Welcome back to From Trauma to True Love, the podcast where we explore how early trauma impacts our capacity to create safe, nourishing, and lasting love, and how we can break free to write a new story for ourselves. I'm your host, Leila Reyes, and author of freedom from shame, trauma, forgiveness, and healing from sexual abuse. Today, we're not sugarcoating a damn thing. This episode is an intervention for a very specific kind of woman, the brilliant, accomplished, deeply capable woman who somehow, against her own better judgment, keeps getting hooked by emotionally unavailable men. Emotionally unavailable or physically unavailable, and you know exactly who you are.

You can run a company. You can raise a family. You can lead a team. You can hold everyone else together. And yet there's this one pattern in your life that keeps circling back.

You meet someone who's half in, half out, someone in you and and then something in you lights up even while another part of you whispers, really? We're doing this again? So let me be clear. This is today is not about brain chemistry. It's not about neuroscience.

It's not about an amygdala deep dive. We already discussed that in the last episode, so you can listen to that if you missed it. But today is really about the pattern most women would rather eat glass than admit that they're in. The pattern that you keep calling chemistry is actually self abandonment in stilettos. You keep choosing unavailable men.

It's the quiet heartbreak you've trained yourself to tolerate. It's the crumbs you keep translating into feasts. It's the men you let into your imagination, your calendar, and your body long before they've earned the right to know anything real about you. And it looks like waiting for his name to pop up on your phone and feeling your whole nervous system spike at a two word text. It looks like clearing your schedule just in case he wants to see you, and it looks like defending him to your friends while you cry on your bathroom floor.

And I really want you to hear this clearly. I'm not here to blame you. I'm not here to shame you. I'm here to interrupt a pattern that has robbed you of your time and your joy and your sense of worth for far, far too long. We're not doing polite conversations in this podcast.

I'm not colluding with a story that this is just how you are or this is just what happens in your life because it's not. It's not your personality. It's not your destiny. This is this pattern is how you learned to survive. So today, we're really talking about the lived pattern, the choices that you keep making, the excuses that you keep accepting, the fantasies that you cling to, the humiliations that you swallow, and the quiet repeated self betrayal that you call being patient.

So this episode really is gonna sting not because you're wrong, but because some part of you already knows that you deserve more. You're just tired of pretending that you don't. And just to be transparent, I've been there. I've done that. So if this isn't you, of course, no need to listen.

But if it is, take a breath, let your shoulders drop, let your jaw unclench, because we're going in with compassion, with fierceness, and with zero sugarcoating. So let's let's get painfully clear about what we're talking about here because women tend to soften the language around this pattern like it's some kind of part time job. You call things complicated that are actually very, very simple. You call things timing that are actually avoidance, and you call things potential that are actually red flags. So let's name the men that you keep getting tangled with.

The first one is called the basically we're a couple but not really man. And this this guy kinda tells you, I'm not ready for anything serious. So he lets you know right up front, but he lives in your phone and your nervous system like he's your boyfriend. And what he he what he wants is connection without commitment, access without accountability, and comfort without cost. So he probably texts you in the morning, hey.

Good morning, beautiful. Calls you at night. Maybe he vents about his day, sends you some memes, shares his fears, sleeps with you, and uses you as his emotional home base. But if you ask, what are we? You know, the minute that you ask what are we, it's suddenly, oh, I he says, I don't wanna ruin what we have.

I'm I'm just not in the right place. I'm still figuring myself out. But he'll happily lean on you when he's stressed. He'll call you when he's lonely. He'll let you stroke his hair while he talks about his ex.

But the moment that you ask for for anything for yourself, clarity, consistency, commitment, he pulls back, he gets confused, or he simply just disappears. He acts like a partner when it benefits him and like a stranger when you need him. You call it complicated, it's not complicated. It's called uncommitted. So then the second one is the deep busy healing man that I like to I like to name it.

This one, it really looks impressive on the surface because he's building something. He's working on himself. He's doing the inner work. He's in therapy, reads all the books. He's listening to podcasts.

