Do you feel that you love more than you are loved? Do you believe that you cannot live without someone? Do you feel lonely and empty without that person? Do you harbor feelings of jealousy and possessiveness towards your partner? Does your body tremble at the thought of a breakup or do you have extreme anxiety if that person doesn’t answer the phone? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may be emotionally dependent.
For an emotionally dependent person, anything goes for love. What they don’t know, however, is that they confuse something else with this feeling: need. It springs from a deep emptiness that lives in their chest and threatens to devour them — loneliness.
Thus, the emotionally dependent person becomes a true addict: as in other addictions, they need continuous and increasing doses of their substance, passionate love. Intense as a hurricane, this feeling pours a torrent of chemicals into the bloodstream.
The emotional addict believes that their worth, happiness, and security depend on the other person. They feel empty when they are alone, they feel that their life has no meaning if it does not revolve around someone else. But they do not choose just any partner: the emotional addict is the “rotten finger” of social jargon.
Why do these people always choose those who will make them suffer?
This happens because the emotionally dependent person needs the fear of not being chosen and the possibility of being replaced. Only in this way can they contrast with the ecstasy of being chosen. This feeling makes them feel special when they are with that person. “He had many women, but he chose me” — she will say to herself.
However, any threat will make them tremble. It will make them invest more, becoming suffocating.
Emotionally dependent people often have a history of idealizing their partner. Even if everyone tries to warn them otherwise, they believe that the chosen person is wonderful and will refuse to see any signs of anything that proves otherwise. To do this, they will fight with friends and family, if necessary. They become reclusive in a loneliness that will worsen their dependence. Everything works like a domino falling.
Just as they idealize the qualities of this person, they will also create expectations about the relationship. They create an illusion of how they want to be loved, how the partner must be to feel loved and valued.
The emotionally dependent person wants, at all costs, for their partner to achieve their internal goals, guided by the idealization they make of them, the way they imagine they should be or how love should be, but which they never achieve. As a result, they will have the frustration that will turn into guilt, because the emotionally dependent person believes that they have not done enough. Their main characteristic is their extreme dedication.
It happens that these people, very often, grew up in homes where they were exposed to high demands charged as a price for the love of those who should take care of them. They discovered, from a very early age, that they needed to be perfect to be loved and, since then, they do not know how to be different. All they know is how to serve, so they will choose a partner who becomes a perfect fit: a narcissist. Or else they had to mature too early.
Emotional dependence appears when one abandons oneself, when one believes that there is no other way to be loved than through the eyes of another. Everyone depends, to some extent, on the approval of someone else. However, for the emotionally dependent person, this need is vital.
Love that comes from fear is not love, it is need. There is no greater loneliness than the lack of oneself. Therefore, if you are emotionally dependent, know that the love you need is and always has been right there, inside you!
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© 2024 Lost in My Soul
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Light and Love from my Soul to Yours! 🤍
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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Photo credit: Created to Lost in My Soul by Filipa Kinomoto with Midjourney
