The Femme Cast

Why You’re Addicted to Emotionally Unavailable Love (And How to Break the Cycle for Good)

• Maria Rei

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What if I told you that the pattern you call “bad luck in love” is actually a trauma response in disguise?

In this soul-baring episode of The Femme Cast, I take you into the raw, unfiltered moment that shattered my illusions about love — the night I found myself on the floor, begging someone to love me. Not because he was worth it. But because, deep down, I still believed I wasn’t.

What followed was a soul-awakening — a brutal and beautiful unraveling of every belief I had about love, worth, and who I thought I needed to be to be chosen.

Inside this episode, we explore:

  • Why you keep chasing emotionally unavailable people — and the surprising dopamine addiction that makes it feel like love
  • How this pattern is a sophisticated trauma response designed to protect you from the deeper pain of feeling unworthy
  • How your parents (even the ones who “did their best”) shaped your beliefs about what love looks and feels like
  • The childhood wounds that make unavailable love feel safe — and the real reason you can’t stop going back
  • How to break the cycle by facing the parts of yourself you’ve been running from (and finally reclaim your power)

This isn’t just about romantic relationships. It’s about every place in your life where you’ve outsourced your worth, silenced your truth, and begged to be chosen — instead of choosing yourself.

Because the moment you stop chasing love that only sees half of you… is the moment you become magnetic to love that stays.

This episode is your mirror. Your permission slip. Your turning point.

If you’ve ever felt addicted to the pain of almost-love, this one will crack you wide open — in the best possible way.

Tap play. Let’s go there.

PS: Stop begging to be chosen. Choose yourself instead.

You’re not here to beg, chase, or perform for the bare minimum.

You’re here to reclaim your power and become magnetic to real, soul-aligned love, success, and abundance.

Reclaim the version of you that never had to beg to be chosen.

Book your 90-minute Sacred Reclamation Intensive.

But fair warning—authentic connections, aligned opportunities, and breakthroughs in love, money, and purpose are inevitable.

Maria Rei:

Hey guys, what is up? Welcome back to the show, so excited and grateful to have you here. Last week we talked about that moment where, you know, I was literally begging on the living room floor for my partner to just, you know, to just love me, to act like he loved me, to show that he loved me, which is, you know, the only thing in the world that I wanted, and I was, you know, fighting tooth and nail for that. And you know, like I mentioned in last week's episode, you know, even though he was saying that he loved me, he wasn't acting like it and in fact he was acting in very hurtful ways, in ways that really hurt me and diminished me and made me feel unloved and unseen in every way possible and like I didn't really matter. To be quite honest. And you know, looking back, you know, and how cringy that moment was and how I couldn't believe that I actually got to a point in my life where, you know, I was literally on the floor begging for somebody to love me, like how the fuck did I actually get here? Like how did that happen? You know, as I look back on that, you know, and what I if I only I knew you know what do they say about? Hindsight is 2020. If I only knew then what I know now. I know now what was going on in that moment and why I was so desperate, like a fool, for this man to love me, and with all of them actually not just him, it was with all of them. And the whole reason that I had been so desperate for love and to have someone love me and to beg someone to love me and to choose me is because there was a part of me that really didn't believe that I was worthy of love, that I deserved love, that anybody would ever really come around and love me the way that I wanted them to love me.

Maria Rei:

You know, like I said, you know, when I was younger, I always remember my dad. You know who was, you know who again, I can't say this enough he loved us to the moon and back in his own sort of dysfunctional way, but he really, truly did love us and I don't have a doubt in my mind and he still does to this day of baggage and that love doesn't always get expressed in the healthiest ways. It's certainly not expressed in the ways we want them to be, or at least in the way I want them to be expressed. You know, I always wanted, um, someone to love me different Um, and that's that's been my own healing is learning to accept that this is the best my dad can do and and that's how he knows how to love and that's how he's been taught how to love. And you know, that's always been a healing journey for me and it continues to be to this day, to recognize that we have two very different definitions of how we love and making room for that to kind of be okay, not to tolerate like bad behavior or whatever. I don't believe in that, but please never use that as an excuse to tolerate bad behavior. But you know, I do think that you know, sometimes we have to have grace for people who you know really just don't know any better. You know, for somebody growing up in our generation who's had access to personal development and therapy and stuff, I would probably not be so lenient. You know what I mean. But when I look at my dad and what he's been through and what he knows to be true and right and wrong, like I mean, it is what it is right.

