The Hilary Silver Podcast - Why Self-aware Women Still Choose Emotionally Unavailable Men

Starting point is 00:00:00 You've talked about him in therapy. You've journaled about him. You've told your friends you're done. And then he texts. And you feel it. That pull. That urge you just can't resist. And before you even realize what's happening, you're right back in it again.

Starting point is 00:00:15 And you hate yourself just a little bit for it. Then comes the part nobody will admit out loud. You're not just hurting. You're embarrassed because you knew. You knew the whole time. So why does a grounded, accomplished woman find herself checking her phone, replaying conversations, and feeling like a middle schooler who's waiting to be asked to the dance to the point where she doesn't even recognize herself.

Starting point is 00:00:39 That is what we are talking about today. And stick with me here because I'm taking this to the root issue, the real reason self-aware women keep choosing emotionally unavailable men and non-committal men. And I promise you it's not what you think. Hi, it's Hillary. Welcome to the Ready for Love podcast. Before we get started, please make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode and also subscribe to the Ready for Love YouTube channel so you can share your thoughts and your comments with me. So you've read the books, you've done the therapy, you know your attachment style, you've listened to the podcast, you've learned all about the nervous system response

Starting point is 00:01:17 triggering your behavior. And yet you keep ending up here with a man who can't quite show up, who pulls away just when things get real, who makes you feel like you're always stretching for something that just keeps moving out of reach. And you already know what everyone's going to say because you've heard it all before. And your nervous system registers the lack and the chase as excitement and your brain is wired to create what's familiar. All of this makes perfect sense intellectually. We all have a lot more information than we've ever had because, well, TikTok and AI. And this is all true what I'm saying. But here's the problem. You already know all of this. You've known it for years, but knowing it hasn't stopped it. After 25 years of working with women who are smart,

Starting point is 00:02:04 successful, self-aware, and completely baffled by their own choices in love, knowing that a man was wrong for them and yet choosing him anyway, over and over again, or going back to him again and again, I have identified exactly why this keeps happening. So let's go through it layer by layer till we get to the root cause and the deep core issue, the truth that actually has the power to change it once and for all. So the first layer, the outermost layer, is this, an uncomfortable truth. You have spent years, maybe decades, acquiring awareness, self-awareness, information, and understanding. And doing all of that felt like doing something. It felt like progress. It felt like forward motion and so you kept going to therapy and going to the retreats and doing the work so you

Starting point is 00:02:57 think more insight more understanding more frameworks more language but then you go out in the wild and nothing is actually different that's because there is a profound difference between acquiring knowledge about yourself and actually transforming between understanding a pattern and dissolving it between being able to articulate exactly why you do what you do and actually stopping that and doing something new and different. I call this intellectual bypassing and it really is the most sophisticated way to stay stuck that I have ever seen because it looks exactly like doing the work. It sounds like doing the work. It uses all the language of doing the work. Some of my clients have reported going to therapy for 20 years, 30 years, often with the same therapist,

Starting point is 00:03:47 all that time, being committed to working on themselves. But there is a profound difference between insight and transformation. You can narrate your wounds in extraordinary detail and still be bleeding from them. And you can trace the patterns all the way back to childhood, explain every dynamic, identify every trigger, and name every trauma, and still feel that pull when he texts you. You can spend years in a therapist's office developing and exquisitely detailed map of your psychology and still be completely lost in the territory because the map is not the territory. Understanding the terrain is not the same as moving through it. More insight on top of

Starting point is 00:04:31 more insight while the root stays completely untouched. And then thinking you have the answers means thinking that you are doing better or being better, but you're really not. Because here you are out there dating with your binoculars on and your microscope out. looking for the red flags, dissecting his issues, or diagnosing his attachment style, and explaining your patterns with him. But that is not doing it differently. That is knowing better, but not doing better. It's a seriously dangerous blind spot. The reality is this, doing time in a therapist office, or listening to a podcast, or writing in a journal, or reading yet another self-help book, is not the same as actually addressing the root cause and core issues

Starting point is 00:05:17 that are running the show underneath it all. And listen, I know, I know you've been trying. This is not a failure of effort. Please hear me on that. I know you've been trying. It's a failure of approach. Because the work that actually moves the needle in love is not more information. It's not more insight. It's not more self-awareness. It is identity-level transformation. And that is a completely different thing. And most women never get there despite years of seeking help and solutions. The next layer to this issue of why self-aware women continue to choose emotionally unavailable men and non-committal men lives not in your mind but in your body. There's a book called The Body Keeps the Score.

