Humans, like animals in pain, recoil from any perceived threat by hiding.
Rejection sensitivity, common to various forms of personality issues, begets a range of defenses: gaslighting, deflecting, and even rejecting. Some of these are so intrinsic that their use is lost on the individual. But, seldom acknowledged is dependence as a learned defense against danger. Sometimes, it’s presented as fawning, but it’s much more than that. While the concept indicates an outward show of reverence, it fails to account for the internalized expectation of a forgery of divine grace. For the dependent personality maintains relationships by not just fawning, but also worshipping.
Dependent Personality Disorder is the most common of the bunch and yet the least written about; it’s not as flashy as some of the others. However, it’s often co-morbid with them. We, as human beings, often seek out experts when searching for advice, but the dependent individual asks almost everyone they admire, and feel close enough to, what they would do if they were in their shoes. So, no particular individual is treated as being truly special to them, even if they are. These individuals worship heroes while feeling self-oriented repulsion. And, few things terrify them as much as disillusionment.
So, the therapist can’t submit to them as they, initially, do to her. In this respect, she can’t play the role of savior. This isn’t to say that one can’t ever teach the client how to better navigate their relationships. It’s more so referring to situations when the client knows what to do or how to navigate a choice but, instead, leans on the therapist to make it for them. On the topic of being terrified, to us, few things are scarier than being devalued. My own hesitance and uncertainty caused me to be fired by several clients. In essence, they noted that they wanted someone who had a “better grasp of what they were doing.” Some of it was me; I could have tried to explain why my not knowing that much was more conducive to their treatment. And some of it was them; projecting their conceptions of their own inadequacies onto me. But, in the end, if I became whom they sought, I would have been just another expert in their pockets, another emotionally distant subject they could call on. Another soon-to-be fallen idol.
If, as psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams wrote, narcissists profoundly need people but hardly love them, dependents only deeply love them because they compulsively need them, in the way a child may love a parent. In the glow of idealization, there is no other, for the need suffocates and contorts them. To the dependent, it feels impossible to love flawed people because they serve no apparent purpose. They can’t always make good decisions for you. They can’t make you believe they’ll never leave. They can’t save you from yourself. And they can’t prove to you that you’re lovable. Ultimately, therapy’s purpose is to help them decide what proof and faith are, as both are essential to making choices and both are relative to their beholders. When should you act? When has, at least for the moment, the evidence-base reached its ceiling? And how long can you wait without acting? Asking for advice and turning to experts isn’t inherently bad, but one eventually learns that proof, or what enough proof is, varies between people. Some of us are more willing to act on higher degrees of faith than others. One can argue that those individuals have a broader foundation of self-esteem.
The dependent, on the other hand, maintains a dichotomy of self-esteem, keeping her’s low while exaggerating the other’s, as a defense against existential anxiety, meaning her fear of being harmed and having to suffer for her choices. She gains her self-esteem, if one can call it that, from her attachment to the gods. Thus, the therapist has to work on presenting himself as he is, limitations on the table. The appeal of the narcissistic healer fades once it becomes obvious that the less secure practitioner is a much better companion; he’ll sit with you and your anxiety. And the young therapist, who desperately wants to prove himself, has to find a way to tolerate the seemingly intolerable: his own reflection of incompetence.
Leon's Existential Cafe 