Maria Rei:

But all that to say, like you know, for me, you know that moment it wasn't. It wasn't. I was desperate for that love because you was never that. That whole circumstance, that whole situation even though you know it was hurtful and it brought, you know, like, so much pain, um, and so much, you know, trans, so much hurt and so much transformation, which I mean, at the end of the day, was a good thing. You know, it was never about him. It was about the pain that I was avoiding looking at, which made me need him to show up in the loving way that I needed him to show up in, so that I would avoid that pain, that pain being the belief that I was not worthy of love, that I would never be loved the way that I wanted to be loved. The pain of, you know, remembering that my you know, my dad didn't love me the way that my, my mind, I wanted him to love me, um, how I wanted him to love me and how he did love me were two very different things, um, and I think that there was a part of me that was still hurting from that, and I think that there was a part of me that was still, like you know, vying for his attention and trying to get him to say I love you back. And you know, doing all the things that I would do to get my dad to show up as the dad, the TV dad, right, the dad that you see on TV, that's always loving, is always affectionate. He's, you know, solves everybody's problems in five minutes or less. You know, solves everybody's problems in five minutes or less. You know I grew up in the sitcom era, but life's not like that, right? So, and it's not to say that, you know, what I wanted in terms of love was delusional, it wasn't. I do believe that.

Maria Rei:

You know my parents, you know God love them. They did the best that they could, but you know they carried a lot of dysfunction between them. Trauma, unhealed trauma that they had experienced as childhood, you know, created some of that. And also just the way they were loved by their parents, because that's the only way they knew how. And they carried their own trauma and so on and so on and so on. And we've had patterns and trauma and you know cycles that have been carried down from generation to generation to generation. So I was just repeating the same cycles that my parents were repeating, you know, with us.

Maria Rei:

And so you know I was trying, you know, I was trying to get him to act like he loved me so I wouldn't have to look at this painful part of myself that was 150% convinced she didn't deserve love, she wasn't good enough, she would never be good enough to be loved and she would never be loved the way that she wanted to be loved. And she just needed to accept that and that was the narrative that was going on. And by getting him to act like he loved me and how I thought love should look, it would totally, totally negate all of that and make it all untrue and make all that pain and sadness and hurt just go away. But that's not how this works right. So in that moment when I had that, I can only describe it as a soul awakening where I said something here is not right, this is not this, this is not what love is supposed to look like. Nope, something in me knew that day this wasn't it and that was the beginning of the undoing, and I had no idea how much work I was looking at or how long it would take or what I would have to go through or the shit that I would have to learn and heal along the way and stuff.

Maria Rei:

But the important thing is, I think, when we're moving through these experiences and when we're moving through these pain points in our lives, it's so important to remember that when, much like an addiction, a pattern is also an addiction is also an addiction because it's something we need or have become reliant on in order to soothe something or distract from something right or to comfort us from something. So it doesn't matter what it is Like I've said this before. It doesn't matter if it's excessive shopping, if it's binge watching your favorite Netflix shows, which I'm still guilty of overeating. Could be sex, could be drugs, could be gambling, could be any number of things. But sometimes it's as simple as you know.

Maria Rei:

An addiction can be as simple as chasing unavailable love again and again and again. That's an addiction because, believe it or not, you get a real dopamine hit when, as soon as you get some attention, and then, as soon as you don't have that attention, you're scrambling for that next fix. Um, and attention is the very thing, attention, validation, is the very thing that you need to put some of these pains, to silence them, to soothe them, to put them aside, to fool yourself into thinking that they're not there for a hot minute, you know. So that was my dopamine hit was getting affection or attention from emotionally unavailable guys who, um, you know, that moment, for that moment it was on such a high, um, only to, like you know, spend the next I don't know days, weeks, months, you know, trying to get the next hit. So the pain was that, you know, there was a part of me that believed that I was not worthy of love, that it would never get any better than this, that, you know, I would always kind of be on my own.

Maria Rei:

And I remember, like in my younger years, oh my God, I remember in our twenties, when we used to go clubbing and I would like, like at the point of peak inebriation, like on the way from the club to the restaurant that was open, like after hours, we would walk in like five minutes before closing and order like souvlaki dinners, like around the table I know we were eating spit, that I know we ate spit like they hated us. We would come in five minutes before closing and order the longest thing to cook on the menu and then make them work and like we didn't know this, but we found out after that, you know they were supposed to be getting off at like whatever two o'clock in the morning. We would be walking in at like one, 55 or no. They were getting off at three and we'd be walking in at two, 55, something like that and ordering these massive dinner Anyway, um, I remember like being at peak inebriation in the backseat of my friend's car every fucking Saturday night and we had this like playlist like going on right, and so I remember there was always, there was always like there was a ton of Madonna on this playlist and I remember when that song All by Myself by Madonna came on, I would start singing that at the top of my lungs All by myself, I don't need anyone, like top of my lungs.

