“After the kiss, Sleeping Beauty discovered an infamous mother-in-law, a not-so-charming prince and not-so-defenseless children. That is, life itself. If this ending that Ana María Matute reinvented was only one point and followed, the story could perhaps continue like this:
“Sleeping Beauty she felt disappointed and cheated. She had wasted too much of her life waiting for Prince Charming. So instead of sinking into grief and anger, she thought it was time to be brave and make decisions.
He left the palace, looked for work and settled in the big city. He changed his name, he quickly adapted and made many friends, he returned to idealizing love and becoming disappointed, found his better half several timesbut she was never alone. Since she really enjoyed the present and her people, she forgot about happy endings and never ended up eating partridges.
But this Sleeping Beauty, independent and determined, is not the protagonist of the story that was read to us when we were children. women often suffer more emotional dependence than menin our relationships, because we have been educated to give more importance to love and the couple.
What is emotional dependency?
Emotional dependency is a potent mix of many fears: fear of commitment, fear of falling in love, fear of betrayal, fear of not finding a partner, of being stopped loving, because one of the greatest terrors that inhabit us is the fear of loneliness.
More common in women
We generally we are more romantic: Since we were teenagers, we spend hours imagining the encounter with Prince Charming, reading love stories, talking to our friends about our sentimental problems, watching movies, writing diaries… And, above all, we love living intense romances.
With the stories that are told to us when we were little we learn to delegate our happiness in the arrival of a prince charming who changes our lives, that is why we suffer a lot if this does not happen, if it is not as we expected or if, after a while, he decides to separate from us and asks us to leave the palace.
Isolation makes us vulnerable
They teach us to fear loneliness and they tell us that without love we are nothing: it is not surprising that we depend too much on it, since we have learned that it is the only thing that matters in life. We dedicate a lot of time and energy to finding a partner and, therefore, when we have one, we fear losing it and we cling to it as if it were an oxygen bottle, essential for our survival.
In many movies, the protagonists are alone. They do not have networks of affection around them to help them, that’s why they need prince charming. They never appear with their mothers, sisters, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, friends, neighbors… Isolation makes them more vulnerable and more in need of love, because their happiness depends on just one person.
Emotional dependency makes us believe that we do not deserve loveThat is why jealousy and the desire for possession arise. The more insecure we are and the more complex we have, the more we need to control the other person.
9 keys to overcome emotional dependence
Love only makes sense if we free ourselves from fear and love from freedom. A love that not dependency based It is one in which we can love without losing our personality, without giving up our autonomy, without establishing relationships of domination and submission with the other person.
1. Take relationships easy
The fear of loneliness sometimes leads us to rush when choosing a good partner. It’s too painful to fall in love and realize that we don’t really know him, that he cheated on us and we were wrong.
That is why it is essential take some time to analyze if the relationship that we are going to start is worth it, if it is really so wonderful, if the balance of virtues and defects compensates us. It is convenient to move slowly, give more importance to behaviors than to the beautiful words that are said in full ecstasy,
2. Learn to turn the page
Another of the keys to emotional dependence is the inability to let go of the past, the burden of traumas and shortcomings that we carry from childhood. It is not easy at all; some of us have to work at it for years, or even a lifetime. We failed to make a clean slate!
3. Don’t expect anyone to save you
We cannot wait for our prince to save us, heal us or assume our problems or shortcomings, or to protect us from the pain and fears that inhabit us inside. The path to healing or overcoming is our responsibility, and we have to undertake it with joy, with strength, with the desire to free ourselves from all the burdens of the past to walk lightly through our present.
4. Take her down from the pedestal
To avoid dependency, it is also important build balanced and horizontal links. We often put our partner on a pedestal and feel inferior. We sacrifice ourselves for the other, we continually try to please them, we put up with painful situations and we behave submissively in the face of conflicts.
5. Share the burden of care
Besides, we assume the load of the house, raising and educating children to free the other from their responsibilities, without worrying about our health and our need for rest. We are capable of giving up over and over again, of giving in, of giving all the power to the other so that he remains with us, so that there are no problems, so that he establishes the rules of the game of love.
6. Be yourself
And then we realize that by falling in love we lose part of our personality. We discover that we are not showing ourselves as we are. By shrinking and losing independence, we lose attractiveness, even though we do so thinking that this way they might love us more.
Trapped in that relationship, we become weak, infantilized beings, victims and victimizers who beg for love and attention. When we lose all our autonomy to be loved more, we are falling into a trap; well canceling ourselves out as people doesn’t make us sexierbut more boring and predictable: usually, people fall in love with happy, active people, with initiative, with vital energy to move around the world.
7. Learn to love in the present
When fear possesses us, the need for acceptance and recognition is continuous. Sometimes we find it hard to believe that someone wants to stay by our side, even we forbid ourselves the right to enjoy love. For fear that they will stop loving us, we cannot even enjoy being loved in the present.
8. And to love yourself
To be able to love from generosity, respect, mutual care and deep love we have to love ourselveswhich also means accepting ourselves and working to improve what we don’t like about ourselves.
9. Enjoy company and solitude
Practicing loving self-criticism consists of lovingly analyzing ourselves and freeing ourselves from the fears that make us dependent people… to feel better with ourselves, to learn to relate from freedom and not from necessityto learn to enjoy solitude and company, of life whether or not we have a partner.