The Hidden Faces of Dependency
It may seem that a person who avoids commitment may have nothing in common with someone that continuously clings to others. Or, yet another person that finds themselves committing to a relationship, starting a family, only to end up feeling unfulfilled and discontent.
Whilst these life stories may be very different, they originate from the same place—dependency.
Dependency is normally associated with features such as: over-reliance on others, the need for guidance, fears of rejection or abandonment, avoidance of conflict, or a tendency to please others. But this is merely on the surface.
Dependency has other, more subtle, often unseen, but devastating features. Someone struggling with dependency may find themselves engaging in unfulfilling relationships or over-committing at their own detriment. Or the opposite, they may shy away from commitment. A person may feel unable to sustain any meaningful relationship, which often leads to a life of solitude and an experience of aloneness even when surrounded by others.
Experiencing a pattern of abusive relationships or relationships where one is in some way used or abused can also be an indicator of dependency.
Dependency from a Narrow Perspective
Dependency is normally associated with interpersonal dependency—so, dependency in relationships. This is often expressed as one’s need for guidance, attention, or approval from others. It can manifest itself as neediness, clinginess, and often comes with aversion to conflict, rejection, and separation.
Dependent individuals tend to have difficulties making life or even everyday decisions. They often experience indecisiveness and tend to adopt opinions of others.
Dependency, however, is not merely an issue of relationships. It is a part of personality and runs deep within the psyche. Whilst it may impact relationships, it primarily affects one’s sense of self, self-esteem, and identity (Birtchnell, 1984, 1988).
Someone struggling with dependency may have an experience of inadequacy and inability to tackle adult life as though they have not had the chance to fully grow up. Helplessness, hopelessness, and the experience of being alone are also common (Zivkovic, 2023).
Symptoms Associated with Dependency
In terms of symptoms, dependency is often associated with social and performance anxiety, depression and eating disorders (Bornstein, 1994, 2001).
It also manifests itself as physical illness (Bornstein, 2012), somatisation (i.e., experiencing feelings and internal conflicts through bodily sensations, pain, or illness) (Lingiardi & McWilliams, 2017), or hypochondriac fears (i.e., paranoid fears of being or becoming ill).
Alcohol and drug abuse are also common addictions associated with the underlying dependency.
In relationships, when both partners struggle with dependency, it may cause codependency and increases the risk of abusive relationships. It may be present as a personality feature both with the victims of abuse as well as with the perpetrators (Bornstein, 2012).
Relationships characterised by dependency are often experienced as unfulfilling or as something one is destined to endure.
In the case of loss of an important other—either romantic partner or a parent—prolonged grief may occur.
Excessive Independence and Self-sufficiency
Paradoxically, dependency can hide itself beneath excessive independence (Zivkovic, 2023), also known as pseudo-self-sufficiency (Gabbard & Crisp-Han, 2016) or as inflexible independence (Bornstein, 1998).
Excessive independence stems from an individual’s unconscious disavowal of any dependency that they may experience on another. And, because it is an unconscious defence, the individual is often completely oblivious of their underlying dependency, living under the illusion that they are independent, self-sufficient, and not needing anyone.
Even more, an excessively independent person may experience others as clingy, needy, or having to be taken care of. They may feel trapped in the relationship and needing to put their own needs aside. This may further fuel their feelings of resenting others for being needy and needing care (Zivkovic, 2023).
We can see that dependency can take many forms. It influences a person’s sense of self, their relationships, and may be the causing factor to many symptoms.
The Less Conscious Manifestations of Dependency
The Carer
The psychological roots of dependency are outside of immediate awareness and may manifest themselves in less overt and unconscious ways.
For instance, a person that engages in relationships where they find themselves continuously meeting other people’s needs, taking care of others, and selflessly giving themselves to others, may present with such traits because of their own underlying dependency.
Pleasing others is merely a tool to avoid rejection and the experience of abandonment or aloneness. This kind of attendance to others’ needs can be observed in familial, social, or romantic relationships.
Infantility
Infantility and experiencing the world from an infantile child-like place is a common indicator of dependency. With the individuals that are more overtly “needy” and “clingy”, this may be closer to their awareness and the awareness of those around them. Those that tend to disavow their dependency and adopt a role of a self-sufficient carer, on the other hand, are less in touch with their infantile parts.
