The Effect of Emotional Dependency on Our Communication

[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to Emotional the Next Step in recovery with Dr. Alan Berger and Tom Rutledge. I'm here with Alan and we're going to do a two parter. A really relevant theme to emotional sobriety and what we talk about every week. First up is the effect of emotional dependency on our communication. And maybe the best way to start Alan, is defining emotional dependency. What does that look like? [00:00:32] Speaker B: Well, you know, one of the things that Bill described when he was writing his letter to the person in California who was struggling with depression and trying to answer the question, can the steps help with depression? He said that he brought forth the idea that emotional sobriety is really his answer. Right. It's this gentleman's answer. And that's where Bill has found his freedom, in some of the concepts he discovered about emotional sobriety. And what he was saying when he was defining it, he called it real maturity and balance, which is to say humility in relationship to ourselves, to others and to God. I would also add in relationship to life itself. Right. So what was he meaning when he said real maturity? So when I researched that, the best definition of maturation, emotional maturation, that I could find was a definition that was brought forth by Dr. Fritz Perls. And what Dr. Perls said is that maturity is the transcendence of environmental support to self support. Well, what is environmental support? It means that I am looking to my environment to support my existence, to support my being. That is a very, very normal condition in becoming a human being because we are completely dependent. When we're in the womb, you and I are unable to provide the oxygen that we need in our. In our blood. Our mother does that through the umbilical cord. We cannot go out and forage for food or hunt. We're really completely hooked and dependent, fused with our mother for all support for everything. [00:02:30] Speaker A: Literally. [00:02:31] Speaker B: Literally. So, you know, when we talk about emotional dependency, what we're talking about is that we failed to move from this environmental support consciousness to self support. Now what does that mean? What is self support? Well, some examples of it are biological, are. They're pretty clear and that's why I use them, is that when you're born, you actually start supporting yourself. The first thing you do is breathe. You take in the oxygen from the environment around you. So we're still in relationship and need the environment. But I take the responsibility by breathing, inhaling and exhaling to take the oxygen and interact with the environment and give it back carbon dioxide. [00:03:20] Speaker A: That's amazing. That's really the first. That's the first step towards independence. Is our first breaths. Yeah. [00:03:26] Speaker B: And that is. It's our first act of self support. And it's the first of many. And see, what is important for everybody to hear is that we do that naturally. Now, obviously, if something's wrong and the child's a premature baby, then it has to be put in a nicu and the machine has to breathe for it until it gets to the point where it's able to support its own breathing through, you know, the fact that the lungs mature more, the central nervous system matures and all that stuff. But let's say a child is born, quote, normal, meaning an intact central nervous system, and they're mature enough to support themselves, they're going to start breathing automatically. I see that, Patrick, is our life force. You see, I believe that each of us possesses a force that wants us to become what we can be, that wants us to move towards this individuality, towards self support, towards being a whole person. And being a whole person means that I take responsibility for my existence. Well, early on, we can't do that other than breathing. At some point, we feed ourselves. We want to walk around a one year of age. We don't want to be held and carried everywhere. We want to, you know, take ourselves for, you know, move ourselves through this world to ambulate, and we start to walk around one. Now, when we do that, we don't master it right away. We make many mistakes. In fact, we make a lot. You've [00:05:07] Speaker A: had a front row seat lately. [00:05:09] Speaker B: That's right. I've had a front row seat with four children. And how many mistakes do you make and I make when we were trying to do that? As many as we needed to. You see, that's the wonderful thing, is that if you don't have a part of your brain that's telling you you should be like this or you should be like that, you're going to do what you can until you master the skill that you're trying to master. Now, this is where the problem comes in, is we're doing this. We're supporting ourselves physically, biologically. Some point in time, we take ourselves to the bathroom. You know, we take care of our own business, we clean ourselves, all those things we want to do. A child wants to take that responsibility. Now, emotionally, we have the same force inside of us that moves there, but emotionally it's not instinctual. Now, we are dependent on our environment for a certain emotional climate that would support our development, to be able to support ourselves. Unfortunately, Patrick, not many of us get that. If anyone. I'm starting to believe nobody really does, at least in our culture. An example can be like, let's say little Cece comes home from art class, and this just shows you where the problem begins or lies or is perpetuated. She comes in and she says, daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, look at what I did today in our class. And she comes running up with a picture. Now, I want to be a good father. So what's the first thing out of my mouth? [00:06:50] Speaker A: Well, that's beautiful. You did such a great job. [00:06:52] Speaker B: There you go. I'm trying to positively reinforce her self esteem, right? So I'm going on and on about how great it is, what a wonderful job. What do I do with it? I typically get some scotch tape, put it up on the fridge, or post it to a, you know, chalk, a cork board or something like that, right? So let's contrast that. Let's say she comes home and