S1 EP14 – Relationships: Are You Emotionally Dependent?

Transcript

Hi everyone. Dr. Margaret Paul here with the inner bonding podcast. And today I would like to talk about the issue of emotional dependency, which is something that many, many people suffer from. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna list a whole bunch of issues that you might be experiencing, thoughts and beliefs you might be experiencing that relate to emotional dependency.

So see if you relate to any of these symptoms, do you feel that you can’t feel lovable and worthy without another person’s approval that you need them to approve of you in order to feel like you’re okay. Do you feel like you need a lot of attention from certain people to feel like you’re worthy, that you’re lovable? Are you a person that doesn’t trust your own feelings that, that you need others to validate what you, that, what you feel is okay.

Do you have a big fear of rejection? Do you isolate and try and be perfect or agree with others or give yourself up or shut down and many other things that you might do to try and avoid rejection? Like the plague, like that’s one of the worst things or are you afraid to be alone? Do you often feel an emptiness inside a sense of alone? Yes. Inside.

Do you want off and feel anxious around other people? Like maybe you’re not going to say the right thing or do the right thing. Are you often jealous in your relationships? Do do things that your partner do trigger a sense of jealousy in you. And do you, do you take other people’s uncaring behavior toward you personally and think it’s really about you rather than about them. Do you get angry when the people who are important to you do what they want instead of what you want them to do?

Have you ever had the experience of people telling you that you’re too needy? Do you sometimes feel like you just don’t know what to do with yourself when you’re not around other people? Are you fine when you’re alone, but you get tense and anxious around others. Do you often find yourself blaming others? There is for your feelings, for your anger or your emptiness or insecurity or anxiety or other painful for you, feelings.

You believe that your good feeling should come from someone else loving you. Yeah. Do you believe that your safety and security should come from someone else? Do you have the experience that you just can’t have fun unless you’re with someone else who knows how to have fun? Do you often feel anxious or depressed or guilty or shamed or hurt or angry?

This is not a complete list, but hopefully you get the idea of some of the symptoms of emotional dependency. You’re emotionally dependent when you’re not taking responsibility for your own feelings. So taking responsibility means that you compassionately nurture the painful existential feelings of life, of loneliness, helplessness over others, heartbreak, sorrow, and grief. And it means learning about how you’re treating yourself and what you’re telling yourself.

That’s causing your wounded feelings of anxiety, depression, victim hurt, guilt, shame, anger, jealousy, all, all of these that I’ve mentioned. You’re emotionally dependent when you’re a not defining your own worth instead making others approval and attention responsible for your sense of worth when you’re not taking responsibility for your own feelings and for defining your own worth.

Then of course, you’re dependent on other people to do this for you. So this is putting yourself in the position of being a victim of other’s choices. And this is emotional dependency. So the opposite of emotional dependence is emotional freedom. And you can attain emotional freedom. When you decide to learn how to take responsibility for your own feelings.

So taking responsibility for your own feelings means that you compassionately embrace the core painful feelings of life that I mentioned and learn how to manage these difficult feelings. Like I said, with a lot of compassion so that you don’t have to avoid them with various addictions are all the ways that you’ve learned to abandon yourself. As long as you use self abandoning ways to avoid these feelings, instead of learning to compassionately, manage them, you’re going to continue to suffer from emotional dependency, making others responsible for you.

These feelings are being caused by others and circumstances, but it’s up to you to learn to lovingly manage them without closing down and turning to various addictions. Also taking responsibility for your own feelings means that you need to learn to explore the feelings that you create with your own thoughts and actions, the, the, the feelings of anxiety and depression. And so on that I’ve mentioned as long as you believe that it’s other’s choices rather than what you’re telling yourself and how you’re treating yourself, that’s causing these feelings.

You will suffer from emotional dependency. You’ll see yourself as a victim until you’re willing to take full responsibility for how you’re creating these painful feelings with your own various ways of abandoning yourself.