Starting point is 00:06:00 Maybe you've heard of it. It's a classic written by Bessel van der Kolk in 2014, I think, and the title alone really says it all. Because whether you experienced significant trauma growing up or what I call micro traumas, the smaller, quieter wounds that still cut very deep. we all come out of childhood fucked up somehow because growing up is hard and parenting is hard. We all come out of childhood shaped by what we felt and what we learned. And those experiences don't just live in our memory that get stored a sensation as a knowing in the body.

Starting point is 00:06:33 If you were ignored, dismissed, abandoned, or neglected as a child, even if it was only perceived that way at the time, let alone abused. There is a longing that gets lodged in you, an ache, the feeling of chasing. something just beyond reach. Nothing you did was ever quite enough to earn the love, the praise, or the attention you needed. You were always the one picking up the pieces, fending for yourself, taking care of others, making yourself smaller, making yourself more, making yourself whatever you thought might finally work to get the love you needed. That experience becomes trapped in your body as a felt sense of what love is, of what it feels like to be loved. what it costs, what it requires, you learned not intellectually, but physically in your nervous system

Starting point is 00:07:23 and in your body, that love means chasing, that love means proving, that love means performing and earning, and never quite arriving, that you will never really ever be loved no matter what you do, and it becomes an unrequited longing. And so as an adult, when you encounter a man who is emotionally unavailable, non-committal, disconnected, unable to fully commit to you. He's hot and cold. He's just beyond your reach. Your body says, I know this. This is a comfortable old shoe. You know how to do. Don't worry about me. I'll be all right. You know how to do. It's always about everyone else and never about me. You know how to do. No matter what I do, it's never enough. You don't choose him because you're naive. You choose him because your body recognizes this.

Starting point is 00:08:12 as an opportunity with him to fulfill your destiny by replaying the dynamic each of you with your roles and parts to play. Think about it this way. A dog is not born to fight. By nature, dogs are loving and loyal and wired for connection and companionship. That is their DNA. But when you take that animal and put it in an environment where love and survival become the same thing, where they have to fight to eat, fight to be safe, fight to be still their tomorrow, they adapt. The fighting becomes the language of staying alive. And here's the heartbreaking part.

Starting point is 00:08:48 Even after you rescue that dog from a fighting situation, even after you remove them from that environment completely and give them safety and warmth and consistency and love, their nervous system just isn't reset. They flinch at kindness. We've all seen that. They don't trust the calm. They are waiting for the fight to start again

Starting point is 00:09:08 because fighting is the only context in which they have, ever known how to survive. They don't want to fight. They were never meant to fight, but their nervous system learned that love and struggle are the same thing. And now it can't tell the difference. It can't trust the safety. That is just like you right now. So have compassion for yourself. You were not born to chase unavailable men. You were born for connection, wired for it, made for it and actually destined for love, destined to receive love and care. But someone early, love came with struggle attached, and your nervous system learned to call that struggle home. The goal becomes to never stop until you achieve it. You will fight to the death for it

Starting point is 00:09:53 because that is what you were trained to do, chasing down love. So when he goes cold, your fighter instinct activates. You grab on tighter, chase harder. Or at the slightest shift in his energy, you flee. I'll leave before he can hurt me. You freeze, just accepting and tolerating the status quo and taking his crumbs. Or you fawn doing anything and everything to keep him even if it means losing your dignity and yourself in the process. That feeling and that charge, that thing that you've been calling chemistry is actually your nervous system recognizing a familiar threat. And it knows exactly how to respond because it has been responding to some version of this your whole life. And then when the secure man shows up, no threat, no activation, your nervous system

Starting point is 00:10:42 just settles, in the absence of drama and in the absence of struggle or difficulty, you interpret ease and calm as boring or as a lack of chemistry or a lack of feeling. But your body isn't telling you he's wrong. Your body is just telling you it's unfamiliar. And that is actually a good thing because we want the change. We want this to be different. That is how baked in this is for you, how deeply embedded it is into your very being and part of your identity and how you operate in the world. So how does this change? The same way it changes for the rescued dog, not through understanding, but through experience, real, embodied, felt experience that slowly teaches your body a new language and where calm actually feels good like home instead of absence, where consistency feels exciting,

Starting point is 00:11:36 like attraction instead of boredom and we're being chosen doesn't make you want to run for the hills. That retraining cannot happen in your head. It happens below the level of thought, which is exactly why knowing better has never been enough. But here's the thing that separates you from the dog, among many things. You have something the dog doesn't. You have a conscious mind. And that means you have the ability to make a decision to go to the deepest root of all and actually change what's there. And that is layer three, the root of it all, the deepest layer and the one that feeds everything above it. And this is where I'm going to say something that I really need you to just let it land. Don't just understand it in your head. Feel it. Somewhere below the level of conscious thought,

