Emotional dependence is a perverse relational pattern that causes the individual to function based on the belief that one's own existence only has value if one is loved, recognized and supported by others. In the egoic phase, which is the step on which we currently find ourselves, this mechanism is prevalent both collectively and individually, being that which forms and nurtures the roots of the ego. To a greater or lesser extent, every human being on this planet dedicates their life to seeking and obtaining affection, attention and support (be it real or imaginary), first from their parents and then through any other male or female figure with whom they relate. The rendering of emotional dependence is materialized through the metaphorical or real surrender of one's own life (and responsibility for it) to others. This keeps us anchored to the egoic phase, which produces an endemic devaluation of the transcendent and unique phenomenon that we, as living beings, are.
Emoenergetica postulates that the mechanisms of identity could be centered on the relationship that the individual has with themselves and with their own existence. However, emotional dependencies cause most of the processes related to self-image, self-acceptance, self-valuation and self-esteem to be externalized, and so filtered in a recurrent and perverse way through others, with the intent that others give us the emotional support that we should have learned to generate for ourselves before reaching adulthood.
Despite being a perverse psychological mechanism, emotional dependence had its origin in an evolutionary biological adaptation. The social character of human beings is not only one of our main signs of identity; it was also a necessary strategy to facilitate the survival of the species in its early and difficult times. Sociability impelled the appearance of an exceptional cognitive ability that would have great repercussions on what we have become as humans – empathy. This is the means by which the individual virtualizes the physical and psycho-emotional states of others in their inner world, thus generating a complex interpretation through which they recognize and anticipate the needs of others, changing and adapting their own behavior in return. Empathy has allowed an unparalleled psychological development in human beings, or maybe this exceptional development would have inevitably driven the emergence of empathy. The ability to empathize had to evolve in parallel with the ability to reflect on past situations, to recognise present needs and to plan for future events. In early hominids, this new and advanced ability to empathize and care for others gradually began to replace the mechanism of animal instinct, as we learned to speak and help each other by means of sophisticated social behaviours and interpersonal cooperation. Empathy was the great promoter of the exchange of affection, attention and support.
Returning to our own time, it is true that newborns, babies, children and even adolescents need attention, affection and support (from the paternal, maternal or other adult figure or figures). These needs begin as purely biological in nature and are fundamental in our maturative period, as we need help for our physical survival. However, they are also very important from a psychological point of view, since without attention, affection and support in the early stages of our life it would be very difficult to develop a healthy mind and a balanced personality. As humans, we are born in a state of severe physical and psychological immaturity. But, the real problem is that, from the outset, this biological and psychological need is systematically converted into emotional dependence, due to the fact that adult society transmits emotional schemes of a purely addictive nature from one generation to the next. The establishment of this pattern of dependence is a globally consensual phenomenon, with slight differences among cultures.
As a natural part of our psychological and social development, from infanthood, we are trained by adults to make moral judgments about ourselves and others. Thus, as we grow and learn to speak, our psyche matures, through the construction of our own self-image and the image of the world. The personal ability to obtain affection, attention and support is key when making value judgments about oneself; in other words, the formation and development of one's own self-image will be greatly influenced by the experiences through which we may or may not become the centre of the world, first for our parents and then for everyone else. The innate configurations of the emotional core, the sensory core and the personality will interact with the patterns of dependence and systems of images that have already been developed by the father, mother and other figures with whom the child relates. Gradually, together with the self-image and the image of the world, their own map of emotional dependencies will be configured. We will also shape the images of good and evil and will then begin to classify ourselves as good or bad people and we will also see ourselves as successful or unsuccessful people, accumulating different gratifying or frustrating feelings, largely conditioned by the experiences through which we manage, or do not manage, to feel loved, recognized and supported.
Human life, both individually and collectively, revolves around emotional dependence. In recent years, this pattern has been compounded by the misuse of technology and social networks. If you observe carefully, you will find how society is full of customs and routines whose sole objective is to keep its members completely addicted to this dependency, so that the cognitive functions of selection of objectives, decision making, evaluation, planning and execution are constantly interfered with and conditioned by this addiction. Ultimately, the problem lies not in receiving affection, attention and support from others, but rather in being addicted to it and, as a consequence, never developing a true capacity to love, care for and support oneself.