Maria Rei:

And there was a part of me that actually believed that I really did. And I really believed that not only that, I believe that I wasn't worthy of love. But I think there was also a part of me that felt, you know, that love wasn't safe. You know, you know a lot of my younger years, even like with my friends, parents, you know extended family. You know I saw relationships that were quite volatile, and so love for me didn't feel very safe. So maybe emotionally available was the safe option as well.

Maria Rei:

Like there's so many stories. There's so many stories when you start to unpack why we have the pattern that we do and what it is that it's keeping us from seeing right. But it's only when we eliminate the distraction, we eliminate the soothing, we eliminate the thing that's keeping us from feeling the thing or acknowledging the thing right, when we start to feel the pain and acknowledge the beliefs behind that pain and what's actually the narrative behind the pattern. That's when the magic happens, that's when the healing happens. But we have to be willing to go through the discomfort of not having the soothing or the distraction or you know, whatever. Whatever is is keeping us from seeing our truth and feeling our, our, our, our pain, body right and what it's trying to tell us. And and you know it's such an intricate um balance of feeling the feelings, examining the beliefs behind them and using them to transform and heal yourself and not get caught up in that. You never want to get caught up in it, you never want to project it and you never want to ignore it.

Maria Rei:

Those are all the wrong ways we've been dealing with our emotional body. We either try and distract or deny it, we project it onto the people around us or we get stuck there and we create like a mindset or a belief around it. You know, none of those are healthy. None of those are healthy expressions. Healthy is being able to move through it. Extract the lesson, extract the wisdom and use that energy to transmute into creating what you do want. That is really the superpower, you know.

Maria Rei:

And so I had to look at this pattern and I had to ask myself well, what is this saying about me? Like, what is it saying about what I believe I deserve, or what is safe, or you know what it is that I truly want or think that is available to me? And then I had to start to look at all those beliefs, one by one, and undo all the moments and the events and the conditioning behind each one. So, looking at everything that I might have gone through that made me feel like I wasn't worthy of love, or that love wasn't safe, and that being an emotionally available and being in love with somebody who's emotionally unavailable is a safer alternative which, by the way, is totally and categorically untrue, because there's nothing more painful than being in love with somebody who's emotionally unavailable to you Nothing. And it's painful because they don't love you back, but also because you're forced to look at all the shit that's going on on the inside. So it's also kind of perfect, to be honest, but nonetheless, that is the work.

Maria Rei:

So if you're somebody who's been, you know, if you've been in a pattern of dating emotionally unavailable people, people who are consistently not showing up for you, who consistently show you that they don't love you, and you keep chasing them, ask yourself what is it that you're running from within yourself that these people are distracting you from? What are you avoiding within you when you're chasing them? What is it? What pain, what fear, what heartbreak Are they soothing in those moments when they show you just the littlest, tiniest bit of affection? Because that, my love, is where your healing is and that is where the magic is going to happen. And if you have the courage to go into it to see what's going on in there and see what it's trying to tell you, I promise you the transformation will be so worth it on the other side, but you have to be willing to look at what's going on underneath it all, because I'm telling you right now it has nothing to do with them and it has everything to do with you and the pain that you're avoiding within you.

Maria Rei:

So the sooner you start to avoid that pain and look at it, the sooner you will start to become magnetic to emotionally available relationships. And this isn't just like romantic. This is all kind of friendships, partners, whatever, like it doesn't matter, like this is where you start to have people who are in your life, who are ready to have a deep emotional connection with you, to get to know you, to see you, to love you, because you have to see and love yourself. You have to connect with yourself on a deep soul level if you want others to connect with you on a deep soul level, because you need to get comfortable with the whole of you and to integrate the whole of you and to stop rejecting parts of yourself, to reclaim all those parts of yourself that you've been rejecting for so long and not to say that you're not broken. You're not.

Maria Rei:

I don't believe people are broken. I do believe that there's parts of ourselves that we're rejecting or ignoring and when we start to bring those back together, we come to this place of wholeness, of soul wholeness, and that's when we really become the most magnetic, because that is when we take our power back from all these people, places and things that have caused us pain, and that is when we become truly powerful and magnetic. So start to look. So you know, start to look at all these beliefs, start to look at all these parts of yourself that are might be, maybe sad, maybe hurt, maybe in pain, maybe even in anger and rage. Start to look at all these parts of yourselves and ask you, ask yourself you know what is, what is? What? Is this relationship not giving me what I need? You know which? You know the love, the validation, the attention, the affection, whatever it is. Why do I? Why do I still keep chasing it? Why am I chasing?

