If I’m So Great, Why Am I Still Single?

The hidden ways attachment trauma keeps you emotionally unavailable

I offer attachment-focused psychotherapy and EMDR therapy online worldwide and in person in Lisbon. I work with people who feel stuck in relationship patterns, including attracting unavailable partners, emotional disconnection, and fear of intimacy.

Why Am I Still Single?

I was still single in my 40s and my friends couldn’t understand why. “You’re so amazing! You’re interested in so many things, have such cool hobbies.” “You’re so capable, from putting up IKEA wall-to-wall bookshelves by yourself to gardening like a pro.” They’d go on to say, “And you’re not full of yourself. You’re humble and can show vulnerability and laugh at yourself. Plus you’re kind and caring and have so much love to give.” “You’re a great catch. It completely stumps me as to why you weren’t snapped up years ago!”

And I used to agree. Not necessarily in a puffed-up, “I’m so amazing” kind of way. Don’t get me wrong, I have lots of insecure feelings as well. But in an objective way, when I looked at my qualities and traits that could make me a good partner, I felt like I had a lot going for me. There was even a resentful, insecure part of me that compared myself to others and thought, why them and not me?

Some of you feel the same. I know this because I see my former self reflected in you when we begin work together on your relationship patterns. You feel equally stumped and befuddled as to why the heck you are still single.

Why You Attract Unavailable Partners

And it’s a subtle one, a tricky one. I admit that in the past I felt stumped as to why certain clients who seemed to have a lot to offer were still single long after they had decided they wanted to meet a life partner. And stumped as to why they kept being attracted to ar**holes. People who aren’t available in various forms — whether long-distance, addicted to weed or porn or work, emotionally immature, or plain ambivalent. I could sympathise with the pattern, as I had attracted similar types.

Are You Emotionally Available in Relationships?

My therapist called me out on this pattern many years ago. “You keep attracting unavailable men. So how available are you?” This stung. I admit I didn’t like perceiving myself as unavailable. Although I got the concept. I knew intellectually that we attract people who reflect something of our inner dynamic — whether it be a sense of unworthiness, a fear of emotional intimacy, or something else. And to add nuance, it is often more than one dynamic at play, which is why our relationship patterns can feel complex and difficult to grasp, let alone shift.

I carried the knowledge with me that I was likely unavailable in some way. And I did the work to make myself more available by strengthening my boundaries, upping my standards, and working on my self-worth. But the single status, intertwined with patches of being with an unavailable partner, continued in some form.

What Changed: My Relationship to Money

Until, interestingly, I started doing work on my relationship to money.

I was determined to increase my income, and that determination led me to hone in on how available I was full stop — whether to a fulfilling relationship or to a fulfilling bank balance. And that’s when my understanding of my availability became embodied and not just conceptual.

Here is what I learned:

My unavailability was very well disguised.

Trauma Is a Shape-Shifter

Trauma is a shape shifter. I remember a Gestalt Therapy training I attended with Miriam Taylor. She first said this and I became intrigued. A shape shifter is a mythic figure who can alter form — bodily, animal, elemental, or identity-based — often associated with liminality, boundary-crossing, and survival.

The sense I made of it is that our response to trauma of any kind — but I am focusing on attachment trauma — is a creative and intelligent adaptation. This part will do whatever it takes so that we don’t have to suffer the same pain we originally experienced at the hands of our primary caregivers.

A mythic example is Old Proteus of the Sea in The Odyssey by Homer. He writes:

“Old Proteus of the sea… will change himself into every shape that moves on earth, and into water and blazing fire.”

Proteus transforms repeatedly to avoid being captured — lion, serpent, panther, water, tree — until he is held fast.

In the same way, my shape-shifter part will do whatever it can to protect me. Out of awareness, it will deceive me, deceive the other, and dress up as logic or anxiety in order to keep me safe.

Deceive? Moi? But I’m such an honest person — how dare you call me deceptive?

Okay, so let me give you some context for this assertion. “Out of awareness” is the key phrase. Gestalt Therapy asserts that our creative responses to our environment developed when we were children. Our thinking brain — our prefrontal cortex — was not fully online. This is why I didn’t consciously decide to create a brilliant and colourful way to protect myself from relationship pain. This is why I find it hard to connect with this part of myself until my therapist points it out. Even then, I didn’t fully connect until I wholeheartedly and urgently wanted to change my pattern.

How My Unavailability Was Disguised

Here are some concrete examples of how the shape-shifter disguised my distrust of connection:

1. Disconnecting from vulnerable feelings

“But I have no issues with feelings. I wear my heart on my sleeve.” I used to say that. Perhaps you do too.