Recognizing and accepting the mechanism of emotional dependence is essential if we want to understand the human psyche, but still more so for the warriors of consciousness, since this strategy forms the roots and foundations upon which the egoic personality is based and constructed.
The three potencies of the emotional core (will, intelligence and intent) are enlisted by the three great emotional dependencies (need for affection, need for attention and need for support). Each of these will be divided into two, in order to intoxicate the six core emotions. In turn, the six dependencies will each manifest themselves in the form of two complementary aspects: contractive dependence (when one is the object of the action of dependence), and expansive dependence (when we make others the object of the action of dependence). Ultimately, we end up with a set made up of twelve emotional sub-dependencies. Deep down, all expansive dependencies seek to covertly inflate the contractive ones, since what is intended, in all cases, is to be one the object of the action of dependence, which is to say, to be the centre of the world, trying to recruit all possible affection, attention and support.
As I have already indicated, the need for attention, affection and support are the three roots of the ego. From these, its pillars emerge (feeling of superiority, feeling of inferiority, feeling of personal importance and feeling of offense), which will feed back into one's emotional dependence, and so on. The pillars of the ego are what give rise to the dominator-dominated pattern, which is the trademark of the egoic phase, along with the prevalence of emotional dependence. Everyone, at some point, tries to position themselves in the role of the dominator, whence the feeling of superiority is nourished. But, naturally, it is not always possible to be and to feel superior to others. As a consequence, many end up taking on the role of the dominated, a position from which the feeling of inferiority is fostered. Regardless of this, in one way or another, we all want to be the centre, namely, to nurture our own feeling of personal importance. The reality is, we, ourselves, are not always going to be the most important person around just because we want to be, since others also fight for this position, which is reason enough to get angry and give free rein to the feeling of offense – towards oneself, towards others, towards the world and towards life. In this way, from one's own emotional dependence, the four pillars of the ego are constructed and fed. This pattern is unceasingly passed down from generation to generation.
The innate personality plays a major role in how the map of dependencies is constructed at the individual level. In turn, dependencies will influence how the core personality evolves or degenerates. There are egos that primarily remain in the phase of superiority (dominators-owners) and others in the phase of inferiority (dominated-servants). Despite the fact that in both cases the person is dependent, those who remain in the phase of inferiority tend to have serious deficiencies in their horizontal development, since their ability to learn, acquire skills, develop strategies or decide is greatly conditioned by the fact that they will preferably identify with patterns of failure, inferiors, forming and maintaining belief systems and relationships with others through which this identity is perpetuated. These are the broken spearheads. Personalities who succeed in establishing themselves in the phase of superiority can accumulate great experiential symmetry, often achieving success at the family, intellectual, social, or economic level. These are usually false or true spearheads. Personalities with marked variability can also be observed, repeatedly alternating between the phases of superiority and inferiority, resulting in frequent cases of individuals with dissociative disorders or other more or less serious psychological problems; generally, these are broken or false spearheads. All these patterns are so automated in our heads that most do not even consider the possibility that there are better options.
The nuances of personality through which someone generates relationships of dependence are acquired first through genetic inheritance and by the initial information contained in the ancestral soul. They are later remodeled in childhood through experiences and decisions, as well as through patterns of relationships with parents or people who exercise this role. When you grow up, you use the same patterns of dependency that you used with your parents to relate to other figures, both in the family or the couple, as well as in friendships, and also in work and professional relationships. At the same time, we try to make others depend on us, as a reflex action that tries, without much success, to recover our lost power. As we have seen, all emotional dependencies originate from the maternal and paternal dependencies conceived in childhood.
We are now going to look at the characteristics of the dependencies and their relationship to each emotion in detail:
Need for Affection:
This is the need for others to give us the affection that we should give ourselves.
It is the emotional dependence that intoxicates the conservative power (formed by love and fear) and its metafunction, will.
- Contractive and expansive dependencies whose origin is love.
- The need to receive love: this consists in affecting others by requiring the love that we believe we are incapable of giving to ourselves.
- The need to give love: this consists in affecting others by making them see that we will give them the love that they believe they are incapable of giving to themselves.
- Contractive and expansive dependencies whose origin is fear.
- The need to receive protection: this consists in affecting others by requiring from them the protection that one should give to oneself.
- The need to give protection: this consists in affecting others by making them see that we assume the responsibility of protecting them when they do not do so for themselves.
