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By: Macrina Acosta
Emotional dependency is the extreme affective need that a person feels towards another one. It is not based upon the succession of such relation but upon the personality; it means that the person has a dependent personality. When he/she is alone, his/her pathology makes him/her look for another person that understands and loves him/her.
According to Doctor Carlos Llano, a XXI century philosopher, there are two determining features to have a solid character: humility and chastity. If these qualities are put aside, the person will be mediocre and insignificant. And this is so because humility and purity are the spiritual and corporal bases of the character.
There are emotionally dependent people both, among pathologic cases and standard cases. These two categories exist due to the fact that emotional dependency always starts in normality and ends in pathology; it means that there are different levels of intensity.
In the lightest standard dependencies, we find only some of these characteristics. Here we can find, among others, some victims of domestic violence.
In interpersonal relationships we can find a tendency to exclusivity, for example in friendship relations. The person feels more comfortable talking to only one friend than to a group, where he does not find the necessary affective supply. Such exclusivity, within couple relationships, reflects more an extreme need of company than love, involving a certain lack of personal maturity. A person becomes the existential center of the individual, leaving everything else aside.
Such addict people need a constant communication with the person they depend on. This situation translates into continuous calls, cell phone messages, excessive insistence and a wish to share every activity with that person.
There is illusion at the beginning of a relationship or when they meet an interesting person. This illusion involves a great deal of self-deceiving. We can also find subordination within couple relations as a means to preserve the relationship. Emotionally dependent relationships are noticeable unbalanced. One of them is only interested in his/her well being, in doing what the other wants, in magnifying and praising everything the other does.
Narcissism is the counterpart of low self-esteem in the emotionally dependant people, that is why this idealization and fascination is produced.
Couple relationships diminish this need, but they are not happy anyway and they will never be because their existence is a succession of disappointments, they do not have the essential ingredient of contentment: self-esteem, loving themselves. They live in an ever-lasting panic of a possible breakup and there is a possibility of suffering from mental disorders in case this occurs.
This emotional storm diminishes when another person miraculously appears, who meets the affective needs of the dependent person, and it is very frequently that the breakup occurs when there is already another relationship. When this happens the new person becomes the center of the existence. The difference with normal people is that they usually live a mourning period after a loving breakup, a period where most of the times, people are not willing to get involved with a new person because the previous one still occupies a special place in his/her heart.
Dominant dependants usually play domination roles within a relationship and not submission ones, but this does not mean that they stop feeling dependency on their partners. In normal emotional dependency, couple relations are characterized by submission and idealization. In the case of dominant dependent individuals they develop an affective need together with a hostility feeling. Such hostility can be interpreted as a kind of revenge for the deficiencies they have gone through while certain people with a little more solid self-esteem can show. This people are mostly men, this situation possibly has both, biological and cultural implications, since they suffer from social pressures to adopt strength and competitivity positions and have certain easiness to break affective ties with others.
Behind this superiority position hides a deep need and control of the other, who they always want to have exclusively with them. In this type of dependencies, jealousy is very common including the pathological one that hides the need and possession individuals feel towards their partner.
With this domination attitude they get exactly the same as the standard emotional dependants, which is the constant presence of their partner, on the other hand they compensate a more hostile and dominant tendency and satisfy their ego and resentment towards people.
A procedure that can be used to confirm the presence of emotional dependency is to propose a certain period of separation between the couple. If hostility, domination and disdain are pure they will resist perfectly well this period, because they really do not have positive feelings for the other person; if there is dependency the person will call with any excuse due to the urgent need he/she experiences.
There is no doubt that this phenomenon reveals and it is recognized by the dependent one when there is a breakup. It is easy to imagine, that breakups are frequent in this kind of possessive relationships, because the other person gets tired of the criticism, hostility, disdain, of doing always what the dominant person wants and of being aware how the dominant person denies any positive feeling towards himself or towards the others. When the breakup occurs, the dominant dependant reacts exactly the same as any other emotional dependant: he/she goes through a deep depression, begs his/her ex-partner to come back, he/she promises to change and recognizes how bad he has behaved.
A healthy love has its areas of autonomy.
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