

Arise difficulties in recognizing and expressing their own and others' emotional states.. Because of this, they appear to lack empathy and emotional coldness.

2. Avoidance of conflict situations with evasive strategies.

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

Cognitive distortions arise

These cognitive distortions about their self-concept trigger negative reactions from others, reinforcing the ideas of rejection or absenteeism that have been the source of the emotional distress during the formation of the attachment style, thus further reinforce these defensive behaviors by perceiving affection as hostile..

Emotional immaturity in emotionally unavailable persons.

Daniel Hill (1944) in his theory of the regulation of affect, points out that people who have an insecure attachment tend to develop a narcissistic personalityNarcissism is understood as a personality bias that can be in the mild part of the spectrum or in the more severe one.

Emotional immaturity is the difficulty to make decisions, make commitments, or assume 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 ranging from extreme closeness to maximum distance for no apparent reason, contradictory communication, tendency to not give clear answers, etc.

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

Emotional availability and stress

These behavioral patterns become transformed only by the nature of the relationship in which they are involved.. This relationship can be affective, such as a couple, or in therapy, where one develops the ability to reflect on one's own patterns of concern.

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

Stress is the adaptive effort in the face of a problem and the non-specific reaction to it.. To avoid negative stressors, which are usually associated with stress, it is a priority to know how to discern between an important and not so important event, and to approach them from a correct perspective of their relevance in order to give a healthier response. However, daily life involves situations of suffering or disturbance as well as positive daily events.

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

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

Concluding

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

Finally, it should be noted that this article does not include an analysis of people suffering from alexithymia or other psychological disorders that interfere with emotional availability.