Читать книгу The Courage to Be Yourself - Sue Patton Thoele - Страница 22

A woman's public identity is her husband's and her private identity, her children's.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

I was tempted to call this chapter, “Ya gotta name it to overcome it!” Why? Because we can only move beyond what is limiting or upsetting us when we honestly define what is going on. If we feel our identity is not our own, we must acknowledge that feeling before we can forge an identity for ourselves. If we've sacrificed our lives on the altar of everyone else's needs, we need to recognize the resultant malaise in order to remedy the situation. No matter what it is, we gotta name it before there is any hope that we'll learn to move around, over, and through it.

Toward that end, we will define some of the forms emotional dependence can take. Emotional dependence is many faceted and can put its depressive foot on our necks in a host of different ways. Anytime we come away from an encounter with someone feeling used or abused—not having stood up for ourselves or what we believed—it's a pretty sure bet we have acted, or not acted, out of an emotionally dependent internal space. When we find ourselves believing it's not okay for us to have a self who can come first—at least part of the time—when we know that our “self”-concept is really an “other”-concept, or when we suppress our feelings in order to please someone else, we have undoubtedly come face to face with a facet of our own emotional dependence. A profound and revealing question to ask ourselves during such times is “What was I afraid of that made me act this way?”