Need for Attention:
This is the need for others to give us the attention that we ought to give ourselves.
It is the emotional dependence that intoxicates the creative power (formed by sadness and recreation) and its metafunction, intelligence.
- Contractive and expansive dependencies whose origin is sadness:
- The need to receive compassion: this consists in attracting the attention of others, using the strategy of making them feel pity for us.
- The need to give compassion: this consists in giving our attention to others when they are pitying themselves.
- Contractive and expansive dependencies whose origin is recreation:
- The need to receive admiration or recognition: this consists in attracting the attention of others, with the intention that they give us the worth and value that we should give ourselves.
- The need to give admiration or recognition: this consists in paying attention to others, giving them worth and value when they signal out to us their need to be recognized or admired.
Need for support:
The need to request from others the support that we ought to give to ourselves.
It is the emotional dependence that intoxicates the transformative power (formed by joy and motive force) and its metafunction, intent.
- Contractive and expansive dependencies whose origin is joy:
- The need to receive motivation: this consists in asking others for support, requiring from them the motivation that we should give ourselves.
- The need to give motivation: this consists in supporting others by making them see that we will give them the motivation that they should give themselves.
- Contractive and expansive dependencies whose origin is the motive force:
- The need to receive help: this consists in seeking the support of others by requiring them to do the things that we should and could do ourselves.
- The need to give help: this consists in supporting others, undertaking to do the things that they should and could do themselves.
I have highlighted the psycho-emotional component of emotional dependence, but this can also be explained from the energetic-transcendent level. A perceiver of subtle energy, with adequate training, can observe that the strategy of emotional dependence provokes an enormous exchange of filaments of energy between human subtlesomas. These fibres can be seen in the form of strings that unite the chakras and aura of people who interact with each other. This phenomenon forms what I have come to call the social spider’s web. Thus, from the energetic point of view, dependence emerges by contaminating one's own emotional nucleus with alien attention, affection and support. Not only do other people take out their core energies and place them in our emotional core, but we also do the same – we take out our individual emotional core energy and place it in the cores of others. Nonetheless, we have a lifelong connection to our own energy through these strand-like fibers. In reality, it is not possible to totally lose individual emotional energy, it is merely loaned. The social spider's web is the source of compulsive concern with “what will they think of me?”
This process brings about the loss of purity of the emotional core. Some time ago I learned to quantify the degree of intoxication of the emotional core by means of the psycho-aural readings that I perform via perception by resonance. I have therefore witnessed how the energies of others that are incorporated into the emotional core sometimes give people a false appearance of stability, whereas, in reality, they always unbalance the individual matrix, generating perverse limits, blockages and wear and tear, or simply making the individual excessively rigid, limited and egomaniacal. This hijacks the possibility of vertical evolution and transcendence. In order to correctly develop its symmetry, the human emotional core would need to contain only its own energies. Given that it does not seem like the collective is going to make the necessary changes to work with a different model other than that of the social spider's web, it is the individual who must choose to become an impeccable warrior of conscience, if they want to have a different opportunity from that of being trapped in the web. However, they will have to do so on their own, because the group will not support them.
To stop sustaining the collective mandate of the social spider's web is by no means to become a hermit, a social outcast or a misfit; in reality, the new warriors require precisely the opposite. It simply consists in renouncing personal misery and ceasing to help others increase their own misery: letting go of the snare and, optionally, daring to be an alternative reference point, should anyone else want to accompany us. Only in this way, it is possible to turn the increase and splendor of consciousness into the main purpose of one's existence. If you truly want something like this in your life, you have to realize that a good part of this objective is obtained through the sublimation of the most mundane and apparently insignificant acts. This is a solitary battle. For now, the purpose and intent of humanity is to continue to support the scheme of emotional dependence, and with it, to continue to nurture the patterns of dominator-dominated.
The readings of the emotional core that I have conducted for years tell me that on average the individual emotional core has a "purity" of between 10 and 15 percent or, in other words, between 85 and 90 percent of the emotional resources and information of the average individual core are extraneous accumulations. In some cases, however, purity can drop as low as 3 percent. As a point of curiosity, it must be said that a certain percentage of leaders, although they are connected with a greater number of people, have between 15 and 20 percent purity in their emotional core, despite normally having low or very low emotional symmetries.
