Monday 11 April 2016

Emotional Dependence - finding yourself

How to distinguish between love and emotional dependence

What makes the world go around; some say money and some say love. In short is the suns gravitational pull which rotates the earth, I am only joking. I say its love because without it, nothing would mean anything, not even money. Love is used to express a variety of different emotions. The word “love” is used way too often and more often when it should be used. Nether the less love does make this world a better place to live in.

We can use this word, to serve to our own advantages, especially when we have become emotionally dependent on a person. How would we know what we are feeling is emotional dependence or love. We need to be able to distinction the two.

Emotional dependency is when you seek a sense of fulfilment from something or someone. You seek love, security, approval or appreciation from another person. This is a way of feeling a sense of completeness in of our lives.

The things that we can get emotionally dependent on, is food, drugs, alcohol, money or work. This will eventually lead to being trapped, and it will turn our feelings into insecurities, depression, loneliness and unworthiness.

As a child is emotionally dependent on their parents for survival, we start repeating this pattern and we fail to “grow up” because of dependency on others. Most of the time this is done unconsciously and it’s important to see that this pattern governs us.

There is a lot of fear that is lurking behind our emotional dependency, and for a lot of us, the fear, is ourselves. We became afraid to be with alone with our self’s, we need distractions continually, and that tends to become the factors that set our emotionally dependency. The thoughts that we have, there is not escape from, and we are inclined to run away from ourselves to escape from our own thoughts, , we try to lose ourselves in our object of dependency.

We start looking in the wrong places for fulfilment, look within yourself; it’s not outside of you. Move through this fear and freedom will be just on the other side. There is no ways of escaping yourself. We live with ourselves 24/7.
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Don’t be afraid of loneliness, learn to love yourself.

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, which we ascribe to heaven.
~William Shakespeare


Often when we are emotionally dependent on someone, we are looking to them as a ‘filler’ to cover over and distract us from unresolved emotional issues in ourselves. In order to truly love someone, we first have to discover and explore what love is, and that means starting with the person you spend the most time with – yourself!

We can often name our shortcomings far quicker than our positive qualities, and we are very quick to beat ourselves up for anything we didn’t do to our satisfaction. This all has to change. Try every day to identify your positive qualities and bring them more to the fore and increase them, and when you do make a mistake, try and see it as a ‘work-in-progress’ rather than an absolute failure. When your own self-love and self-respect increases, you are then able to approach relationships with others with much more equanimity.

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There is no mistaking love. You feel it in your heart. It is the common fibre of life, the flame of that heats our soul, energizes our spirit and supplies passion to our lives. It is our connection to God and to each other.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross


Along with the word ‘love’, the word ‘heart’ is often dragged in to many conversations and used to describe all manner of behaviour good and bad. When we talk about the heart we mean the space in the middle of the chest we point to when we say ‘this is me’ – the place we feel the essence of our being more than anywhere else. It is also where most of our higher and nobler qualities emanate from – empathy, kindness and love.

Emotional attachment on the other hand is a tangled up array of feelings from the mind and also from the emotional part of our being located closer to the navel. Because the sources of love and emotional attachment are located so close together, they can and are often confused by the undiscerning person.

However, setting aside some time each day for a practice of self-discovery and self-enquiry (e.g. meditation) will very quickly enable you to distinguish one from the other.

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“When your love is pure or spiritual, there is no demand, no expectation. There is only the sweetest feeling of spontaneous oneness with the human being or beings concerned.”
Sri Chinmoy


Social anthropologists often describe many human relationships like a contract – we give our love to a person and at the same time we subconsciously place all kinds of expectations on that person which we want them to fulfil. And then when the other person fails to sufficiently satisfy our demands (which will definitely happen from time to time – we’re all imperfect) we feel let down and angry with the person, our insecurity and fear of not being loved come to the fore, and we often resort to some kind of emotional manipulation to try and get them to fulfil our demands.

True love, on the other hand is like the sun. The sun shines its rays and gives its warmth to all and sundry, without anything in return. This may sound like naivety to the calculating mind, but when we live in the heart we feel exactly like the sun does – we just want spread our love and goodwill anywhere we can. With this kind of love we have detachment – we have no fixed ideas about what way this love should be taken by others, the mere act of giving love satisfies our heart immensely.

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Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go.
Hermann Hesse

Often we place mental restrictions on people we love, whether it is parents ‘living their dreams’ through their children, or someone ‘trapped’ in a relationship. True love means loving people for who they are, not trying to channel them into who you want them to be. The greatest service you can do to one whom you love is allow them to grow in to their soul’s highest potential – sometimes this will mean actively helping them, but other times this will mean recognising when you are standing in the way of that happening and getting out of the way!

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“Patience serves as a protection against wrong as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you.”
Leonardo Da Vinci


To develop love, we also have developed forgiveness and patience. To forgive someone, it helps to see beyond their surface imperfections and appreciate the beauty that lies deep within. Love always goes hand in hand with this recognition of inner beauty inside a person, and when we can see this inner beauty in a person and appreciate it, we help bring that beauty to the fore and perhaps prevent whatever unfortunate thing that person might have done from occurring again.


This world of ours can seem like a downright unfair place at times, but developing this quality of love for everyone you meet allows you to rise above ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ that people might throw at you and still keep your faith in humanity intact.

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To be happy in our life’s we need to free ourselves from all kinds of emotional dependency.

We need to find a way to stop being emotional dependent and become “whole” again.To be free of emotionally dependency, we need to go on that journey to find our “true self”. We need to know what has made us the person that we are today.

Most of us have no idea who we really are and become dependent on a “self-image”. A self-image is an idea and it needs “content” to keep it alive, and the “content” is what we get from others, those we are dependent on for a sense of fulfilment. That self-image is usually negative, and if not will turn negative.

Find out whom you really are, your truth, and you will be free of emotional dependence for a sense of identity. Are you just a person? Is that not just an idea? Who you are is free, liberated already, and completely free of all dependence.

Let go of your ideas and seek to find your true nature, your true “being” and you will find freedom there. You cannot be truly free until you find out the truth of who you really are, that’s what “awakening” or enlightenment is all about (don’t be scared of the words). Enlightenment is simply to return to who you are and function from there.

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Don’t Push Away Your Source of Emotional Dependence – Most people, when they realize that they are emotionally dependent on something or someone, tend to force it out of their life. What they eventually end up doing is replace one source of emotional dependence with another. For example, if you were emotionally dependent on alcohol, you might push it away forcefully, and end up feeling empty which you will then till to fill up through a relationship, sex or some form of entertainment.

Unless you realize that the root cause of emotional dependence is ignorance of the truth of who you really are, it will just keep taking new forms. You can only truly feel fulfilment in your true self, in your being. There is a deep sense of rest, peace and fulfilment in your being, and when you reside there, you slowly move back to true self. Your true self is free of “dependence” and so it enjoys life freely. When you get a taste of how your true self really experiences life, you will surprised that it’s completely different from the way you’re “me” perceives life.

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Overcoming emotional dependence is not about finding “fault” with yourself, and changing it, but it’s more about using it as a guidance to find out what truly lies on the other side of the fear or insecurity that was causing the dependence. You can overcome all forms of emotional dependence when you find your true resting place, which is in your own being. The paradox is that when you let go of emotional dependence, all things come to you easily and you will experience an abundance of everything that you previously lacked, but you will not be dependent of any of them, you will just enjoy them from a place of fulfilment which you find in your being.

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