Therefore, mindfulness can help us increase awareness around the patterns of behaviours and thoughts that maintain emotional dependence....
MENTAL HEALTH
Practice mindfulness
Practicing mindfulness can help you build emotional independence because it can help you increase your awareness around your reactions and responses when things don’t happen as planned.
We cannot heal what we are not aware of. Therefore, mindfulness can help us increase awareness around the patterns of behaviours and thoughts that maintain emotional dependence.
Identify your “why“
You can begin by using these questions as journal prompts to dig deeper into why you want to build your internal resiliency.
Why is it important for you to become emotionally independent?
How does it make you feel when you have to depend on others or things outside of you to make you feel better about yourself?
What has this experience been like for you?
What does it mean to you to become emotionally independent, and how do you see your life changing as a result of being able to have more control over your emotional states?
Having a clear understanding of your “why” will serve as a motivating factor to continue to do the work that it takes to become more emotionally independent.
Rewire your thinking
Write down the thoughts and beliefs that keep you emotionally dependent. For example, “I need other people to feel good about me so that I can feel better” or “I need things to go my way so I can feel in control of my life.”
When you come across these kinds of thoughts (also known as automatic negative thoughts), practice replacing them with something neutral and adaptive such as “I can handle difficult feelings that come up” or “I am capable of feeling OK with myself despite how someone else may feel about me.”
Being able to replace the automatic negative thoughts with alternative, adaptive statements can help you with rewiring your thinking.
Practice self-compassion
Ask yourself, what are you avoiding by being emotionally dependent on another person? Is it loneliness, sadness, fear of rejection? Pay attention to what lies beneath feeling emotionally dependent on another person and give compassion to the underlying feelings.
Here’s what giving yourself compassion might sound like: “It is OK to experience sadness and loneliness. There is nothing wrong with me for feeling uncomfortable with rejection.”
When we can sit with the underlying feelings that drive emotional dependence and give those feelings love and compassion, then we can increase our ability to tolerate difficult emotions without having to soothe them away by seeking approval from someone else. In a sense, practicing self-compassion is a form of self-soothing when we are feeling overwhelmed with emotion.
Learn self-validation
Oftentimes, emotional dependence intertwines with being a people-pleaser. This looks like shrinking yourself and shifting your boundaries in order to accommodate someone else.
Practicing self-validation means that you give yourself permission to feel your feelings and are accepting of your thoughts and emotions. Here’s what that might sound like: “My feelings make sense. It is OK to feel what I am feeling. I am allowed to set boundaries.”
Self-validation is helpful in giving space to your feelings. If you struggle with self-validation, the next time you are seeking validation from someone else, ask yourself, “What is it that I would like to hear from this person?” Then practice saying those words to yourself.
Practice letting go
Emotional dependence is when we feel like we can’t be OK unless someone else is OK with us. Practicing letting go means releasing the need to control how other people feel about us so that we can be OK with ourselves. By learning to let go of these expectations, we are also taking responsibility for our feelings without making another person responsible for them. This is a true form of acceptance where we can acknowledge that other people are entitled to their own feelings toward us, but this doesn’t change the core of who we are and how we feel about ourselves.