Is that really true for all your feelings?

Do you secretly have a feelings hierarchy? Is showing sadness and empathy “good,” but feeling anger or envy “bad,” so you disconnect from those? Do you minimise certain feelings? For example, “I feel disappointed or sad with that person,” rather than admitting, I actually feel enraged by them?

In this way, I was not fully available.

2. Expressing feelings in private but not in relationship

Perhaps you are okay with expressing the full range of your feelings — but not to the other. I know that I tend to cry in private. Even in sessions with my therapist, I noticed that I wanted to hold back tears or intensity until I was alone. I had an old belief playing out: soothing myself on my own is safer than receiving soothing in a relationship.

In this way, I was not fully available.

3. Short bursts of “difficult” feelings and then quickly moving on… with an apology

The shape-shifter turns the tap on briefly when it comes to vulnerable emotion. I allowed myself a few moments of tears in front of my therapist — and then the tap got turned off and I moved quickly on. I see this reflected in those I work with too. Apologising profusely for crying or wiping tears away quickly is a similar example.

In this way, I was not fully available.

4. Intellectualising the issue rather than staying with it

The shape-shifter felt more comfortable when I was in my head. Quickly coming back to “thinking about” my relationship patterns felt safer than experiential therapy work. I see this in those I serve too. After a here-and-now relational piece of work, the conversation quickly moves to, “I don’t understand why I do this.”

As my therapist told me long ago, we can understand why all the livelong day, but that doesn’t change anything. Our creative adjustments developed before our thinking brain was fully developed, so we cannot think our way out of our patterns. If we could, my job would be redundant.

In this way, I was not fully available.

5. Subtly redirecting the focus onto the other

I remember a supervisor saying, with a pinch of humour, that being a therapist is for control freaks. It’s a way to hold some kind of power and control in an emotionally intimate setting. Of course, he was not suggesting abuse of power. A person comes to me for help; this sets up a power difference (even though, as a Gestalt therapist, I aim for therapy to feel dialogical and horizontal).

It made me uncomfortable to consider this. I didn’t like the idea of being a “control freak.” But the point is not to criticise controlling parts — it’s to understand how they came about and what function they serve. And then to have compassion.

It made sense to me that I equated feeling in control with being safe, given childhood experiences of volatility, violence and lack of safety.

And this doesn’t just apply to therapists. It applies to caring behaviour full stop.

It might upset you, the reader, to consider this, but I invite you to do so anyway:

How does being the one who cares, who listens, who asks the questions, allow you to stay in your comfort zone?

I’m not saying that those who care don’t actually care. I’m saying that, in my case, I truly cared about my clients and at the same time I was more comfortable in the therapist role than in the client role.

Control, Safety, and the Illusion of Connection

Through getting clear on my shape-shifter part, I also got clearer on how I was unavailable.

I became aware of a part of me that doesn’t trust it can rely on another person to be consistently available. Therefore, it is best to stay “in control.” Controlling the quality and distance of connection keeps it safe. The alternative feels like being dragged into a vortex of chaos and engulfment. My guts churn as I consider this — my body resonating with the fear. So of course I learned to control. That was a brilliant move.

Why Receiving Love (and Money) Feels Unsafe

There was also a part that believed she was undeserving. Not necessarily unworthy — similar, but not the same. I did believe I was worthy. But a part felt undeserving of receiving.

This became especially clear in my relationship to money. When I considered raising my prices, a voice would say: “Shame on you for asking for more money.” It warned me that people would be angry with me. That no one would want to work with me. Or that if they did, they would soon realise I’m not worth it and ask for their money back.

Is that a protector part? Protecting me from the abandonment, loss and shame of my past?

I believe so.

This part braces against receiving in order to avoid the feelings of pain, exposure and rejection I experienced as a child. If I don’t fully receive, I cannot fully lose. If I don’t expand, I cannot be cut down. It is scanning for relational danger.

In the same way that I was unavailable in love, I was unavailable in prosperity. Receiving — whether love, support, money or care — carried risk.

Questions to Ask Yourself

So dear reader, if any of this resonates, I invite you to ponder:

How much space do you allow for others to step in? In conversations… in pauses…

How do you respond to receiving?

How might you have learned not to trust that you could rely on consistent care?

How do you disconnect from yourself? Stay in your head? Focus on the other — including your kids?

Letting the Shape-Shifter Rest

Pondering these questions with compassion and curiosity can reassure our shape-shifter part that it no longer needs to keep changing form. Just like Proteus, who, when held steadily and without panic, eventually stops transforming and returns to himself. And this is the work I now do with the people who sit opposite me.

This article was first published in Elephant Journal, March 2026.