**Have you ever found it impossible to get out of a relationship that was causing you suffering? ** That’s what happened to Marina, the living image of an independent woman.
He impeccably managed a large company that he inherited from his parents. However, he was unable to leave his partner. That was the reason he decided to come to therapy.
And although it seems that society encourages us to be more and more independent, in some way We all want to feel loved and accompanied
Marina’s case may be that of many women (and also that of many men). She never thought that her husband would be unfaithful to her, until one day she took his cell phone to consult something and 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 them everything done.
She had been unable to set limits for them and her husband was never home to educate them. This filled her with guilt, but always He felt that he did it for his own good I didn’t want them to go through the same thing as her.
Meanwhile, Paco, her husband, had been climbing in his job. He went to play paddle tennis almost daily with her friends and remained in perfect physical shape. Marina, on the other hand, had become increasingly isolated and physically neglected.
Now I didn’t know what decision to make. I saw it as impossible to live without Paco. In therapy she couldn’t stop crying and saying that she still loved him very much, She couldn’t see herself 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 be happy and feel fulfilled.
Emotional dependence is something else. What dominates is the fear of breaking up 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 their approval and recognition.
Without a doubt, this is one of the worst addictions, as many therapists can see in our daily practice. And it can not only occur in a couple, but also in the family, with friends or with co-workers.
In a dependency relationship there are two parties. On the one hand there is the subjugated person, in whom insecurity and the feeling of inferiority will dominate. He will have difficulties when making decisions and will always put himself in the background in which his wishes will never prevail. There is a tendency to idealize the couple, in which they pour the reason for their existence, producing a loss of their own identity.
This is what happened to Marina. She adopted a maternal role, becoming Paco’s great savior and caregiver, becoming essential in her life. This way she felt that it would be more difficult for him to abandon her. She discovered in therapy that had unconsciously repeated the same role of submission towards men that he had seen in his mother
On the other hand, there is the dominant person, who may have narcissistic, possessive or manipulative traits, although “in front of the gallery” he or she may be a charming person. That’s how Paco was, a man who was not very communicative at home, while on the street he was a man full of good humor, which amounts to being a “light in someone else’s house.”
Marina had found the figure of her father in Paco. He was an authoritarian man, whom she feared as a child. Just one look was enough for him to obey. He was someone who never showed too much affection. His focus was always on work, for which we had to be eternally grateful. In therapy he was able to see those darker aspects of his father, which he would never have dared to recognize before
Why this need to stay in a relationship in which you are not really good?
Well, it seems that the key is in childhood, where we have the urgent need to have strong ties with our caregiver figures: 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 ignoring the fact that there are more and more studies that link emotional dependence with emotional deficiencies in childhood. This is why parental mental health is so important: without a doubt, the best gift for children.
