Who Are You When Someone Needs You Most

The Uncomfortable Mirror

Welcome back to the According to West Podcast. Grab some coffee, settle in, because today we are having one of those necessary, slightly uncomfortable conversations. I want you to think about the people in your life who you consistently let down, the texts you ignore, the commitments you flake on, the emotional distance you keep from your partner. When you justify that absence to yourself, what reason do you give? I'm willing to bet it sounds something like I'm just not built this way because, you know, my past and now when I say absence, I don't mean physically not showing up to a dinner party. I mean emotional absence.

What Emotional Absence Looks Like

Emotional absence, often referred to as emotional unavailability, occurs when a person is physically present but disconnected from the emotional dynamics of a relationship. It is the inability or unwillingness to connect on a deeper level. You're also unwilling to share vulnerabilities or respond empathetically to another person's feelings. When someone is emotionally absent, they may fulfill the practical or surface level requirements of a relationship, but they leave their partner, child, or friend feeling unseen, unheard, and emotionally isolated. When you avoid vulnerability, you tend to deflect conversations that require you to share your own fears, insecurities, or deep desires. Having lack of empathy, you struggle to put yourself in other people's shoes, often reacting to your distress with confusion, frustration, or indifference. You may also find yourself doing a lot of minimizing, you know, brushing brushing off feelings with phrases like you're overreacting, it's not a big deal, or just let it go. Or you do the the intellectual pivot. You know, when you're when you're faced with heavy emotions, you shift the conversation to facts, logical, or purely practical solutions rather than holding space for that feeling itself. The things, the the the aspects that I just named or just described are are core signs of uh emotional absence. If if you recognize them in yourself or in others, then hey, uh call the spade a spade, I guess. But let's take it a step further. Let's what does that what does emotional absence look like in real life?

Real Life Examples In Love And Friends

Well, I'll give you an example. Let's say for in a remote a romantic relationship, imagine um imagine a scenario where one partner comes home devastated after being unfairly criticized by their boss. You see that they're upset and uh and that they're looking for you for they're looking to you for comfort. Now, the emotionally absent response that a person will get or mo will most likely get would be well why didn't you just explain the project timeline to them? Or you should write an email documenting everything tomorrow so it doesn't happen again, or you know, crying about it isn't going to fix the solution. Like, those are good answers, those are logical answers, they're practically sound, but it completely ignores the emotional reality of the moment, you know. If that person's upset and it's they can leave the person feeling like that you're just there to solve the problem when they're looking to you for support. The the emotionally absent partner bypassed empathy and went straight to fixing the mechanics of the situation, leaving the emotional need entirely unmet. Another example of uh what this looks like in your day-to-day is uh in your friendships with people. Like you might have a friend who is incredibly fun, always up for a party, and great at keeping the conversation light and entertaining. However, the the moment that the dynamic requires emotionally heavy lifting, you know, sometimes uh not sometimes that emotionally absent person, they they vanish. For an example, let's say that that friend that's incredibly fun, um, they experience a significant loss like the death of a family member or a severe health diagnosis. The the person that's emotionally unavailable, they might send a single text saying, so sorry, let me know if you need anything, but then stops reaching out. If you try to, if that friend would try to talk to their talk about their grief over coffee or something like that, the the emotionally absent person will tense up, uh they check, you know, they'll be all in the phone, and they try to quickly change the subject back to a funny story from work or something like that. They they they want to check out. And then you leave the other person feeling like their friendship is conditional, like it only exists in the realm of comfort and entertainment, offering no safe harbor during actual life storms. And of course, that can suck. It sounds sucky.

Past Pain And The Victim Loop

As we unpack this today, you'll start to see that your past is absolutely an explanation for your defense mechanisms, but it's not a justification for being absent in your current life. When you use your history as an excuse to stop practicing virtue today, you are engaging in deep self-deceit. And today, we figure out how to stop living in the rear view mirror. Let's look under the hood at our internal dialogue. When we pull away from people, our brain creates an unproductive loop to justify it. We start complaining internally. The anatomy of the complaining mind refers to the cognitive and philosophical structure of how a person processes adversity, inconvenience, or unmet expectations. It is the mechanism by which the human brain takes an objective neutral event and wraps it in a subjective narrative of unfairness, resistance, or self-pity. A classic example of this is the. It assumes that the world owes the individual a clear path and views the delay not as a neutral logistical reality, but as a personal attack on their schedule. The energy spent resisting the unchangeable situation fuels self-pity rather than resilience. This is the exact moment a painful past transforms into a permanent victim mentality. A victim mentality requires zero self-mastery. It takes all the responsibility of your current action and blames them on a ghost from ten years ago. It says, hey, I don't have to be dependable, I don't have to be present because I am hurt. But being hurt does not exempt you from being a decent, reliable human being. Thousands of years ago, stoic thinkers like Marcus Aurelius wrote extensively about this. They believe that the past is entirely outside of our control. It is dead. The only thing you actually possess is the present moment. When you let an old womb dictate your behavior today, you are letting a ghost drive your car. True self-mastery is the ability to look at your past, acknowledge it, and then deliberately choose your actions in the present. We tend to think of healing as reaching a state where nothing hurts anymore. That's a myth. That's a lie. A lie and a myth. Real healing, real strength, is just the virtue of perseverance. Perseverance. It's waking up feeling the weight of your history and deciding to show up for your partner anyway. It's feeling the urge to run away and choosing to stand your ground. Resilience isn't a lack of pain. It's commitment to the to character despite the pain. When you constantly pull the past trauma card to excuse your flakiness, you are you're taking the people in your present for granted. You're asking them to pay the debt for a crime they didn't commit. You're punishing your current partner or your current friends for the actions of people who aren't even in your life anymore.

