Emotional dependence is when a person thinks he or she needs another person to survive, be happy, or feel complete. Love is easily confused with emotional dependence because they both contain strong feelings for another person. In an emotionally dependent relationship, people feel “in love” when in fact they are “in need”. Emotionally dependent individuals need constant attention, approval and support from their partner to identify themselves.
What are the signs of emotional dependence?
• Do you tend to idealize the people you are in a relationship with?
• Do you focus on how your partner treats you and ignore who he really is even when the signs are obvious?
• Are you impressed when your partner makes you feel special?
• Have you made your partner responsible for your happiness, value and safety?
• Do you feel anxious or panicked when you are not with your partner or when he / she does not respond to your messages immediately?
• Do you have expectations that need to be met immediately in order to feel loved and safe?
• Do you feel that you cannot live without him / her and are you afraid of losing him / her?
• Do you feel unworthy unless your partner gives you attention and approval?
• Do you feel jealous and possessive about him / her?
Love vs emotional dependence.
The “love” that comes from fear is not love – it is a need. Emotional dependence comes from the inner void you feel – and then wait for your partner to fill it for you in order to feel loved and safe. Once you make your partner responsible for your happiness, security and value, then you try to control him/her and obsessively tell him/her how he/she should treat you to feel that he/she loves you and you are special.
Love is to give and share and not to demand. It involves care, intimacy, protection, attraction, affection and trust and is inconsistent with control and complete submission.
When the two partners can exist alone but instead they choose to coexist then the relationship is healthy. Emotionally balanced adults want companionship, but they also endure emotional loneliness. They have interests and social life and when they finally enter a relationship, they maintain their autonomy but at the same time the balance between it and the commitment to their loved one.
Addicts, on the other hand, even when in a relationship tend to cling to their partner. They are often jealous even when they have not been given a reason and they can pretend to be helpless or vulnerable in order to impose on their partner to take care of them even on simple daily habits. In the end, they end up with what they try to avoid from the beginning, separation.
Each of us is responsible for our emotional balance and happiness. Whoever can do this only when he/she has a partner, is doomed to never know love. “All he/she will know is addiction, which he/she will call love,” according to American psychiatrist David Burns.
