Emotional Dependency: Feeling Good When Feeling Bad

When you are living the dreams, ambitions, and life models that belong to your parents, teachers, or partners, you live according to what you think is expected of you. It creates stress and imbalances in your body, mind, and spirit, affecting all general aspects of your life.

A state of emotional, mental or physical imbalance, experienced over a substantial period (even for a month or so) eventually becomes our second nature.

When you are living the dreams, ambitions, and life models that belong to your parents, teachers, or partners, you live according to what you think is expected of you. It creates stress and imbalances in your body, mind, and spirit, affecting all general aspects of your life.

A state of emotional, mental or physical imbalance, experienced over a substantial period (even for a month or so) eventually becomes our second nature. As we internalize our tribal dos, shoulds and do nots, our body/mind system identifies with these demands and changes our priorities according to other people’s needs and desires instead of following our own inclinations. We create an illusion of comfort through helping others, while a deep inner resentment and eventually a bottomless un-satisfaction begins to build up disrupting the graceful flow in our relationships.

Even if we have the best childhood and the most loving, attentive parents, we still experience the moments of shame or guilt and emotional manipulation during our first, most important years of development. Every critical interaction, every moment we feel that we are not living up to our parents’ expectations makes us a bit less confident and promotes the habit of pleasing others in order to prove our self-worth and experience acceptance and love. As we go through schooling, marriage, and raising our own children, we emanate these lower vibrations of fear, concern, and self-doubt. We start to worry about kids, or complain about life to people whom we love because these behaviors were the modeled ways to express love and compassion in our families.

Do you feel supported and cared for by the closest people in your family or by your romantic partners?
Are you taking your true Valentine to dinner or are you stuck with somebody that makes you feel insecure and worried just as your father (mother) did?
Do you like yourself when you are with your partner or you feel just the way you felt with your father (mother) and could never figure out how to please him(her)?

Lacking true, unconditional love and genuine interest in our lives, we look for people that may fulfill our need for inner safety and acceptance. Mistaking this need for a true love, we create all kinds of co-dependent relationships that remind us of our family of origin or reflect our own state of neediness. Even though these relationships keep us unbalanced, unhealthy and unhappy, they provide us with a familiar environment that we have learned to navigate.