Through psychotherapy, however, the underlying dependency and infantility may quickly surface into awareness and the person may see how their role of a carer was in fact performed from a child-like place rather than from a place of an autonomous adult.
Infantility may also present itself through conflicts related to psychological separation from one’s primary family or their caregivers. As an adult, an individual may be overly preoccupied with their relationship with one or both of their parents, or the entire family, having trouble allocating emotional investment, attention and love between the primary family, on one hand, and their romantic relationships or secondary family, on the other. This may in turn cause further problems in the person’s romantic relationships as the partner perceives this as a lack of commitment.
Fear of Commitment
Fear of commitment is one of the most prevalent characteristics of dependency and, whilst for some, this may be something they may be aware of, for others, it may be deeply unconscious.
A person may find themselves re-enacting a particular pattern of engaging and ending relationships, continuously feeling either disappointed, rejected, unseen, used, etc. Whilst at the initial stages of the relationship, hope or even a sense of infatuation may be present, hopelessness and disappointment usually follow. Feeling unseen, or as though the missing puzzle has not been filled, often prevails one’s experience as the relationship progresses. After the relationship has ended, however, feelings of purposelessness, meaninglessness, emptiness, hopelessness, or loneliness may emerge util eventually the same cycle restarts.
Often the fear of commitment may be completely unconscious. For instance, one may experience themselves as longing and being open to commitment, however, ending up feeling unable to meet the kind of person that they can connect with, or being continuously disappointed in romantic relationships. In search of the perfect other, a person may continuously end relationships or may be inclined to remain in a relationship but may simultaneously refuse to take the relationship further until they feel safe to do so—a moment that never comes. This may come with a sense of fear of rejection or abandonment arising out of the increased vulnerability stimulated by the commitment.
The fear of commitment often arises out of an internal conflict between, on one hand, striving for the proximity of others and longing for relationships—mainly to avoid the experience of aloneness, confusion, disorientation, or feeling lost—and, on the other hand, an experience of loss of freedom and life’s potential, along with feeling entrapped.
The conflict between freedom and the loss of it is one of the most characteristic features of dependency. As a person constantly strives for freedom, they will need to avoid commitment to keep this strive alive. On the other hand, committing will often evoke uncomfortable feelings of settling, being trapped, submitting to lifeless life, experience of mediocrity, boredom, pointlessness, and meaninglessness, and simultaneously, being vulnerable to control and rejection. So, for the prospects of freedom to remain alive forever a person needs to destroy the relationships they build.
Endless Search for Fulfilment
As these internal patterns are explored in psychotherapy, they often reveal unconscious motivations and beliefs in the form of unconscious fantasies.
Someone may, completely outside of their awareness, continuously search for a particular feeling, experience, or a characteristic in the other. It is a way of keeping the fantasy of reaching an ideal—ideal life, ideal relationship, ideal identity—alive.
However, such search is inevitably unsuccessful. It often ends in disappointment and reinitiating of the same cycle. The time spent in this cycle is then experienced as lost time, the realisation of which often evokes a sense of grief.
Unfulfilling Relationships
As dependency is analysed, it often reveals itself as the main cause for one’s engagement in unfulfilling or even abusive relationships. This involves feeling stuck or a hostage of a romantic relationship where an individual’s needs are continuously unmet. A person may desperately wish to escape it but experiences themselves as unable to do so.
It is not uncommon to see that someone that may have had a history of short relationships which may have ended due to their unwillingness to commit, may through the years of failed commitments, wish to settle down. They may even jump into a relationship and start a family only to find themselves unfulfilled, empty, and hopeless over the outlook of their future.
Dependency runs deep and forms an integrative part of a person’s personality functioning. Whist behavioural changes, such as changes to the relationships or a decision to start meeting one’s needs, may have some effect, the results are usually limited to behaviour and short-lived unless the internal conflicts that underpin dependency are also resolved.
Ales Zivkovic, MSc, Psychotherapist
Related:
Codependency and the Dynamics of Codependent Relationships
References:
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