He sends you long, thoughtful texts about how hard life is right now, and he tells you that no one understands him like you do. He calls you his safe place. Maybe he talks about the future and, you know, he might even share his trauma. He tells you he's never been this vulnerable with anyone, and yet somehow he's always too busy to make clear plans. He's always overwhelmed when you ask where this is going.

He's always not ready when the relationship actually needs to move forward with one inch, and then he asks you to be patient, and you do. You find yourself saying things like, he's just under a lot of pressure right now, or he's in a really intense season, or he's trying. I know he cares. Meanwhile, you're watching his stories from trips, from dinners, and adventures that he never mentioned to you. Here's the truth about this.

Vulnerability without follow through is not intimacy. It's called performance. He wants your emotional labor. He wants your empathy. He wants your belief in his potential, in his future, but he doesn't step up consistently as an actual partner.

So he's actually deeply expressive, but emotionally, he's unavailable for you. And that combination can be pretty brutal because it makes you doubt your perception instead of his behavior. The third one is the unavailable by definition man. Well, this man's married. He's taken.

He's entangled in some way. Right? This is the most obvious kind of unavailability that maybe you still somehow talk yourself around. So he's in this relationship. He's or he's engaged.

He's married or or he's separated but still living together. He tells you that they're sleeping in separate rooms, but they just had a baby. He tells you it's complicated and, basically, it's over. Or maybe he tells you that he's waiting for the right time to tell her. He confides in you that you're the person he's felt you're the first person he's felt this way in many years that or that his wife doesn't understand him like you do.

Or he says if things were different, it would just be you and me, baby. He says he doesn't wanna hurt anyone while in the process of hurting everyone. He might say he'll leave once things calm down, after the holidays or after the kids adjust or when her health improves or once the business is stable. But you end up waiting for milestones that never come. You end up ex accepting secret meetups maybe the day before or after a holiday, but never on the holiday.

You find yourself waiting home on the holiday on your birthday because something came up for him. Well, it was his sick kid's soccer game that he forgot about. You hide your feelings from your friends and then and at the same time defend him while you're dying inside. You might tell yourself something like he's just stuck. You know?

Oh, he's such a good dad. He doesn't wanna blow up his family. He's not like other cheaters. He really cares. But here's the reality.

If he's married or partnered and not actively, transparently disentangling himself, he's not available for a healthy relationship with you. You're the side story. You're the emotional refuge. You're the one absorbing his guilt, his longing, and his confusion, and getting none of the safety, none of the public commitment, and none of the full life partnership that I kinda think that you want. You call it star crossed.

It's not star crossed. It's stolen. Let's call it what it is. For all of these men who are unavailable, and there are other categories as well, but these are not men who can't love. These are men who won't love, who won't love you in the way that you deserve to be loved.

And if that stings a little bit, stay with it. Because you have to see the pattern for what keeps it in place to be able to crack it open, to stop romanticizing unavailability and really start seeing it for what it is. So let's go a little bit deeper and to see why you might be drawn to unavailable men. This part really only works if you if you're really willing to tell yourself honestly the the total truth. You're not drawn to these men because you're broken.

You're drawn to them because something in your early life taught you a specific template for love. And for most of the women listening to this, that template was shaped by trauma. Sometimes overt, like childhood sexual abuse, like what happened to me. Sometimes covert, like emotional neglect, like what happened to me, or parent with addiction or chronic criticism or or being parent parentified or witnessing domestic conflict or living with a caregiver who's unpredictable or volatile or checked out. Right?

Any of these patterns. So when you're young, you don't really have the ability to interpret these experiences correctly. You don't say, oh, my dad is emotionally unavailable, or my dad did something that was wrong, or my mother's overwhelmed or my caregiver doesn't have the capacity to attune to me. You you know, you which is actually the truth of what happened. You say, this must be about me.