Starting point is 00:12:24 you do not fully believe you are worth showing up for. Not without earning it, working hard for it, proving it or performing for it. Not in your mind. In your mind, you know your worth. You can say it all day. I probably said it 100 times. I know my value. I have standards. Of course I deserve love. I'm a great catch. Anyone would be lucky to have me. But there is a big difference between intellectually knowing your worth and embodying a deeply felt sense of worthiness. Between knowing something in your head or even talking yourself into it and convincing yourself of it and actually believing it in your bones, in your very soul, in every cell of your being so that it just is. You don't have to think about it at all. It is just part of how you move in the

Starting point is 00:13:11 world. Imagine what that would be like to not think about it at all and just live, just be that version of you. For the women I work with, accomplished, self-aware, extraordinary women, the gap between what they tell themselves intellectually in their rational mind. What they actually still believe deep down is the source of it all and what fuels the pattern and the repetitious. and until you are willing and able to access the subconscious to change the beliefs about what is possible for you, what you think about yourself, and feel about yourself and what you believe is possible for you, nothing on the surface will ever change. If you don't think what I'm saying is true, then I ask you this. Does your track record with men reflect a woman who truly knows

Starting point is 00:13:57 her worth and her value? Or have you settled for less than you want in a partner or in a relationship? Have you taken crumbs, dated men, not at your level, or chosen unavailable men, or non-committal men over and over and over again? I know it stings, but this is the key to unlock the pattern. It is the deep subconscious belief of not being enough, deserving, or worthy of love. And the deep subconscious fear of rejection, being abandoned or being disappointed or hurt again. And the deep subconscious belief that love, Love is something you forever have to chase and pursue. And getting that from an external source will be the one last missing piece to fill the

Starting point is 00:14:41 hole in your soul. This is it, I promise you. He is not the problem. He is just the most recent place the wound has shown up. The belief started long before him in the earliest experiences of your life in the moments that taught you what you were worth and what love costs and what you had to do to deserve it. and it has been quietly running the show ever since, determining who you're drawn to and how you behave and the choices you make. So listen, you cannot receive what you don't believe you deserve. Not really,

Starting point is 00:15:12 not fully. You can want it and you can say you want it and you can go after it. But if a man who is steady, available, and genuinely choosing you activates nothing in you or worse makes you want to run, that is not a compatibility problem. That is your unworthiness, believe. leaf doing exactly what it was designed to do, protecting you from the very thing you want most. It feels like something is always going around. That's why Air Doctor is the only air purifier I use in our home. Air Doctor's powerful three-stage filtration captures extremely small particles, about 100 times smaller than what typical air purifiers can remove. It captures airborne contaminants you don't want to be breathing in, like dust, pollen, mold spores, pet dander, wildfire smoke,

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Starting point is 00:16:46 You can know every pattern, read every book, understand every dynamic and name every wound, and trace every belief back to its origin. And still go back to him again. And again, because knowing is not the same as believing you deserve more. Understanding the root is not the same as ripping it out. This right here is why the approach has to change. Not more insight, not more understanding, not more time in your head mapping what's wrong, not more diagnosing your attachment or his or any of that stuff. The work is reprogramming, actually rewriting the belief at the level where it lives.

Starting point is 00:17:24 not in your thoughts, but in your body, in your nervous system, in your felt sense of who you are and what you are worth. It is the difference between reading about swimming and actually getting in the water, between understanding the wound and actually healing it once and for all. And between knowing the map and finally, finally moving through the territory. When the belief changes, really changes in your bones, everything changes with it. The man you keep chasing. starts to feel like what he actually is, a familiar trap. And the man who is steady, who shows up, who chooses you clearly and consistently, he starts to feel like what he actually is, exactly what you were looking for all along.

Starting point is 00:18:09 And you don't talk yourself into him or out of it, and you don't white-knuckle your way into choosing differently. When your sense of self and sense of worth is real and felt and solid, the right man doesn't just seem acceptable, he feels right, because you finally do too. This is not a strategy. This is not a dating rule. It's an identity shift. And identity work is the gateway to everything you want, ladies. So commit to do the deeper work. Not just the self-awareness, but deep self-worth changing this relationship with yourself. And that changes everything. Thanks for listening. If this hit home, share it with some

Starting point is 00:18:52 who needs to hear it. And if you're ready to stop hiding, stop settling, and start building the kind of real, committed, healthy relationship you actually want, we can help. Check out what we do at ready for loveink.com. We have everything from self-study courses to high-touch elite-level coaching programs to support you at whatever level you need or want for yourself. I hope you'll let us help you. You don't have to figure this out on your own. See you next time. You know,

The Hilary Silver Podcast - Why Self-aware Women Still Choose Emotionally Unavailable Men

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