Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Why You Keep Attracting Emotionally Unavailable Partners

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

Have you ever wondered why you keep ending up in the same kind of painful relationship almost like you’re tuned to a certain frequency that keeps pulling you toward emotionally unavailable partners? In this episode of Language of Love Session, I answer a heartfelt question from Sarah, a listener who wrote in asking: “Why do I keep attracting emotionally unavailable people, and how can I heal whatever inside me is drawing me to these relationships?”  We explore how the energy you carry, your vibration, and your earliest experiences all play a role in who you’re drawn to and why. I also share how healing practices like somatic experiencing and Internal Family Systems therapy can help shift your frequency so you attract partners who are truly capable of love and connection. We explore: Why emotionally unavailable partners feel so familiar (and why it’s not just “bad luck”) How childhood patterns set the vibration for the partners we’re drawn to later in life Ways somatic therapy helps release unconscious patterns stored in the body How Internal Family Systems therapy rewires your inner world for healthier love Why “butterflies” aren’t always passion, they may be your nervous system picking up on an old, unhealthy frequency This is all about learning how to change your vibration so you stop repeating painful cycles and open yourself up to safe, supportive love. For resources on somatic experiencing,  visit the Hakomi Institute or traumatherapy.org  for more on this powerful mindfulness-centered approach to healing. Have a question you’d like me to answer on the show? Email me at [e-mail], leave a voice message or question at SpeakPipe.com/LanguageofLove  or connect with me on social media @DrLauraBerman. For more support, visit my website for expert resources and don’t forget to check out my newest book, Sex Magic. And if you’re navigating betrayal or struggling to rebuild trust, share your story with me at [e-mail] for a chance to be featured in a future episode. Your journey could be exactly what someone else needs to hear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love, and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman, and for the last 30 years, I've been helping people learn to love and be loved better. Welcome to the Language of Love Sessions. This is where I get to work with you one-on-one, on air. You, my listeners, my goal in these sessions is to empower you to enjoy better relationships, both with others and with yourself, and to help you embrace how precious and sacred your body, your love life, and your sexuality really is. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. Welcome to the Language of Love Sessions, where I get to tackle your questions. I love hearing

from you either live on the show or so many of you send me email questions or reach out to me on social media in my DMs. So if you ever want to reach out to me, you can go to social media, Dr. Laura Berman, or you can email me at languageoflovepod at gmail.com. Here is an email from Sarah. Really common question. Dr. Berman, I keep attracting emotionally unavailable people

and I'm starting to realize that there might be something within me that's drawn to that dynamic. How can I uncover and heal whatever is attracting me to these relationships? Sarah, I love this question so much. And I love you for asking it because what it says to me is that you are really starting to look at yourself and think about how you might be playing a role in this. For so many of us, when we repeatedly get into toxic relationships or infidelity or emotionally unavailable relationships or

addicts or whatever it is. We just think I have the worst luck in love and there are only jerks in the world. That's not the case. Each one of us, not just you, Sarah, every single one of us is a match. We're going to call in a match for where we are emotionally. And so what that means is if you are repeatedly calling in emotionally unavailable partners, that means that something within you is what I call a frequency match to that. Something in you is calling that in accidentally. Of course, you would never call that in consciously, but everything is about vibration. Everything is about frequency and our conscious and unconscious beliefs about ourselves and what's possible in love does play a huge role in who we attract in. So my guess is, Sarah,

that for you, you come from a history where there was emotional unavailability. So that may mean that you were literally or figuratively abandoned in your childhood. Maybe one parent, maybe there was divorce. Maybe one parent left the home. Maybe one parent withdrew from the relationship. Maybe one parent had addiction or a mental health issue that caused them to more or less withdraw from relationship with you, or at least being able to show up for you in the way you needed and deserved, right? Sometimes we have abandonment later in life, but usually when we have these more subtle patterns that we don't really understand where they're coming from, it was something that happened earlier in life, right? Or you could have experienced emotional abandonment by having

