thoughts, words, deeds

healthy/unhealthy

Prompt: What makes us emotionally dependent on people or anything else? And do you think a person might have emotional dependencies with or without being conscious of them?

This question makes me think about that song about people needing people being lucky. The word dependency makes me automatically cringe a bit, but I think there are differences between unhealthy emotional dependencies, and healthy ones.

I am emotionally dependent on my family. Not that I need to talk to them all the time or make them give their input on everything I do, but I do feel better and more stable knowing that they are in the world and thinking about me. And I am happy to provide that stability to my family in their turn. There isn’t any uneven distribution of emotional power in the relationship. We sometimes need more, we sometimes can give more, and that’s just how things are.

In a relationship, a certain amount of emotional dependency can be good—although I would add that unhealthy relationships generally involve unequal distribution of emotional dependency. In other words, when someone is more emotionally invested than their partner, and either one of the two takes advantage of the fact, this is unhealthy. There are exceptions to this, of course. In a parent/child relationship, the child needs a lot and the parent gives a lot, and that is still healthy as long as the parent is working constantly at training the child to be more independent. It’s easier to see in intellectual and social spheres, but the emotional sphere also needs training for a child to become an adult.

I think that a person can have emotional dependencies without being conscious of them. A lot of us are not as emotionally aware as we are socially or intellectually. We feel things, but we don’t pause and analyze why. This can be frustrating in some cases.