The most damaging misconception about emotionally unavailable men is that they are making a deliberate choice to withhold. Partners experience the unavailability as rejection and conclude that the man does not care enough to share. The reality in most cases is that the man cannot access the emotional content his partner is requesting. The shutdown is involuntary. It is a defense that activates automatically, often before the man has registered what he is feeling. Asking him to try harder produces frustration on both sides because the problem is not effort. It is access.
Dr. David Steinbok works with men in Boca Raton who are dealing with this involuntary emotional shutdown. As a male emotional unavailability therapist, his focus is on restoring the connection between internal experience and external expression, a connection that was disrupted earlier in the patient's life for reasons that made sense at the time.
