All human beings are born dependent. Babies need someone to carry them around, feed them, nurture them, and love them. With every passing year, the mentally healthy child grows more independent. They learn to walk by themselves, feed themselves, make their own relationships, and self soothe. They keep learning until they ultimately leave the safe cocoon of home and spread their wings to fly into adulthood. At least, that is the ideal ultimate situation when raising a child.
Healthy methods of parenting are instrumental in achieving a child’s success. A child that learns healthy dependency has healthy independence later in life. However, some people do not get the necessary ingredients for healthy independence in their early lives. Instead, they develop dependent personalities. In his article, “Codependence and the Dependent Personality Disorder,” Sam Vaknin outlines the four types of dependent personality disorders.
Codependency centered around abandonment anxiety
This type of dependency is characterized by clinginess, smothering, panic, and self-negating submissiveness. The sufferer has difficulty with simply being alone. They constantly need their partner close to them. They rarely start things themselves for fear of doing something by themselves.
Codependency centered around a fear of losing control
People that have this type of dependent personality disorder will go to great lengths to keep their partners on a short leash. They present themselves as helpless and needy so they receive constant attention. In order to keep control over their situation, they even go as far as to threaten and blackmail their partners.
Vicarious dependency
These codependents live through others. They don’t have too many interests outside of their relationships and lack a personal history. They do not pursue their wishes, preferences and dreams because they are too wrapped up in someone else’s.
Counterdependency
Counterdependency is quite the opposite of the past three examples, but is still a result of a lack of healthy depency. They are independent to a fault. Unable to maintain intimate relationships, they are locked into “approach-avoidance” cycles. An “approach-avoidance” cycle is where the counterdependent approaches an intimate relationship, thinking that they might tolerate it, but once they get into it, they feel enslaved, causing the avoidance.
If you think you may know someone who suffers from a form of dependent personality disorder, you may want to equip yourself with the tools to spot the signs.
Here are “8 Signs of Dependent Personality Disorder” according to Emily Lockheart:
- Appearing needy particularly in front of the person on whom they depend. They do this in order to keep that person close to them.
- Separation anxiety: feeling lost without their person and struggling to deal with their absence.
- Struggling with choices: they find it very hard to make decisions, both big and small, without the input of their partner. This gets in the way of normal daily functions.
- Poor decision making that tends to hurt them just to satisfy the other person’s wishes
- Shutting others out to focus all of their attention of the other person and effectively distancing themselves from relationships with family and friends who care about them
- Avoidance of responsibilities they abandon important duties that encourage healthy independence such as networking for their career. This may put their employment in jeopardy.
- Devastation when relationship ends: it may take months or even years for them to see their value outside of their past relationship.
- Tolerance for mistreatment: allowing a partner to consistently mistreat them without consequence is a visible sign of dependent personality disorder
From a Mind Map Perspective
We need the necessary ingredients for healthy dependency in order to form healthy independency. Like butterflies, we need to form solid cocoons early on in life to be able to spread our wings. Through attunement and secure attachment by our primary caregivers, we form our sturdy cocoons that we can launch out of.
When the development of healthy independency is stunted by our parents, we tend to either depend on others or push them away to a fault later in life. We employ defense mechanisms such as clinginess, self-detrimental decision making, and an “approach-avoid” cycle of repetition in an attempt to patch up the “holes in our souls”. The “hole in the soul” phenomenon happens when our parents inflict one of the 5 childhood wounds (neglect, smothering, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and verbal abuse). If we can look into our past and current relationships and spot the signs of unhealthy attachment, then we can paradigm shift into a healthier lifestyle. Healing begins when we form healthy relationships in which all parties benefit and we can happily be alone with the person that needs love the most: ourselves.