instead of me telling her how great it was, I say to her, wow, Cece, you are very excited. Look at how excited you are about what you did today. Tell me, what did you like about it? How come you use this color? What was so, you know, what turned you on so much when you were doing this? And I finish it by saying, what would you like to do with this? And more importantly, honey, it's important to do things that make you feel this good about yourself. Now, in the first case, she goes back to school thinking about, if she's in her art class and she's drawing another picture, part of her mind, part of her consciousness is going to be, how is Daddy going to like this? She's no longer just paying attention to do I like it or not? She's paying attention to, is Daddy going to like this? How happy is he going to be with me? Now, let's say she comes home, and for some reason, I'm not practicing my emotional sobriety that day, and I'm distracted. I'm upset about something. I can't get balance. She comes in the door and she said, daddy, dad, look at this. I said, don't bother me right now. I'm busy. [00:08:36] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:08:37] Speaker B: Now what happens? She's crushed. She didn't get that positive reinforcement. [00:08:43] Speaker A: I'm sure there's some incident like that in my past that I don't remember, but that was foundational. [00:08:48] Speaker B: There's got to be. There's. It's in my past. I know it is. I can go back and think about that. But if. If she goes to school after the second interaction and she's doing her artwork, she's not thinking about is daddy gonna like this? What is she thinking? [00:09:06] Speaker A: Thinking about what can I do to be true to myself? [00:09:09] Speaker B: There it is. Now just think about how many times has that happened to poor little Sisi? How many times did it happen to you? How many times did it happen to me? We've spent our lifetime being encouraged to look outside of ourselves to decide whether we can feel good about ourselves or not. Now what that creates Patrick, and this is important before we talk about emotional dependency because this really plays a big role in it. We develop early on a reflected sense of self, meaning how I think about myself is based on how you are interacting with me and reflecting me back to me. How you are mirroring me. If you're marrying me in a way of proving to me if I perform a certain way, then what starts to happen to my self esteem. It's other validated self esteem. Now my reflected sense of self meaning feeling good about myself is completely dependent on how people think about me. When Bill said he wanted top approval, that's why he wanted that is because then the reflection back to him is I'm of value, I'm okay, I'm worthy, I'm whatever. He fill in the blank that he needed to feel about himself. So our reflected sense of self starts very early on. As you can see if we have the right kind of parenting, that reflected sense of self becomes less dependent on what other people think about us and is more rooted in what I think about myself. Not many of us get that. [00:10:58] Speaker A: We only get the reflection or you know, we are. [00:11:01] Speaker B: We are having [00:11:01] Speaker A: tendency goes towards [00:11:02] Speaker B: it. Exactly. We have a reflected sense of self. And so as adults, when we don't mature beyond the dependency on our environment, which now becomes more of an emotional dependency because. Right, because what I'm saying is biologically we start to do pretty good taking care of ourselves emotionally. We are. We are stuck. We are stuck at an. At the. It's all about me and I am more the more I have stage of development. And that's why you hear me say a lot lately. I don't believe our problem is that we have suffered from a psychiatric condition. We may have a comorbidity, but I believe the root of our problem is the fact that we are emotionally dependent. We're dependent on our environment for our sense of self worth, for our sense of self in general. And that becomes, as Bill labeled it very accurately, an impossible way of life. We will talk about the effects of emotional sobriety on communication in our next podcast. But for today, we're Going to focus on what does emotional dependency do? So it changes the purpose of our communication. Instead of me just communicating something about where I'm at and what I'd like and what I want, I now communicate with you to try to secure your reassurance, to prevent your disapproval, or to get you to respond in a way that I want you to, or that restores my emotional balance. [00:12:52] Speaker A: It's how you get two people in a conversation not listening to each other or talking past each other. Right. Because, you know, they're not really in engagement with the other person. [00:13:02] Speaker B: Well, [00:13:03] Speaker A: if I'm just [00:13:03] Speaker B: trying on you, what happens when you start to criticize me? I get panicky. [00:13:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. It drives you up the wall. Yeah. [00:13:12] Speaker B: I feel threatened, man. I. I have a panic attack and I want to convince you that I'm not a piece of. That I'm not as bad as you think I am, that I'm not a bad boy, or if you're a woman, I'm not a bad girl. You know, please love me. Please love me. Let me point out all the ways that you're wrong. But when I'm doing that, what happens to you? We're trying to share with you me something you're upset about. [00:13:37] Speaker A: You [00:13:37] Speaker B: feel dismissed. [00:13:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. And you [00:13:40] Speaker B: don't feel listened to. Like you said, I'm not listening to you. I'm defending myself. I am defending my reflected sense of self. Does that make sense when I say it that way? [00:13:52] Speaker A: It does, yeah. I. The volumes come down on that over the years. You know, I heard somebody the other day, I was talking to somebody about work, an editing project, and it was somebody that, like, I kind of. I've only really interacted with him remotely, but I've worked with him off and on for more than 10 years. And he said to me, give me a nice compliment. He's like, you know, Patrick, you know, I've been known you a long time and working with