In Emoenergetica the energies of others that are integrated into one's own subtlesoma are categorized as toxic, and it is considered a waste of one's personal power to allow our emotional energy to be lost in the subtle bodies of others. Whoever wants to raise their emotional symmetry to level 10 of degree 1, must be willing to work to achieve, at the very least, a purity of 60 percent in their emotional core. This is where you must first begin if you intend to develop the mandala state. Only through inflexible intent can emotional dependence be reduced and the emotional core be sublimated until it is completely liberated from exogenous intrusions. An impeccable work of recapitulation is also necessary, which, as I have already stated, is one of the four psycho-energetic disciplines of Emoenergetica, about which I will go into detail in subsequent chapters. Even when the emotional core is completely purified, the patterns of dependence remain active in the individual, even if he or she has reached the mandala phase. This is due to the fact that, in order for emotional dependence to disappear completely, not only must the emotional core be kept pure, but it is also necessary to reach the state of realization of the original mind, that is to say, to have completely rid oneself of the egoic mind, both in its individual and collectivized parts. Although I have already pointed out that it is society that perpetuates the patterns of emotional dependence, and that there is a biological component to it, we must remember that its true origin is the duality in which the human being is born: we are split in two, we have an original mind and another that functions as a parasite – the egoic mind. Emoenergetica affirms that our evolutionary process, rather than being something biological, is one of consciousness, with the transcendence of the ego and the unfolding of the original mind constituting our true destiny.
Most people cannot even imagine what they are missing out on by being trapped in the social spider's web; many, when they sense that the prospect of liberation might be real, are even afraid to contemplate its very possibility. We can relate to one another without needing to be parasitic. For me, it is clear that with an appropriate cultural and psycho-emotional model, social relationships could be established through an alternative model to that of dominator-dominated; based, to begin with, on the commandment "my benefit is your benefit, your benefit is my benefit". In this way, we would enrich each other as opposed to collectively depredating ourselves. Although, for the time being, this change does not appear to be possible at the global level, it is still possible at the individual level.
Emotional dependence is the main impediment to true psychological and transcendental development, distancing us from sacred symmetry and vertical development, both individually and collectively. Since emotional dependencies are the true source and support of the ego, any hope of real personal growth must pass through awareness, recognition and acceptance of this phenomenon. We must also realize how it is socially fostered and protected by the cultural patterns we are often supporting.
It is possible to set to work in a sustained way to diminish the intensity of these dependencies, by gradually and consciously changing our relationship patterns, with the objective of anchoring them in individual and collective human enrichment and development. Emoenergetica teaches that this option of personality development (based on emotional dependence) is not the only possibility, since it considers that human beings are really navigators of consciousness that are passing through (perhaps stranded) at their current evolutionary level. Human beings are a bridge, an intermediate point of evolution between the brute level and something else. What anchors them at the current level is the social perpetuation of the strategy of emotional dependence, which permits horizontal developments in every case, but in no case does it allow true vertical developments to take place. The problem is that those horizontal developments that have led us to technological progress and overpopulation may also mean our annihilation and extinction as a species in the long term. A change in the human emotional paradigm is necessary, but something very odd, even disconcerting, is that sometimes, if you are really doing something to achieve that change (an evolutionary path, a therapy, personal work or whatever) through which you try to limit your patterns of dependence and increase awareness, your environment may respond with suspicion, accusing you of depending on it! The collective usually tries to aggressively defend itself against any new element that does not conform to its paradigms and, in this case, it may even label an attempt to become independent as a dependent behaviour, in order to protect itself. In general, dependencies tend to generate a denial mechanism in the addict, who often defends the addiction itself. We find ourselves somehow trapped and in the paradox that, although we do possess biological and energetic possibilities to reach the transcendence of which I speak, dependence itself makes us feel attached to a limiting and harmful way of relating to one another. We promote a model of apparent cohesion in the social world that, in reality, will not cease to provoke misery over and over again throughout history.
The underlying problems that we as humanity have cannot really be solved without an advance in emotions and consciousness. But beware, it is common to find people who do show interest in the evolution of consciousness, and yet fall into the trap of feeling even more special, waiting, trusting or praying for some higher power to give them their affection, attention, support, because they are important enough for God to take them into account and thus release and enlighten them, granting them eternal salvation. The traps set by the ego are endless.
Emotional Dependence by Chema Sanz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.