“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity.” ~ Brené Brown

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We talk and hear so much about emotional unavailability—what it looks like, its impact on people and relationships—but do we ever stop to reflect on and ask what emotional availability is?

What it means? What it looks like and how it can transform our relationship with ourselves and others?

We complain when our emotional needs go unmet when we are faced with invalidation and lack of empathy. We know how lonely it feels to be in a space that is devoid of emotional warmth and comfort, but rarely do we wonder what the opposite of being in such a space would be.

As much as we want it, most of us don’t understand it because it’s not something that we talk about much, even though we assume that emotional availability is something that everyone has or must have. Most of us aren’t aware and not even trained to be emotionally available. Yes, it’s something that we need to train ourselves into becoming. Like most other things, emotional availability is a skill that needs to be developed over time.

The reason emotional availability feels so rare today is because most of us were never taught how to sit with discomfort, only how to escape it.

Being emotional is not the same as being emotionally available. You can feel a lot and still be deeply unavailable to yourself and others.

Emotional availability is about being open, present, and available to one thing that makes us all human—emotions, both within ourselves and others. It’s about embracing a crucial fact of human existence that confronts us every now and then—vulnerability (i.e. a state where all our guards, masks, and pretenses are down). When the deep, difficult, heavy, or even gentle emotions surface asking to be seen and felt. A state that leaves us open, exposed, and fragile, a state that we humans desperately want to run away from because of everything that it makes us feel.

“The attempt to escape from pain, is what creates more pain.” ~ Gabor Maté

We don’t like it. We don’t want it because we always want to be in control. Uncertainty of any kind scares us. Being in our most delicate, fragile state makes us feel weak, inadequate, lost, untethered, and unanchored, and why on earth would we ever want to be in such a state?

But the thing is that vulnerability comes with us. It’s part and parcel of being human. This is the state when we are truly who we are, when our shadows surface, the parts of us that we don’t want to see and claim. But without this reclamation, there is no connection to self, forget connection to another. There is no accepting and embracing of who we are, and then there’s no growth.

When we deny ourselves our own emotional experience and stay disconnected from our emotional world, we deny ourselves the possibility of genuine human connection and evolution—something that we’re all meant to have. Our emotional world is where our soul lives and breathes. This is what gives meaning to our lives whether we like it or not, and our emotions are what allow us to truly reach out, connect, and be with another person. But how can we do that when we don’t fully understand what being emotionally available really entails?

Being emotionally available is about:

>> Recognising that you have emotions and a rich inner world. After all, you’re human and that’s what separates you from inanimate objects. Your ability to feel is what adds meaning to everything in your life. Imagine eating your favourite ice cream, chocolate, hanging out with your favourite person, or doing the thing that you love and not feeling a thing. Wouldn’t that be a bummer? So just like you don’t question joy, excitement, and happiness, know that you will also have to experience sadness, grief, and anger. You are made of light and shadow, and you can’t change that.

>> Knowing that every emotion has a place and a purpose, even the uncomfortable ones. Emotional availability begins with accepting that nothing you feel is “wrong,” “too much,” or “unnecessary.” Feelings carry information. They are messengers, not enemies. Your joy tells you what lights you up and what you need more of. Your sadness and pain tell you what matters to you, what you need to tend to within yourself, what you need to stop doing or allowing because it hurts. How would you know if you never felt anything?

>> Developing emotional literacy—knowing what you are feeling. Most people only know “good,” “bad,” “angry,” or “sad.” Emotional availability asks you to go deeper: Am I hurt? Ashamed? Afraid? Disappointed? Lonely? Overwhelmed? The more you can name your emotions, the more power you have to work with them instead of running from them. And even if you don’t have the exact names, just allowing yourself to feel is enough, or you can even make up your own names, like kids do! What matters is that you don’t deny your emotional experience to yourself.

>> Being present with your emotions instead of escaping them. Emotional availability means not numbing out, distracting, intellectualising, or suppressing the moment discomfort shows up. It’s the willingness to sit with yourself when it’s hard, without rushing to fix, judge, avoid, or find a solution. It’s about knowing that there is a void you may find yourself sitting in at some point because it’s part of the human experience.

>> Developing awareness of how emotions show up in your body—tight chest, heavy stomach, shaking hands, shallow breath, and so on. Emotional availability includes learning your body’s language, because emotions don’t just live in the mind—they live in the nervous system and speak through your body. It’s about tuning into the wisdom and asking, “What is this emotion trying to tell me?” Can I just listen to it like I would listen to a friend? That’s all.

>> Exploring why vulnerability feels uncomfortable for you. Many of us grew up in environments where softer emotions weren’t respected, where crying was shamed, where needs were mocked, ignored, or seen as weakness. If vulnerability once felt unsafe, it makes sense that you learned to shutdown. Emotional availability asks you to gently reopen what you once had to close to survive. It’s about going into those deep, dark spaces, cleaning them out, and shining some light so that the parts of you that are still afraid to come out and breathe finally can.

>> Allowing yourself to be seen—imperfectly, messily, honestly. It means letting another person witness your fear, confusion, grief, joy, and uncertainty, and not just the “sorted,” strong version of you.

Most importantly, it’s also about knowing, understanding, and respecting that the other person has a rich, messy, imperfect emotional world just like you do. Your job is neither to dissect, distract, nor fix your emotional world, and you don’t have to do that for the other person either.

It’s about being present with your emotional experience with gentleness and compassion, and doing the same with others. When you learn to become available to yourself, you begin to do that for others as well.

Then being emotionally available for another is about:

>> Learning to hold space for another person without fixing, judging, or shutting down. This is where true availability shows up in relationships—being able to stay present when someone else is emotional without getting defensive, dismissive, overwhelmed, or avoidant. If your first reaction to emotion is defence, explanation, or shutting down, that’s not availability, that’s self-protection, which always destroys connection.

>> Being willing to take accountability. Emotional availability includes the capacity to say, “I hurt you,” “I didn’t show up well,” “I was wrong,” without collapsing into shame or flipping into defence.

>> Letting emotions exist between you and another person. It’s about allowing vulnerability to flow not just within you, but between you and your partner, friend, or family member. This is the fabric of real intimacy.

>> Understanding that being emotionally available doesn’t mean being emotionally perfect. It means you allow yourself to be human—to feel, falter, repair, learn, and grow.

We’re all broken, messy, and imperfect in our own ways, scared kids in adult bodies, unanchored, and untethered from time to time, switching between our light and shadow, and that’s okay. That’s normal. That’s human.

Our job is simply to be present and allow the wisdom of our emotions to enlighten and enrich us because we grow in both light and darkness. Relationships don’t create our emotional capacity—they only reveal how much we have already built within ourselves.

And when we truly become present to ourselves and others that’s what allows people and relationships to transform because at the end of the day, we only want to be witnessed, wholeheartedly, for who we are and what we bring with us. It’s this availability that lets us breathe, connect, and flourish.

Remember, you don’t become emotionally available by becoming fearless. You become available by learning that you can feel and still be safe, and you know someone is available for you when you can let all your guards down and still be held safely.

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