a hypercritical parent or a parent who withdrew love when you displeased them, right? So there are all these different versions of emotional and literal abandonment that we experience in large and small ways in our childhoods that kind of set unconsciously our expectations for love. So that's the first thing that I want you to explore in your own childhood and what you saw modeled for you between your parents growing up and maybe even as or more importantly, your relationship with each of your parents, right? Was their literal or emotional abandonment big or small, obvious or more subtle? Hey, it's Dr. Laura Berman. I've been a sex, love and relationship therapist for over 30 years. And the main question I always get asked is how the heck do we spice it up in a long-term

monogamous relationship? Well, if you want to take your love life, your sex life to the next level, whether you're in a relationship or not, check out my free course on quantum sex. It's going to teach you how to take your sexual response to the next level, capable of full body orgasms, how to use sex magic to manifest your dreams, and how to connect on an even deeper level sexually with your partner. Just go to drlauraberman.com and you'll find it right there on the homepage, the quantum sex free course. Check it out and let me know what you think.

And if there was, and my guess is there was, if this is your pattern of the people you're attracting in, then that's where you want to start exploring. So you want to explore somatic experiencing therapy would be my preference. And you can find that at traumahealing.org is a great resource to start with. Our Hakomi Institute is another really good one. We'll put those in the show notes. But you want to explore that because I like somatic experiencing always

for trauma healing. But I really like it for this kind of thing where it's a little more subconscious and a little more about what you're unconsciously attracting in. Because as you get underneath the thinking brain, which is where you're consciously saying, I don't know why I'm attracting all these people. And beneath that to the nervous system and to the body and to the feelings, right? So for instance, what a somatic experiencing therapist would do would take you back to your last relationship where there was this moment of emotional unavailability, right? Where that partner withdrew from you or disappeared or ghosted you or whatever that was. And then go into the body and all the sensations you felt there and then guide you through this process of saying, OK, what's the earliest memory you have of feeling those feelings in your body?

And your mind will immediately go back to when you were four years old and your mother didn't speak to you for an entire day because you spilled paint on the floor or something. You know, I'm just making that up. But you'll go back and immediately discover those earlier memories that don't really even seem like such a big deal. But when you were little were a huge deal and your nervous system and your body and even your unconscious mind integrated those things as being something to expect from love. And there's probably many things like that, but you can just use kind of a marquee memory, we call them, to get to those feelings and sensations and then clear them, process them, move through them, kind of connect to those younger parts of yourselves, do that healing. And then as you do that work, you become less and less of a frequency match for people who are emotionally unavailable and you feel so much more confident, you feel so much more grounded, you feel so much more able to self-regulate. The other possibility is for you to explore

something called internal family systems. So if you just Google that or look that up, we can put some links in the show notes as well. Internal family systems therapy is another amazing resource for someone who is struggling in love because when we're struggling in love relationship, it always, almost always, I would say 95% of the time goes back to what we experienced in childhood with our key caretakers. It's all related. So I would encourage you to explore that. Do that work. Not only will your life get better, but it will change who you are retracting in. And I would even take a pause on dating while you did this. If you are going to continue dating, what I want you to, and even when you go back to dating, if you pause, I want you to

make it a point not to go for the people who are immediately light you up, right? Because that's going to be connected to your old patterns. And anytime you feel quote unquote butterflies, that is the nervous system's warning signal. That is not mean, that's like a sign of a trauma bond. that's not a sign of love is on the horizon. That is trauma is on the horizon. We mistake that. We think that's excitement and passion and romance when we feel butterflies. That's actually anxiety. When you meet the person who's really going to show up for you and who your nervous system and unconscious mind recognizes as that, what you will feel is the excitement of being about to move into your dream home. That's what it feels like. So it's exciting, but it's like this,

this beautiful, calm, anticipatory, peaceful excitement, if that makes sense. That's the feeling you're looking for. And so you may not feel all a Twitter on your first date with someone who's not going to abandon you. But if you give them a chance, chances are you will realize that they actually are an amazing love match. So hopefully that gives you some guidance. You reach out to me if you have further questions and any of my peeps here, if you have any questions you want to ask or anything you want me to tackle on the show, just go to languageoflovepod at gmail.com. I wrote me a prescription, but there is no cure for a crush.