"I read your letter..."

How are you? I read your letter and I was very pleased to see that you have been applying my advice and it is going great!

You reminded me about my promise to talk to you about emotional dependencies; sorry it took me this while to catch up, I hope what I write helps you there, in the distance.

You might agree with me on the fact that everybody needs someone who shows love and interest about us right? Being loved is one of the greatest experiences in life, it makes you feel special and worth it; unfortunately sometimes we feel no-one is willing to love us, at least no-one outside of our family circle, we find ourselves not having a best friend, not even close ones, most of the time this is real when you are in a new country or when you are just married, or even when the time passes and you have a family that absorbs all of your time; not having, or feeling that we don’t have those people in our lives makes us feel really sad and bad about ourselves.

So this is the thing, when someone appears, and that someone is offering us exactly what we were longing for, we don’t hesitate to accept him/her; we don’t really care who the person is, or the quality of the love he/she is offering, we are like a thirsty person in a desert, and that my friend, is how an emotional dependence begins.

It doesn’t matter how wonderful a relationship of any kind is at the beginning, it can turn out in something destructive for ourselves if we don’t handle them carefully.

You might be wondering how to know when we have an emotional dependence, well let’s define it exactly; an emotional dependence is when we believe that the presence of someone is mandatory for us to feel satisfied and secure.

Now, let’s go a little beyond and let’s try to think on the people that cause this feeling, and I think is quite safe to exclude our parents since it is a natural thing to feel that we need them in our lives, and even though we can develop an insane dependence of them I don’t think this is the case ok?

So, let’s think about the people who surround you and let’s see if our relationship with them fits into the following description:

·         Jealousy, I mean the feeling of wanting the person only for us, like exclusively, feeling really bad when his/her attention goes to someone else.

·         Preference on expending a big amount of time alone with that person and when it doesn’t happen it makes us feel bad.

·         When he/she tries to go away from us, we get mad or depressed, like when they are busy and cannot be with us as much as we want.

·         When we feel or think that we don’t need more friend and we don’t even try to get them.

·         To experience romantic/sexual feelings towards that person leading us to fantasies.

·         We pay attention to his/her appearance, behavior, interests etc.

·         We offer physical expressions of love beyond the accepted standard.

·         We cannot see their mistakes clearly. Despite of the fact that others can.

If you, my friend, have a relationship with someone with these characteristics, it means that you have developed or are in the way to develop an emotional dependence.

It is hard to accept that maybe we don’t love someone deeply and honestly but rather, we are just afraid of living without that person, we are afraid of accepting the possibility that we allowed him/her to become our whole world and it would feel empty if we stop seeing him/her.

Oh well, this was a long letter but I think we can discuss how to fix this the next time right? I am glad we are communicating, I am glad to know that our friendship is strong and sincere.

Take care of you my friend,

Diana