And from that young mind, you know, the these experiences because our mind we don't have the capacity to think outside of or like an adult would. So from those experiences, our core beliefs are formed, and they're identity level beliefs that shape our adult relationships until we consciously break them. So the core reason for this happening is and and attracting unavailable men is because we learned to we learned a distorted truth about our own value before we were even old enough to know what value meant. And so childhood sexual abuse, neglect, abandonment, parentification, chaos, on and on and on, they all whisper some version of something like love is not given, love must be earned, love must be managed, or love must be survived, that kind of thing. And then that belief, whatever belief we created then, becomes the foundation of every relational choice that we make as an adult.

But as it doesn't show up as a sentence in your mind, it shows up in behaviors and patterns and attractions that you can't explain. So let's go ahead and walk through these three common beliefs and how they play out in real time so that you can see exactly how they lead you straight into the arms of an unavailable man. The first belief, this is my personal one, it's I don't matter. So if you grew up with caregivers who were distracted, overwhelmed, or inconsistent, or unresponsive in some way, you learned my needs don't register. My feelings are extra.

My presence is optional, that kind of thing. And as an adult, this belief makes you gravitate towards men who treat you as an afterthought because some part of you learned that being prioritized just isn't for you. So you might find yourself waiting for him to text. You might find yourself rearranging your plans to fit his life instead of him fitting into yours or maybe some reciprocation there. You accept last minute invitations and maybe even change other plans to to fit into his schedule.

You might be giving him the benefit of the doubt every single time, making excuses, downplaying your needs so you don't ask too much. And every time you chase clarity, excuse inconsistency, or settle for crumbs, you're reenacting that childhood moment where you learned my needs aren't important enough to inconvenience anyone. So unavailable men don't make you feel small. You already feel small around men, and unavailability just fits the mold. That's kind of what we're looking for.

The second belief, a common belief, and there are many, but this is a common one, is I'm unworthy. If you experienced childhood sexual abuse or criticism or emotional manipulation or or were blamed for the emotions of adults around you, maybe you internalized that there's something wrong with you or I'm only lovable if I perform, if I prove. I have to earn my belonging. I have to earn my love. So guess who feels what who feels right to your nervous system when this happens?

Men who need to be fixed, men who need your patience, men who need your emotional labor, need you to understand their trauma, need your loyalty during chaos, need you to settle for ambiguity so you don't lose them. So unavailable men let you prove your value. Healthy men simply offer you value, and that kind of feels foreign. So this is why you can feel magnetized towards the man who struggles to choose you and bored by the man who does choose you. The unavailable man activates that childhood job, you you know, earn your place, but you end up never really having a place.

You think you're in love, but what you're doing is you're reenacting your identity. The third a third belief is I'm not safe. So if you lived in a household marked by volatility, secrecy, sudden emotional shifts, or survival mode parenting, then you learned maybe that closeness is dangerous, being seen as unsafe, love can turn on me at any moment. And this this belief is subtle but very powerful. It makes emotionally steady men feel threatening because steadiness invites intimacy, which invites vulnerability, which your body probably equates with risk, with danger, lack of safety.

So when someone healthy shows up, maybe you feel bored or skeptical or suspicious or numb or irritated or simply just not attracted. And when someone unpredictable, inconsistent, or emotionally confusing shows up, then your nervous system can light up because inconsistency inconsistency feels familiar. So you can mistake activation for attraction, and your body says, oh, this feels like home, except home wasn't safe. So this is why you can be drawn to the man who's half in, half out. His emotional distance protects you from the terrifying vulnerability of being fully seen, and unavailable men let you stay close to connection without ever having to risk the intimacy that you learned was dangerous.

I've had that experience in my life where I was seeing two two men. There wasn't any real commitment there. But one was really stable and healthy, and the other one, no. He gave me what was familiar. And I chose to stay with the one that gave me the familiarity so I know firsthand how this kinda works in my own life and what I've seen working with people, working with my clients.

I thought that the I've mentioned this in other podcasts, but I I really did believe at the time that the person who is stable and consistent was probably a serial killer or something. I just couldn't trust it at that level. So here's the truth. You're not choosing unavailable men because you're weak. You're choosing them because some part of you is still trying to resolve an old childhood wound or living through that childhood wound.

