Emotional dependence vs. independence

 

One of the great problems in psychology and therapy is dependence versus independence. What does it mean to be independent, autonomous? There are probably many people like me who appear to be self-motivated, guided by our own lights, but who, failing “separation-individuation” in infancy, need the connective ground of another person. I don’t mind telling certain clients (when useful to their therapy) that I would be drained of identity and meaning if my wife were not at the ready for me, a root-system presence. In my first years as a thera­pist, I believed that an axiomatic goal was to help clients sepa­rate from their abu­sive or unloving parents, “cut the toxic umbili­cal cord.” That might mean writing them a crash-and-burn, moment-of-truth goodbye letter. It might mean moving a thousand miles away. I no longer believe this, though I do see it as theoretically hopeful.

We know that sometimes the most independent-seeming individuals are, paradoxically, the most unindividuated. The maternal bond failed. The unmitigable need for sym­bio­sis remained stillborn. But owing to the resultant emotional distance and the repres­sion of abandon­ment pain in childhood, the person drifted off, be­com­ing perforce pseudo-indepen­dent. Picture the sleeper yo-yo that rests quiet at the end of the string, near the ground, yet remains energized to its inevitable jerk back to its own­er’s hand. Picture all the “real men” who enjoy the bachelor life, but then graft themselves to a susceptible woman, commit domestic violence, Power and Control, and ultimately stalk her when she leaves. These men were never individuals.

A plausible hypothesis would be that all therapy clients (setting aside discrete traumas) remain impotently linked to frus­trat­ing parents, then to their later symbols. They are clients because their childhood needs were not met, needs that never die. The prime question, then, would be: How does this affect their present life?

I am slightly familiar with the concept of Expressed Emotion, derived from mid-twen­tieth-century schizophrenia research. The young schizophrenic would “relapse,” decom­pensate upon returning to his parents’ home under influences that David Calof called “the family hypnosis.” I believe there is no reason to distinguish psychotic persons from anyone who could feel his original childish self emerging in the time-suspended emo­tional vibe of his or her parents.

It should be obvious to therapists that adults whose neurotic parents have remained heart plugs* in their psyche suffer holis­tically – body, mind and time. There could never be normal growth through the psycho-devel­op­mental stages. Emotional pain and injustice could never be expressed to the parent who still has power, emotional or financial. All the formative psychological problems will be locked in, em­bedded in the ungrown child. The adult may be under­em­ployed, a push­over to his spouse, swooning to the parents’ solipsistic demands. Professors, lawyers, vice presi­dents, entre­preneurs, psy­cho­paths – all carry the vitiating ghost of dependency needs from their birth and early childhood.

Maybe a simple way of grasping dysfunctional dependency is to contrast it with the healthy bond with healthy, loving parents. “Organic” self-esteem comes from rela­tion­ships where the parents so accept their child’s personhood – his feelings and thoughts – that he is an “arrived” person at once, fulfilled at the start of his life. He has inter­nalized self­hood, positive self-feeling and will not base his value, later, on accom­plish­ments, on prestige, or on the approval of certain individuals or the admiration of anony­mous masses. (A 20-year-old client told me that “everything I do is to make my mother hap­py.”) A healthy depen­dency be will the person who loves but no longer needs, for ego construction or mean­ing, his aging parent.

I recently made a stupid – but interesting and useful – error with a client. The 25-year-old man has always lived with his parents, as has an older sibling. My error was in assum­ing that he felt a pull to be on his own, to “separate.” I cited Expressed Emotion as a kind of heuristic scare tactic. Agenda-blinded, I missed two warning signs: his claim to have no “frame of reference” to see a difference between himself and a self-supporting young adult; and his interjection (which now haunts me): “I’m not tracking you.” This is a client who, possibly feeling judged or humiliated, will probably disap­pear into the sunset (while remaining nestled in the family home).

Do we need to force ourselves to quit an umbilical dependency? The “codepen­dent enabler” is but one pothole on a wide continuum, surrounded by all the other blatant and invisible enmeshments that trap the psyche. We can see a problem when a 25-, or 29-, or 35-year-old continues to lie on his parents as a Procrustean bed. But what about the successful, driven person whose self-esteem is corrupted by false hope, the regressive hope that her parents will finally see and love her as the person she is? I believe that dependency will always be the radical sticking point of human psychol­ogy: It is our sad or poisonous bed, or our happy, nostalgic home, both the root that we cannot cut.

- - - - - - - - - - -

* From the 1984 film version of Frank Herbert's Dune.