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Relationships can be an incubator and space for all your fears, insecurities and emotions. Ideally, your partner will offer you a safe haven from the world when you feel at your best and your lowest. Every person is a work in progress–and as much as we yearn to enter relationships completely whole, I believe that there are some parts of partnership that can be healing balm for some of your issues.
But problems arise when you are so needy in your relationship that you become overly dependent on your partner. The worst part of this dependency is that if your relationship doesn’t work out, you could start to crumble shortly after the partnership’s demise. Not good. The difference between desiring your partner’s support and needing it is a hard line to distinguish, but at the end of the day, you are responsible for working through any unhealed traumas and emotional wounds you have whether you’re in a relationship or not.
Margaret Paul, Ph.D., wrote for MindBodyGreen, “You need to take responsibility for your feelings instead of trying to get someone else to do this for you. That means becoming present with your feelings instead of avoiding them, moving toward them rather than away from them, and opening to learning about what your feelings are telling you. Focusing within and learning to connect with your higher self can bring love to your wounded inner self—your hurt inner child.”
Focusing on self love also breaks the cycle of childhood wounds because you’re giving yourself the attention and nurturing you may have missed from your caregivers.
“If you’re not taking care of yourself and only seeking to see your value within the context of a relationship and dependent on another person’s love, you are the one abandoning yourself the same way your parents once did. Others’ love can help you heal but not if you are abandoning yourself in the same ways you were abandoned by your parent,” Paul explains.
One you start doing the inner work, your ability to be more present grows and fears dissolve.
“As you begin to heal that core attachment wound, the intense feelings of insecurity and anxiousness around your relationships can in time start to fade. When you recognize your own worth independent of other people’s validation and love yourself regardless of what’s happening in your relationship, you’ll no longer feel the constant need to get love from your partner—and start being able to share love with them instead,” Paul concludes.