you. He's like, I can just hear the power in your voice. You know, I can hear the confidence. Like I could. I feel like there's been a change and he's. He's aware of my recovery and you know, the kind of struggle I've been through. But, you know, the way that I took that was that, you know, I'm not just. It's. It's less about the reflection and it's more about what's really inside of me and. And I'm self supporting more than I used to, and. And that's just what's been coming up for me as you talk about this. Yeah, [00:14:49] Speaker B: terrific, man. It's so great to hear that. And it is possible, see, I mean, we're hearing this all the time that, you know, men and women, when they start to get a hold of these ideas, they start to experience some emotional freedom. And we'll get into that next time when we talk about the effects of emotional sobriety on communication. So now emotional. With my emotional dependency, I am communicating to manipulate you into giving me something I think I need from you to feel okay about myself. So this is the way I say it is that if you and your partner depend on a reflected sense of self for your self esteem, you're going to constantly try to get the positive sense of self you want by monitoring and manipulating both consciously and unconsciously, each other's minds through your interactions. Dr. Snarch, who really understood the effects of this so clearly, especially on sex in relationships, says people who can't maintain their own sense of self. Listen to this. He says it very strongly. He says squeeze the life out of the other people around them, whether they know it or like it or not. We squeeze the life, we squeeze the life out of the other people around us, trying to get them to fill us, to infuse our reflected sense of self with some good feelings. [00:16:26] Speaker A: Yeah, we have no battery of our own, so we're kind of leeching off of everybody [00:16:31] Speaker B: else's. That's a nice analogy. Our battery's empty and we keep trying to hook our cables onto somebody else's. [00:16:40] Speaker A: Somebody asked me the other day, what was your lowest point in your life? And the, the kind of state, state of being that I was describing is very much like what, you know, you're alluding to here is that, you know, I, I had, I had nothing, no self support, you know, so I was just, just kind of throwing myself over whatever object happened to be in my orbit. And yeah, I mean, it, it's why I can sustain any relationships and why at the end, at the end, nobody wanted to be around me. But yeah, I mean, this process of emotional sobriety and recovery has helped me to cultivate that. And, you know, the dependency is still with me, but I can see it now and there's. I've got tools that I can use to try and disentangle myself from it. [00:17:28] Speaker B: Great to hear, Patrick. How do you feel about that? What do you experience? [00:17:34] Speaker A: Much more okay with myself, which is great because I'm with myself all the time. So I need to have some kind of. I need to have, I need to like the guys, at least a little bit. So. Yeah, [00:17:45] Speaker B: that's right. What. What is Brandon say? Self esteem is a reputation we have with ourselves. [00:17:50] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it sucks to not like that guy. So, yeah, my taught. My tolerance is, you know, has gone up and. And I've got so many great people around me that I'm engaged with and that, you know, my calendar is filled with, you know, with relationships and connections that I didn't. I did not have before that have really, you know, made life richer. [00:18:20] Speaker C: So. So when we lack self support, Patrick, we may unconsciously and sometimes even [00:18:26] Speaker B: consciously assign other people the responsibility of our emotional stability. See, I want them to [00:18:34] Speaker C: communicate in a way that makes me feel okay, doesn't upset me. Right. That kind of thing. They have to follow my. This is where the unenforceable rules come in. I have all these rules about how you're supposed to talk to me so that I feel okay. We need them to agree with us, typically validate us, calm us, think the way we want them to think about us, believe what we want them to believe about us, behave as we expect them to, or protect us from disappointment. Our emotional state then becomes completely dependent on their response. And so everything I do in terms of communication is trying to wrest satisfaction out of that other person's behavior instead of taking responsibility for myself being. Bill said very clearly in his letter, he says it's better to. He was talking about St Francis of Assisi's Prayer. That. And he quoted a line from it. It's better to comfort than to be comforted. He goes, here was the answer. All right, but why didn't it work? Well, the reason it didn't work is because when we think it's better to comfort someone else than to be comforted, there's a problem. Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with reaching out to someone who's in trouble and offering your support and all of that. That's a wonderful part of our program, that fellowship. Right. We need a little help from our friends, so to speak. Right. With a little help from our friends. But the other side of that, it's better for me to comfort myself than to be comforted, than to depend on somebody else comforting me. If I can't do that, then when you pull away or I drive you away, I'm in big trouble. By. Just as an aside, I'm working on a new book now that's called reimagining the St. Francis prayer. [00:20:34] Speaker A: And [00:20:34] Speaker C: what I'm doing is looking at the St. Francis prayer from a very different perspective, from this perspective I just talked about in terms of being able to to get some clues about what we need to do to take better care of ourselves. [00:20:49] Speaker A: Another book. You're just adding, you know, more and more plates [00:20:53] Speaker C: in the pipeline. There'll be two more books this year. One will be on Relationships, room enough for two, and reimagining St. Francis prayer. This is a big and a good discussion today. So look, we look forward to everybody join us next week and we'll talk about the other side of the coin, [00:21:08] Speaker A: Part two. Sam. Sat.