And emotionally dependent is a really, really hard way to live. I know this firsthand because that’s how I used to live. And it’s so completely different than experiencing emotional freedom. You move into your personal power. When you learn how to take responsibility for your own feelings, and then you can become emotionally free. One of my clients who’s ex girlfriend broke up with him, asked me the following question.

I think I still love her, but is this love or just emotional dependency? Many times I asked myself a falling in love comes from the wound itself because for me, at least it feels as if I can’t live without the other person. When I give love from the heart, I don’t expect anything back, but when I quote, fall in love, I think this is a different energy. So that’s true. Falling in love can come from two different interstates.

When you fall in love from your wounded self, this is your ego self you’re in love with how the other person loves you. You’re handing over to the other person, the responsibility for your self worth and wellbeing, which is what emotional dependency is. And if he or she does a good job of attending to you in the way that you want to be attending to, then you may say you’re in love. However, it’s not so much the person you love, but how he or she is loving you.

So when it feels as if you can’t live without the other person, that is emotional dependency, the part of you that is in love is really a child or adolescent who is needy for love, because you’re not giving love to yourself or to others. There’s an emptiness inside you that you expect the other person to fill because you’re not taking responsibility for your own feelings of self worth.

You’re attaching your worth to another’s love, which is why you can’t live without that other. So when you fall in love as a mature, loving adult, instead of as a wounded needy child or adolescent, your need for the relationship is totally different. As a loving adult, you’ve learned through, hopefully you’re a consistent practice of inner bonding, had to fill yourself up with love and define your own worth.

Instead of needing someone to fill you a make you feel lovable and worthy, you already feel worthy and full of love. You experienced this inner fullness because you’ve learned how to take full responsibility for your own feelings and needs. And you’ve learned to fill yourself with love from your higher self is fullness overflows within you. And you want to share this love with another person.

Another loving adult who’s also filled with love. Your desire is to share love rather than to get love. Now, it’s important to understand that. Of course I’ve said this, we attract people at our common level of self-abandonment or our common level of self love. So the person that you’re picked will be totally different when a loving adult is choosing. Then when you’re wounded self is choosing, because we do attract people.

We pick people at a similar level of woundedness and a similar level of emotional health. So obviously the more you do your inner bonding work to learn, to bring love inside of you. The more you learn to take loving care of yourself, the more you’ll be attracted to someone who’s also doing that. It’s about frequency. We attract at our common level of frequency. When we’re abandoning ourselves, we’re operating out of a low frequency when we’re loving ourselves or app, we’re operating out of a high frequency.

So when you pick someone from your wounded self, you’re going to pick someone who you believe wants the job of filling you up. And the problem is that the other person also hopes that you’re going to fill up him or her, and two people who each want to get love rather than share love will eventually find themselves very, very disappointed in each other. And they’re each going to blame the other person for not loving them in the way they want to be loved.

And most of the time when relationships break up it’s because one or both partners are not taking for their own feelings of self worth. And they’re blaming the other person for their resulting on happiness. So if you are so attached to someone that you feel you can’t live without that person, please try learning to give yourself and others what it is you want from that person.

Your job is to become the person to yourself that you want the other person to be, to learn, to treat yourself like someone you love. Now think about that for a moment, learn to treat yourself like someone you love. Then you’ll be able to be in love rather than in need. You’ll be able to love another person for who he or she is rather than for what this person can do for you.

Instead of needing to get love. You can give love from the heart for the joy of it. And you feel filled in the giving a client. I’ll call her Linda, not her real name consultant with me because her relationship with her husband, Andrew also not his name was falling apart. Andrew had moved out stating that he could no longer tolerate Lydia.

Lydia Lydia’s neediness and constant pawn him to make her feel loved and secure. Now that they were separated. Lydia’s emotional dependency was getting even worse. She was so deeply addicted to Andrew, making her feel better, even if it was just through a brief text message. Lydia believed that her feelings of safety worth and lovability had to come from Andrew.