Not addicted to them. You're loyal to the beliefs that you learned when you were too young to understand you deserve better and to choose differently. And once these once you begin seeing that the these beliefs clearly, then the spell can break. So the the brutal truth, you know, is here's here's kind of where it can get maybe it's already uncomfortable, but I'm gonna say here's where it gets uncomfortable. The whole dang thing is uncomfortable.

But here's where where you have to really see clearly that unavailable men don't fool you. You you know if you really pay attention, if you really listen. You're fooling yourself. You feel the inconsistency. You see the gaps.

You sense the mismatch. You know when something's off, but instead of trusting that, you start doing his emotional labor for him. So you feel the silence with excuses. He's probably just stressed. He's going through a lot.

He's not good with his phone. You create meaning whether where there's no meaning. He sends you something that says, hey, stranger, after disappearing for a week, and you read it 10 times like it's a confession of love or something like that. Nope. You convert breadcrumbs into effort.

One thoughtful text erases ten days of silent absence. You turn his avoidance into a spiritual lesson. Maybe I meant to learn patience. Maybe this is teaching me to surrender. And then maybe you interpret his inconsistency like it's a puzzle that you're supposed to solve.

You may be replaying conversations, trying to figure the magic response that would make him choose you. Maybe you lie in bed at midnight crafting a careful message so you don't scare him off. Yeah. Scare him off while he's out living his life, not thinking about you at all. So you can build this entire fantasy relationship out of one a one sentence text.

When you love a man's potential more than his behavior, then you become his emotional his unpaid emotional intern. You're doing the analysis, the empathy, the repair, the planning. He's just there benefiting from it, and that isn't love. It's self harm in one of your most oldest, most comfortable outfits. So calling it what it is doesn't punish you.

It frees you. I really want you to get that. This what we're talking about here is freedom because once you name it, you can stop doing his work and start doing your own. So every woman who breaks this pattern reaches the same turning point. It's the moment when she stops negotiating for with negotiating with a man's limitations.

You stop saying, maybe he's overwhelmed. You stop saying, maybe I shouldn't expect so much. You stop saying, maybe if I'm more patient, he'll come around. You stop saying, maybe this is just how men are, or maybe it's me. You've probably said those sentences in your head or out loud more times than you can count.

Maybe you've even typed and deleted texts trying to sound reasonable when your heart was breaking. Nope. You're done. A different voice rises, and this is the voice of your adult self. She says, I don't chase grown men.

She says, if you can't show up, step aside. She says, my standards aren't demands. They're self respect. And she says bare minimum effort doesn't impress me, literally. If you said these things to yourself, it's because you've you've heard the deeper truth of your value.

This isn't the version of you throwing a tantrum. This is the version of you waking up and being able to see what's actually true here so that you can make a different choice. The moment you start listening to this truth, it can be quiet internal, but it's powerful. It's when you start making choices from this truth. It happens when you're starting at your phone when you're staring at your phone and for the first time, you don't take the bait.

You don't respond to the half hearted check-in or the booty call. You don't send the long, thoughtful message to reopen the connection. You just simply put your phone down and you say, nope. I'm not doing this to myself again. And once you cross that line, what happens?

You never go back in the same way. You might wobble. You might visit an old pattern, but something in you has changed, and you can't unknow your worth. I I I think that one of the things that I've heard from people who attract unavailable men from these patterns, you know, they experience these men at like, available men as being boring. And I hear this a lot, actually.

Let me help you understand why. It's because healthy men can feel boring. They you know, why why healthy men feel boring is because they're not activating those old wounds. Unavailable men activate the worker, the fixer, the performer, the child who learned to earn love. But available men activate the receiver, the one who's seen, the one who's chosen, the one who matters.

And if you don't have a context for how to be on the receiving end of an available man, then it's probably gonna register as something untrustworthy or boring as he shows up when he shows up. So instead of seeing it for what it is when a man shows up who actually likes you, who actually texts you back, who plans ahead, who wants to see you regularly, you know, your system flatlines. You think, I don't feel the same spark. I'm just not attracted, or there's no chemistry. But let's name what's actually going on here.

