The key to Emotional Dependence is in childhood

**Have you ever found it impossible to get out of a relationship that was causing you suffering? ** That's what happened to Marina, the spitting image of an independent woman.

She impeccably ran a large company that she inherited from her parents. However, she was unable to leave her partner. That was the reason why she decided to come to therapy.

And it is that although it seems that society encourages us to be more and more independent, somehow we all want to feel loved and accompanied.

The root of emotional dependence

The case of Marina can be that of many women (and also that of many men). She never thought that her husband would be unfaithful, until one day she took her mobile phone to consult something and she read conversations loaded with "erotic" content with a fairly young girl.

She had put aside her promising career as a journalist to dedicate herself fully to taking care of the family, until recently, when her father died suddenly, she had to take the reins of the company.

Marina was the typical “helicopter mother”, flying all day around her children, for whom she worried excessively. She now lamented that her children had not studied anything, that they were still at home waiting for her to give it all to them.

She had been unable to set limits and her husband was never home to educate them. This filled her with guilt, but always she felt that she did it for her she well, she did not want them to go through the same thing as her.

Meanwhile, Paco, her husband, had been climbing in her work. She went to play paddle tennis almost every day with her friends and kept herself in perfect physical shape. Marina, by contrast, had become increasingly isolated and physically neglected.

Now he did not know what decision to make. He saw it as impossible to live without Paco. In therapy, he would not stop crying and saying that he still loved him very much, he couldn't see himself living her life without him.

Many times we confuse love with emotional dependence

Love is something healthy: there is reciprocity, there is a genuine interest in helping the other person to be happy and feel fulfilled.

Emotional dependency is something else. What dominates is fear of breakup. This makes us feel anxious and vulnerable. We fall into a way of relating in which we cannot live without the other person, from whom we constantly expect approval and recognition.

Without a doubt, this is one of the worst addictions, as we can see so many therapists in our daily practice. And it can not only occur in the couple, but also in the family, with friends or with coworkers.

In a dependency relationship there are two parties. On the one hand there is the subdued person, in which she will dominate insecurity and the feeling of inferiority. He will have difficulties when making decisions and will always put himself in the background where his wishes will never prevail. There is a tendency to idealize the couple, in which they turn the reason for their existence, producing a loss of their own identity.

This was what happened to Marina. She adopted a maternal role, establishing herself as Paco's great savior and caretaker, becoming essential in her life. In this way she felt that it would be more difficult for him to leave her. She discovered in therapy that she had unconsciously repeated the same submissive role towards men that she had seen in her mother.

On the other hand is the dominant person, who may have narcissistic traits, possessive or manipulative, although "face to the gallery" he can be a charming person. That's how Paco was, a man who wasn't very communicative at home, while on the street he was a man brimming with good humor, what amounts to a “light from someone else's house”.

Marina had found in Paco the figure of her father. He was an authoritarian man, whom she feared as a child. Just one look was enough to make him obey. He was someone who never showed much affection. His focus of attention was always focused on work, for which he was eternally grateful. In therapy, he was able to see those darker aspects of his father that he would never have dared to acknowledge before..

Why this need to stay in a relationship where you are not really well?

Well, it seems that the key is in childhood, where we have an urgent need to have strong ties with our caregivers: our parents.

if we had a secure attachment, with emotionally available parents it is difficult for us to develop emotional dependence. In this case, the child is provided with the necessary tools to be autonomous and interact with others in a healthy way, from a base of trust.

In the case of an insecure attachment, in which the child has not had sufficient emotional support, a terrible fear of abandonment can develop and separation anxiety appears.

On the other hand, there are studies that relate anxious attachment to emotional dependence. This occurs when parents are not always available and offer intermittent or delayed care. The baby in these cases will develop ambivalent emotions, which oscillate between security and insecurity and even between love and hate.

In short, we cannot continue to ignore that there are more and more studies linking emotional dependence with affective deficiencies in childhood. This is why the mental health of parents is so important: without a doubt, the best gift for children.