Maria Rei:

What is it that I'm avoiding in myself by chasing that love and validation that I know is going to soothe whatever's going on on the inside, because that is where the miracles happen and that when you start to go inward and look at yourself like that and start to love yourself like that and start to see yourself and all these parts of yourself that you've been rejecting and ignoring and not paying attention to, that's when you become magnetic as fuck. So you know, stop chasing them, stop looking at what they're doing, chasing them, stop looking at what they're doing, stop making it about them and look at why do you need this relationship so badly? And what is what does that love, receiving that love mean? You'll soothe within yourself. What belief will that? Will that put to rest within yours? Or doubt or fear Will that put to rest within yourself?

Maria Rei:

Because you have that external validation, because that is where the work is and I know that, that's where it was for me, because I, when I, you know, when I go back to that moment where I said I just want you to love me, like why can't you love me? And then his look of disdain and just hatred and annoyance with me, you know, when I think back, and I think back that moment where I was like this is not normal, right, and I knew that, and I said, okay, but how did I get here and why, like, why did I do that? Why would I ever, like put myself in a position where, like, put myself in a position where you know I was, I was, you know, setting the bar so low for myself that I would do that to to beg someone to love me, to choose me, um, and so I had to look at okay, well, why was I so desperate for somebody who clearly was emotionally unavailable to me to love me, because it would put the belief that I wasn't loved. There was a little girl in me that still believed that she wasn't loved by her dad, even though she was. But there was a little girl in me that believed that she wasn't loved by her dad and so by me trying to convince him to act like he loved me, it would be like putting that little part of me, that little girl who was just begging for her dad's love and attention, to you know, put her at ease, right, but that wasn't the healing my soul needed. That's not healing, that is the definition of addiction and and escape ism. So what I needed to do was have that love taken away from me so I could see that little girl and say but you were loved, you always were, even when you didn't feel like it, even though sometimes this is what I always tell clients. You know, because we all come from different stories and different backgrounds and different experiences. And for some of us our caregivers loved us. And you know, unfortunately, for many of us we didn't have caregivers who loved us, and you know this is where we get very esoteric in the work.

Maria Rei:

Here's the thing whether your caregivers, loved you or not, you were always born out of love and if you're here, you're here for a reason and there is a higher source that absolutely loves you just the way you are. And I think part of our experience here in this lifetime is to detach from everything this world told us that we need in order to feel safe, which is the love of other people. Maybe it's money, maybe it's beauty, maybe it's whatever you know, whatever you've told yourself you needed in order to be safe and successful in this world. I think a big lesson for all of us is learning to detach from all of that and recognizing putting our love and our faith into a higher power to love us, to accept us unconditionally, to support us in ways that this world can never do, can never do, and so a lot of my healing was learning to lean into that love, because my dad just couldn't express love the way that I needed him to, and even now, as he's getting older, it's getting even more and more difficult. So I'm having to lean on that more than I ever have. So you know, take that for what it's worth, I think.

Maria Rei:

I think when we find love in source, we find love within ourselves and I think it. I think it goes hand in hand, because if we love source and we trust source and whatever name you give it, if you call God, if you call source, if you call it creator, you know. Whatever you name, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. If you call it creator, you know. Whatever you name, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. What does matter is that if you believe that you were created by this, you know almighty spiritual presence, then you have to believe that you're perfect and worthy of love, because why would anything like that ever create something that wasn't, even though sometimes in our human expression, we don't, you know, always show up that way, some more than others. However, there is a purpose for you being here, there is a reason that you were created and I do think that where sometimes the difficulty comes and where sometimes I think you know how our lives play out and what we're meant to be here and experience, I think you know, depending on the level of karma that you bring to each life, like each life experience could be vastly different from the next life, like each life experience could be vastly different from the next. But I think if you can always remember that source loves you and, you know, totally created you for a reason, and the more that you lean into that reason or purpose and trust it, you'll be okay.

Maria Rei:

I don't know why it went off on that tangent, but I did. But that is something that I've been really moving through lately. So there it is. The importance is not to get wrapped up in what the ego will tell you, because the ego will always try and keep you from that truth, even though the ego is also trying to keep you safe. It's not bad, but it is acting out of your childhood trauma and limiting belief. So we do gently need to acknowledge the ego and thank it for, you know, wanting to keep it safe.

Maria Rei:

But we have to start to move in a different direction, a higher perspective direction than what we've been perpetuating up until this point, and that includes in our relationship. So be able and be willing to look at it from a higher, from a higher perspective as to you know what it is that you're running from and what is it that you're trying to get to avoid a pain that just wants to be looked at Right. So that is a very mixed up message. I have no idea what I'm going to call this episode, but there it is. So let me know what you take away in the comments below, wherever you're seeing this, and if you love this episode, please, please, please, please, leave a positive rating and review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you're seeing this. Until next time, you guys, massive love.

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