When a man is consistent, what does he do? He texts when he says he will. And if he's late or he misses it, he apologizes. He follows through on his plans. And if he doesn't, he doesn't just disappear.

If he has to change his plans, he talks to you about it. He apologizes. He makes an effort. He you know, it truly was something that he couldn't follow through on, but he repairs that with you. He doesn't just disappear and reappear, and your nervous system doesn't spike.

There's no panic. There's no high. There's no crash. Right? So your body's been trained to equate chaos with love.

And this is something where you can end up saying, well, this is boring. Something must be wrong here. When he asks, when can I see you again? Instead of being flooded with anxiety, you might feel awkward, exposed, unsure what to do next. Healthy attention feels confronting because it doesn't give you a job.

You're not fixing him. You're not chasing him. You're not waiting to see if he chooses you. Being chosen without performing can feel foreign, exposed, and vulnerable. And that discomfort isn't actually boredom.

It's healing. It's the beginning of a new identity, one that knows you deserve to receive. And it might feel like wanting to pull back when he's kind or wanting to make a joke when he gets serious. Dismiss that. Dismiss his seriousness.

You know, or maybe wanting to run or wonder what's wrong with him when he says, hey. I'm really interested in you. It doesn't mean he's wrong for you. It means your system is adjusting to safety, those feelings inside of you. So let's get practical and look at how to break the pattern.

And here here are three actions you can take to create a shift with the least amount of overwhelm. These are not the only things you'll ever do, but they're powerful places to start. And you can kind of think of them as power as as pattern interrupters. And the first one, the first action is to stop chasing mixed signals. Confusion is actually not chemistry.

It's incompatibility. If you're constantly asking your friends, what do you think this means? Well, you already have your answer. So the new action to take, the minute you feel confused, is to pause, is to stop. Don't reach out.

Don't fix. Don't decode anything. You don't send, hey. Just checking in. You don't reply instantly to the vague, hey, stranger, when he's been gone for days, and you don't write a paragraph to make your needs sound less needy.

You say to yourself, if I have to interpret this, he's not my person. The second action, some of these kinda they overlap a little bit. When he pulls away, do nothing. You know? So your old pattern would be to fill the gap, to repair, to soothe, to chase.

Don't. The new action is to give it forty eight hours. No initiating, no rescuing, no, hey. Are you okay? No texting to say, hey.

Did I do something wrong? Let his behavior speak. If he cares and isn't and is capable, he'll move towards you. And if he doesn't, he'll stay gone. Perfect.

Either way, you get clarity without sacrificing your self respect. And then the third action is to really this is this can be really hard in the beginning is to let healthy attention feel uncomfortable. Healthy connection is gonna feel awkward at first, and it doesn't mean it's wrong. So the new action, when a when a healthy man shows up, when a consistent man shows up, when an available man shows up, stay. Let the compliment land to say thank you instead of deflecting or arguing.

When you feel bored with his consistency, let it land. When he asks you out again, don't ever think don't overthink it. Remind yourself that the bored feeling is because of your early programming and just plan the next date. Give it time. Let the safety land.

When you notice your nervous system wanting to bolt, take a breath and let yourself relax one degree or 50 degrees. You don't have to force attraction, but you are building learning to build it from safety and not chaos. So let's see. I've got, a practical tool for you because these three actions are really easier when you can spot availability in real time. And so I've created something to help on the spot to really to to be able to spot availability in real time, and it's called love signals.

It's a guide, a little pocket guide you can keep with you. It's five minutes to recognize a relationship ready partner, and you can download it for free at my website at leilareyes.com. That's leilareyes.com. And this is your guide for choosing differently in the moment, right in the moment when your old patterns want to kind of take precedence. And trust me, they will.

When you can look at this or take a take a little break when you get before you respond, before you act, and just take a look at it. Oh, this is what's happening here. This is a green light. This is yes. This is a red light.

This is no. And it will help you see clearly who is actually available and who is just performing almost availability so you don't keep giving your heart to the wrong man. And so now let's take a minute and look at what healthy connection feels like besides what I've already mentioned. It's not chaos. It's presence.

