How to Get Rid of Your Emotional Dependency on Other People

“There is nothing worse than feeling dependent on other people. Dependency makes you vulnerable to all kinds of emotions — betrayal, disappointment, frustration — that play havoc with your mental balance. Being self-reliant is critical. “ — Robert Greene

Since I was a kid, I have had issues with not feeling in control, and I wanted to be in control. This was mainly in relation to other people and I realised there were two ways to achieve this:

Find a way to control other people.

But I quickly realised no matter how much you try, it’s impossible to control another person entirely. All humans have free will.

Find a way to control my attachment to other people

Similarly, you cannot gain complete control of this, but personally, I believe you can come close. (Although just how close you can get probably depends on your personality and attachment style.)

Here are the steps to take to reduce or get rid of your emotional dependency:

1. Reframe abandonment

People often act like abandonment is the worst thing ever; that if they lose someone, it’s the end of the world or something. Looking at it from a rational perspective, this has always baffled me. Think about it — relationships end all the time. People go through messy divorces where kids are involved or lose their partners to disease or a freak accident. And in the end, most manage to deal with it and move on. In fact, people go through much worse traumatic events than abandonment and manage to work through them.

Abandonment is one of those things that seem like a big deal, but if you look back a couple of years down the road, you will fail to see why you made a big deal out of it in the first place because everybody moves on eventually. The belief that a break-up is the worst thing that happened to you is what keeps people stuck ruminating for longer than they should. Instead, try to see abandonment as a normal event in life — something you must go through multiple times actually. And the more you go through it, the easier it will get because you will realise that it wasn’t the end of the world after all, and you managed to work through it.

I believe abandonment is essentially fear of pain as it involves withdrawal. Love is like a drug — we feel high off it, and we are happy when we are in love, but when it ends, we miss the other person and become depressed. Now, we have to get used to this new reality where the other person doesn’t exist. People fear going through the withdrawal and depression, so they try to keep the toxic relationship going as much as possible. But, in reality, every moment you are in contact with the person will make the withdrawal worse. And if it’s a relationship that is not working, the sooner you let go, the quicker you will get over it.

2. Develop Object Constancy

“To develop this skill, we mature into the understanding that our caregiver is simultaneously a loving presence and a separate individual who could walk away.”

Many people mistakenly believe that when you lack object constancy, it is a case of “out of sight, out of mind”. In fact, the opposite is true. If you don’t have object constancy, it means you cannot withstand relational ambiguity and are consumed by worrying about potential rejection and abandonment. In other words, when someone is out of sight, they are constantly on your mind.

Object inconstancy is the result of black and white thinking. Most of our insecurities, anxieties, depressive thoughts and weaknesses are due to having a primitive way of looking at the world. I have explained why black and white thinking renders someone insecure here:

When we are black and white, we cannot perceive the other person’s good and bad qualities simultaneously. Therefore, when they are gone or have done something to upset us, we immediately perceive them as bad. In comparison, object constancy allows us to trust that our bond with those close to us remains whole even when they are not physically around. The same is true even when they are frustrated with us and we argue. When our thinking is not black and white, and we can see the nuances, someone’s absence does not mean disappearance or abandonment, only temporary distance.

The way to fix black and white thinking is to learn how to mentalise. For many people, this is easy and will come naturally because they have emotions such as empathy, guilt and remorse, which allow them to internalise. However, for many others, due to having experienced childhood trauma, they are lacking in these emotions, and they need to learn how to mentalise to compensate.

I have explained how to do this in these two articles:

3. Objectify people and realise no one is special

We always idealise our intimate partners and render them unique and special. Of course, this is true, and everyone is unique in their own way. But at the same time, this is what we do to every single one of our intimate partners throughout our lives. When we love someone, this causes us to see them differently. We feel that they were perfect or “the one” and will never find someone like them after a break-up. Until that is, we fall in love with the next person.

You need to recognise that there are 7.9 billion people in the world, and there will always be someone else even if you let go of someone. There is nothing that makes someone so special that you shouldn’t be able to let go. There will be someone else in the future who understands you and makes you feel the same way.

Actually, if you start analysing the patterns, you will realise that you tend to fall for people who have the traits of both your parents. People you have developed feelings for in the past will tend to be quite similar personality-wise — not exactly the same but similar. This is the reason why people who grew up with abusive parents end up in abusive relationships again and again — we go towards what’s familiar. In other words, your partner is not that special and there are others with similar traits to him.

What makes someone special is how you develop together over time. If your relationship is heading towards a break-up, then this person was not that special or “the one” because if they were, your relationship would continue.

4. Control your inner world instead of other people

The best and quickest way to emotional freedom is to learn to control your inner world instead of other people. For example, when someone doesn’t text us back, most of us freak out and try to reach out to the person more to get them to respond to us. In other words, most of us try to control the other person’s actions (for example, by forcing them to text us back more quickly) to soothe ourselves.

Instead of this, try to focus on your emotional reaction to the fact that you haven’t received a text back. Think about the worst thing that can happen — they no longer like you as much, and they are going to leave you. Try to be okay with that. The world is filled with people, and no relationship is supposed to be permanent. We will all be separated either by our own decision or death. It was meant to be if your relationship is heading towards a break-up. In fact, the sooner it breaks off, the better it is because now you can concentrate on finding someone else.

What I’m trying to say is that even the worst-case scenario is not that bad. Control your own inner world by trying to accept every possible scenario. If you have object constancy and don’t have black and white thinking, this is so much easier to do because you have a solid inner core that is resilient.

I have explained how to make your mind more resilient here:

5. Choose to depend instead of depending

Finally, change the way you view dependency. You should never depend on someone because you have no choice but to. This means you are relying on this person from a position of weakness. Instead, you need to depend on people because you have taken the time to get to know them, decided that you trust them and you want to. Choosing to depend and dependency are completely different things. One comes from strength and resilience because you can tolerate the ambiguity of human relationships. The other is an indicator of weakness because it comes from deep insecurities that give you no choice but to depend.

I have discussed this further here:

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