She took no emotional responsibility, no responsibility for what she was telling herself and how she was treating herself, that was causing her panic and her pain.

So of course, I worked with her with the inner bonding process, and it soon became clear to Lydia that her panic was being caused by her own. Self-abandonment not by Andrew abandoning her. She was always abandoning her inner child by judging herself, ignoring her feelings that were resulting from herself judgments, and then handing her inner child to Andrew to take care of when she couldn’t reach Andrew, she would collapse into yours and sooth herself with television and food.

She constantly felt panicked. Not because Andrew was not there for her, but because she had never developed an inner loving adult self capable of taking loving care of herself. So as a result of herself, abandonment, Lydia was constantly emotionally, needy and constantly pulling on Andrew with her tears in her anger. And while she said she loved Andrew, her, her primary intent was to get love, not to give and share love.

She was of course, deeply, emotionally dependent. So what is emotional freedom? We’re emotionally free when we do not make others the past or circumstances responsible for our feelings. When we don’t see ourselves as victims, instead, we take responsibility for our own suffering by noticing how we treat ourselves and what we tell ourselves.

And we nurture ourselves through the grief, the sorrow, the loneliness that come from painful life events, such as the death of a loved one. We’re not governed by our feelings when we’re emotionally free or feelings guide us, but we’re not led around by them. We don’t jump into them and wallow in them. We recognize that our positive feelings of love and peace and joy are letting us know that we’re taking loving care of ourselves and that our negative feelings of anger, fear, hurt anxiety, depression, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy, and so on, or letting us know that we’re abandoning ourselves.

One of the metaphors I often use with this is that imagine that you’re standing on the bank of a river and in the river, the river is flowing. This is your emotions. Water can often be a metaphor for our emotions and in the water is your inner child, your feeling self and, and drowning in the emotions. Now you have a choice. If you’re going to operate out of your wound itself, you’re going to jump in the river and start to drown.

Just wallow in the feelings with your feeling self, which is your inner child. But if you’re going to be a loving adult, you’re going to throw out a light preserver and pull in your inner child, your feeling self and wrap him or her in a towel and let that inner child know that he or she is not alone. You’re there as a loving adult. You’re not diving into your feelings and wallowing in them, hoping somebody else is going to throw out the life preserver.

So emotional freedom is you being a loving adult and taking responsibility for your own feelings. We just don’t collapse into our feelings. We don’t become our feelings. We are a witness of our feelings and we learn from them and we nurture the core, painful feelings of life. All of our feelings have important information for us, and we attain emotional freedom when we open to learning about them, but we don’t dive into them and peak and become them and be led around by them.

So we are emotionally free when we not only learned from our feelings, but we take loving action on our own behalf to take responsibility for all of our feelings, all of our painful feelings and for our feelings of worth lovability, safety and security. Now, this is what the inner bonding process is. What the practice of inner bonding teaches you to do when you practice it consistently, there is no such thing as failing at this process.

There’s no such thing that love fails. And so when your intention is to learn to love yourself, rather than the intention of the wound itself, which is to avoid and protect against pain and try and control, getting love when the intention is to really learn to love yourself, and you consistently practice inner bonding, and you don’t allow the resistance of the wound itself, who doesn’t want you to practice it, to take over, you will attain emotional freedom.

You will attain the personal power that comes from this. So I really encourage you to go to inner bonding.com, click on our free course, take some of our courses. I’m in September. My next love yourself course comes up such a powerful course that will enable you to learn to do this. Or you can take it now and then upgrade if you want to. And I have so many programs, I have a fantastic bundle of programs called complete self-love that you, that will enable you to learn to do this on your own.

It ends up being so much less expensive than working with a facilitator. Although working with a facilitator is wonderful, and we have many, many well-trained certified inner bonding facilitators. And I work with people I do now, virtual five intensives. I’m likely going to be doing a virtual workshop. There’s so much that we offer on our website. So I hope you take advantage of it and learn and practice inner bonding, love and blessings to all of you.