Boundaries Vs Chronic Avoidance

This is where we have to practice prudence. And I've talked about prudence before. But yes, prudence. You need boundaries. If you are exhausted, take a break. But do not confuse a healthy boundary with a with chronic avoidance. A healthy boundary protects a relationship. Chronic absence starves it. Your friends and family's time is valuable. When you don't show up for them because you're caught in a loop about your past, you are fundamentally disrespecting their present. So, how do we break the cycle?

Humility, Reps, And Showing Up

Well, it starts with massive humility. You have to admit that your past is not a get out of jail free card. You have to look in the mirror and say, I have been letting my history make me lazy and undependable. Once you admit that, you can start doing the reps. Start making start making small steps. Make a promise to someone today, and no matter what your internal dialogue tells you, you keep it.

Learning To Comfort Before Logic

Now, me personally, I had a very difficult time uh realizing uh this about myself, and wish I had a podcast like this to kind of point me in the right direction as far as uh my emotions and things of that nature. Um hence why I felt like making this episode today. Um I have definitely suffered from the uh the logic only person and inadvertently being the good vibes only person. Um especially in a romantic sense. Um like it's real easy to as a I would say for me, it was real easy for me to be logic only in my romantic endeavors prior and present. Because we started off as we started off as friends. Umly knew, you know, you go to your friends with problems, especially for me. Like I go to my friends with problems when they come to me, you know, we talk it out. Um and maybe in a sense that's a guy thing. Like, we're not looking for, for the most part, we're not looking for a deep uh emotional uh back and forth. We're not looking for support that way. Look like, yo, here's a problem. I don't, you know, what you think? And when I started my relationships, when I started my relationships, I try to make sure I'm a friend first. So yeah, I and when it became romantic, I didn't shut that part off. I didn't, I didn't not that I didn't shut that part off, that part needs to stay on, but I could not decipher between the two. Like, hey, they are definitely coming to you for a there, hug her, pat her on the butt. It's all gonna be okay. Fuck that motherfucker. You know what I mean? Like that type of thing. And that's all they need. They need that partner, they just need you to acknowledge that they are sad they're coming to you because you're a safe space. Did not understand it on that level. Don't know why I didn't understand it on that level. But after bumping my head and fights, and you don't always have to be that way, I started to understand that, yo. Give that. It's the easiest thing to do. You want to comfort her anyway. Comfort her. And then maybe a day or two. Hit her with some logic. Don't hit her with the don't hit them with the logic right away. I've learned that. I'm uh I I have experience in that. Comfort, figure out when the logic should be placed in there. And that that's uh how you place the logic is gonna vary from person to person. I can't tell you when, but for me, what has worked out is you know, once everything is good and they're calm, and you know, we're talking about other things, gently, slightly, throw some logic in there, and never in a I told you so tone. And when it came to me being emotionally available with my with my friends, you know, I did have someone that uh experienced a death or a hard time, and I was that person that will hit you with the hey, let me know if you need anything and not show up. But in my head, honestly, in my head, and this might have something to do with my upbringing as well. I'm like, maybe they just require some alone time to figure that out. Because that's what I guess the I was operating off of how I would want to be treated. Like, yo, just give me some time to figure it out. But I was generalizing, and none of my friends are that way. I'm that way, but none of my friends are that way. And what I should have been doing was even if they don't respond, still checking up, making sure that they're okay, making letting them know they have someone in their corner. And I was not doing a good job at that. And it's not because I I cringed at the the fact that they were dealing with something while trying to change the subject, and that was the that was the weird part because when they talked about it, I was all ears. But I was also acting like that logical person, giving logical answers and not necessarily sharing with them and being vulnerable with them, but I was operating off the let me be a sounding board, let me be the uh the ear, and I hit you with some logic to try to make you feel better. And it wasn't up until like one of my friends was like, yo, you you're hurting my feelings. Like they had to tell me that, and I felt shitty. And I fucking changed because that was the last person I wanted to feel to feel shitty. Um because I genuinely uh I genuinely care about them. They they I care about all my friends. I genuinely care about all my friends. So it was it was, I'm not gonna say it was nothing for me to make that change. It was nothing for me to want to make that change, but I had to I had to understand how to make that change. And what I the conclusion I came to was don't be preoccupied when you're talking. Remember these words, like trigger words, not trigger words, but just like actionable words. If they're dealing with something, you check up on them, put that in the front of your brain. Don't be emotionally unavailable. Because uh I guess the way I took it or the way I'm saying it is uh, you know, not you know, but I tend I used to think that emotions was just like just how could I put it? I don't know how to put this gushing and and raw and just un untamed and stuff like that, but you can show emotions, uh not systematically, but in a way that you can in a in a in a way that that I don't want to say systematically, I don't know how to say this, but there are ways you can show emotions without it being the one way that you you see on TV where it's uh it's just raw and 100% of the time. Showing emotion is just literally uh showing your emotions for that person if you're always checking on them and let's just say and that for the death of a family member, if you're always checking on them and things like that. Yeah, you're showing that you're emotionally care about them, you're doing things, you might show up with uh with pizza in hand, you know what I mean? Like, hey, you want to talk? Like you're emotionally invested, and then share some things about you because they are at their bone, they're most vulnerable when they are showing their emotions, and that's how you build that bond. I've learned that. I definitely learned that when it's all said and done, you can't change what happened to you, but you have absolute total authority over who you are going to be at dinner tonight.

Choose Who You Are Tonight

So stop letting the worst chapters of your life write the ending. Show up, be dependable, be present. I want to thank you guys for listening and keep practicing, tell yourselves the truth, and I catch you on the next episode.