“I can do without outside help”, “I don’t need no one”, “I am a completely self -sufficient person” … Is this the ideal that we should strive for? And whether to consider those who cannot do without love and friendship dependent? The psychotherapist Inna Khamitova answers.
The spread of popular psychological information has led to the fact that often the “diagnoses” are made unprofessional and too hasty.
For example, the shortcut “Narcissus” is far from always belonging to those who really suffer from a narcissistic personality disorder, and the name “toxic relationships” is used to denote their displeasure to one or another act of a friend.
In the same way, the need for proximity is often defined as the dependence with which you should fight. Meanwhile, according to different surveys, up to 96% of men and women believe that love is important and that you can only be happy if it is in your life.
Let’s try to understand this contradiction.
What do we mean?
First, let’s remember what it is. Dependence is an obsessive need to perform certain actions, despite their adverse consequences.
Examples are familiar to almost everyone. When someone understands that he will be bad from alcohol, but cannot stop, stop drinking. Sexual addiction understands that he does not need to get ties with different women, this worsens relations with his wife, interferes with working, interferes with himself, but cannot change his behavior.
There are two key points in determining the dependence: obsession and adverse consequences. Dependence is always a protective nature, it is a flight from reality. Over time, dependence takes on a generalized character, that is, it captures a person completely.
Dependent on alcohol not only uses it in large quantities. This becomes the main topic of his conversations and the motive of actions, he chooses acquaintances with the same features, creates many rituals around consumption. If you remove a drink from his life, this very life, according to his subjective feelings, will lose meaning. Because besides alcohol there is almost https://thienanrestaurant.com/steps-to-make-asian-prolonged-distance-associations-successful/ nothing left in it.
This applies to both chemical and behavioral dependence: religious and computer, dependence on sports, plastic surgery and herald, shopping and workaholism have the same characteristics.
However, there is one type of innate dependence, which has almost the same characteristics, with the exception of one: it has no negative consequences, but, on the contrary, there are positive ones, which gives us a reliable support in life.
This is our need for other people and close relationships with them.
Productive dependence
In the 60s of the twentieth century, children’s psychoanalyst John Bowlby, and then his followers Mary Einsvort and Sue Johnson formulated and confirmed the theory of affection. Its essence is that we all have a biologically determined system that is responsible for the emotional connection between the mother and the child.
Four main attachment styles were also highlighted. They are preserved in subsequent life, although to a certain extent amenable to adjusting. Reliable attachment creates the inner basis, thanks to which we can explore the world and be close to significant others.
From this point of view, attachment can be considered as a dependence on others: the search and maintenance of contact with others – the condition of our existence. We are social creatures, we need communication with our own kind.
Reality differs from the fairy tale of Rediaard Kipling: Mowgli children brought up by animals cannot learn to speak and live among people. In this sense, we are initially dependent on others.
Moreover, the attachment style that has developed in childhood affects how successful we will become, whether it will be easy for us to find close people in adulthood, will we ask for help and receive it.