It feels like steadiness. Someone doing what they say that they'll do when they say that they'll do it. He says, I'll call you tonight, and he does. Not at midnight, not three days later with a random excuse. Right?

Some random excuse. It it feels more like reciprocity where you're both giving and you're both investing and you're both showing up. You're not the one always initiating. He texts first sometimes. Sometimes you do.

He plans dates. You're not carrying the entire connection on your back. You ask each other out, for example. It feels like respect because your boundaries are honored and they're not being negotiated. He's not trying to say, oh, yeah.

You say, here's a boundary. No. I'm I'm I don't want you to spend the night. Like, I just got to know you. No.

And he doesn't try and negotiate that. He just honors your boundary. Of course not. You say things like, I can't do last minute tonight, and he says, got it. What night works for you?

How would that be different? Right? And then he shows up when you make the plans. There's no guilt. There's no sulking.

There's no punishment. Just shows up. So it feels like clarity. It's a it's like, wow. I'm clear.

I know exactly where I stand without guessing. It's clear. Now, of course, in the beginning, that might feel awkward because he's showing up and still I mean, I've had experiences in the beginning when I was making these changes. Like, I couldn't trust that. I yeah.

He's being very consistent, but what does that mean? Right? So it can feel kind of bumpy. Don't worry about that. It's okay.

It's okay. You just breathe. You know, you're not the other thing is you're not dissecting his messages with your friends, trying to figure out what's really going on. If he's unsure or he's working something out, he tells you plainly and clearly. He gives you that information.

So there's still consistency. There's still clarity. So it really feels like consistency. Their energy doesn't flip depending on convenience. And the next thing is you don't feel like a secret.

You don't feel like a backup plan. You don't go from you're amazing one day to radio silence the next day or the next week. It feels like safety. Your body will actually relax in their presence. And then you're not bracing.

You're not waiting for the other shoe to drop. You might feel vulnerable, but you don't feel like you're in danger. And this kind of builds over time. Right? Like desire when you're connecting with a healthy person and all of the attraction and chaos and all of that that in the past would attract you.

No. Desire actually builds over time, not fireworks that explode and disappear. And so the attraction grows as trust and connection grow. It's very different way into relationship. It doesn't burn hot and fast and then evaporate.

Healthy love feels like someone showing up with their whole self because they want you, not just access to you. So you deserve a relationship where you don't have to shrink, chase, contort, or earn basic care. You deserve to be chosen without performing. You deserve to be loved without abandoning yourself. And that's what we're doing here.

We're not we're not doing fantasy. We're not doing crumbs. We're not doing almost. We're doing real connection, real healthy connection. And so, let's see.

What else do I wanna say before we end for today? Yeah. If you download the love signals pocket guide to help you break patterns in real time, you can download that at leilareyes.com. And, you know, five minutes to recognize a relationship ready partner. It can make a different you know, so that you can make a different choice in vivo right in that moment when it actually matters.

And so remember, your past shaped you and shaped the choices that you've been making, but it does not get to define your future. Not anymore. You're allowed to outgrow the version of you who settled. You're allowed to stop chasing almost love. You're allowed to require real partnership.

So remember this. And I'm Leila Reyes. Thank you for listening. I'm holding out for you to choose your freedom and refuse to settle for anything less than a love that comes toward you. In this if this episode resonates with you, please share it.

And remember, your past doesn't decide your future. You do. Thank you for joining me on this episode of From Trauma to True Love. I honor your courage for being here, taking steps towards the love and connection that you truly desire. I've been there too, stuck in painful patterns, longing for love but unsure how to create it in a way that felt safe, real, and lasting.

You don't have to figure it all out on your own. If you're ready to explore what's been holding you back and discover what's truly possible for your relationships, I would love to support you. Visit Leila Reyes, l e I l a r e y e s, Leila Reyes, and schedule a call today. We'll take the first step together toward the deep, meaningful love that you were born to have. I can't wait to connect with you.

Until next time, take good care of yourself and know that real, lasting love is within your reach.