Emotional Hooks: What They Are, Why They Occur And How To Overcome Them

The commonly known dependence is a term that refers to people being addicted to a substance, to which the individual can become very intensely emotionally hooked. The same can happen when the addition is a person. In these cases, we speak of emotional attachments as a mechanism that is established when an emotional relationship becomes an obsession.

When there is an emotional attachment, the balance of “giving” and “receiving” affection is altered and love can transform into a true emotional dependency. This psychological discomfort that is capable of living in the shadows throughout a person’s life, however, is the cause of constant pain and fuels other serious psychological, physical and relational problems.

When love chains, makes you suffer and is a victim of emotional attachments, then we are faced with that phenomenon that contemporary psychology precisely defines affective dependence or, in English, love addiction. In the full development of a relationship, emotional dependence is nothing more than loving passion whose result is often suffering and illness.

Emotional hookups are a mechanism that is perpetuated to avoid facing the fear that the relationship will break up, so they are a negative relational condition whose origin can be a large number of factors. This mechanism, which arises in the presence of emotional dependence, can be due to multiple circumstances. Let’s look at those that explain why emotional attachments occur:

• Chronic absence of reciprocity in emotional life: tends to create psychological and/or physical discomfort.
• Desire to merge with the other person: whoever manifests the symptoms of emotional dependence has the desire to always remain fused with the other and for this to remain unchanged over time.
• Need for protection and low self-esteem: fueled by beliefs that one’s happiness depends entirely on the proximity of a supportive person. In this article you will see the characteristics of a person with low self-esteem.
• Negative affective experiences with parents: dependency has its roots in childhood, in the relationship with those who have taken care of us. Those parents who become affectionately dependent on their children have probably received the message that they are not worthy of love or that their needs are not important. In these cases, there is a tendency to unrealistically overestimate the other, losing contact with reality.

The symptoms of emotional addiction They do not necessarily manifest themselves in a relationship, but can also manifest themselves in relation to a parent, a family member, a family figure or a person of authority. In order to identify them, below we show you how to detect emotional hooks:

• Obsession towards the other individual.
• Not being able to separate the self from the other and their will from the other.
• Fear of losing love.
• Fear of abandonment and separation.
• Fear of loneliness and distance. In this article, we tell you how to overcome the fear of loneliness.
• Afraid to show yourself for what you are.
• Guilty feeling.
• Feeling of inferiority with respect to the partner.
• Resentment and anger if left out.
• Total participation and limited social life.
• Jealousy and possessions.

Rarely does one acquire a level of self-awareness that is sufficient to autonomously recognize one’s own emotional dependence. Therefore, to overcome an emotional hook, the first step is to know yourself and be aware of what your mental schemas are. Only in this way will it be possible to intervene and redirect this situation.

psychotherapy can help the emotionally dependent patient recognize the complex cognitive and emotional traps that lead to suffering and unhappiness. A psychotherapy journey can help a person overcome suffering linked to that state of emotional attachment, in which the other person is experienced as indispensable and necessary for their existence.

In this article you will find information about the different types of psychotherapy that exist. In the presence of emotional attachments, the most recommended is go to a psychologist since he will be the one who indicates the best techniques and methods to follow in each case.

This article is merely informative, at PsychologyFor we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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