Title: Emotional Dependency or Emotional Responsibility Author: Margaret Paul, Ph.D. E-mail: mailto:margaret@innerbonding.com Copyright: © 2004 by Margaret Paul URL: http://www.innerbonding.com Word Count: 794 Category: Emotional Healing, Personal Growth

Emotional Dependency or Emotional Responsibility By Margaret Paul, Ph.D.

Emotional dependency means getting one’s good feelings from outside oneself. It means needing to get filled from outside rather than from within. Who or what do you believe is responsible for your emotional wellbeing?

There are numerous forms of emotional dependency:

* Dependence on substances, such as food, drugs, or alcohol, to fill emptiness and take away pain.

* Dependency on processes such as spending, gambling, or TV, also to fill emptiness and take away pain.

* Dependence on money to define one’s worth and adequacy.

* Dependence on getting someone’s love, approval, or attention to feel worthy, adequate, lovable, and safe.

* Dependence on sex to fill emptiness and feel adequate.

When you do not take responsibility for defining your own adequacy and worth or for creating your own inner sense of safety, you will seek to feel adequate, worthy and safe externally. Whatever you do not give to yourself, you may seek from others or from substances or processes. Emotional dependency is opposite of taking personal responsibility for one’s emotional wellbeing. Yet many people have no idea that this is their responsibility, nor do they have any idea how to take this responsibility.

What does it mean to take emotional responsibility rather than be emotionally dependent?

Primarily, it means recognizing that our feelings come from our own thoughts, beliefs and behavior, rather than from others or from circumstances. Once you understand and accept that you create your own feelings, rather than your feelings coming from outside yourself, then you can begin to take emotional responsibility.

For example, let’s say someone you care about gets angry at you.

1. Myth: Once you're born, all you can look forward to is a long and steady loss of brain cells.

REALITY: “Stem” cells in brain can create new neurons, and idle neurons will extend their branches to carry signals to and from other neurons indefinitely, under right conditions.

2. MYTH: We can’t get smarter as we age.

REALITY: Mice in an enriched environment (new toys and playmates), increased 4000 new neurons in hippocampus (crucial to memory and learning) compared to 2400 in control group. Older mice’s brains also got bigger and better quickly! (Diamond and Rosenzweig, Elizabeth Gould, Princeton)

3. MYTH: Creativity diminishes with age.

REALITY: According to Ralph Warner, author of “Get a Life: You Don’t Need a Million to Retire Well,” “older artists often do well, commonly experiencing a sustained burst of exciting creativity after 65.”

4. MYTH: There isn’t much you can do to avoid Alzheimer’s.

REALITY: According to David Snowden, Ph.D., “Aging with Grace,” hardworking brains (the ones that keep learning new challenging things) do well because their stimulated cells branch frequently. This results in millions of new synapses so brain actually becomes larger and a larger brain can cope better with effects of brain diseases, like Alzheimer’s and strokes. Theoretically because it has more active tissue, and therefore a greater number of ways to work around diseased or damaged areas.

5. MYTH: What you’ve got, is all you’ll ever get.

REALITY: According to Paula Tallal, Rutgers neuroscientist, “You create your brain from input you get,” i.e., intellectual stimulation strengthens brain because in normal course of living, our brains constantly reorganize themselves, which is called neuroplasticity.” Neuroplasticity accelerates with amount and complexity of new information our brains receive.