In defence of dependency

Therapists and clients alike have been tainted with the present Western ethos of managing without others – but why this resistance to a human given? By Nick Totton

'It is a fundamental fallacy to believe that it is possible by the elaboration of machinery to escape the necessity of trusting one's fellow human beings.'

Clement Attlee

Fear of dependency

Over the past few years, I've become aware of a new attitude among prospective clients – confirmed by several colleagues and supervisees. Although their problems are in much the same range that I am used to encountering, people who contact me show an increased reluctance to commit themselves to ongoing weekly therapy – a reluctance which is often based on a fear of becoming dependent. Their hope, it seems, is to have as little therapy as possible, for as short a time as possible, so that they can escape before dependency becomes an issue. Being dependent on a therapist is assumed to be a bad thing, a self-evidently good reason for avoiding long-term therapy. Very often, they speak of what friends and family have said to them about the dangers of depending on a therapist.

In this article, I want to think about the various factors behind this attitude; and also, to counter it with a robust defence of dependency. Depending on others is utterly inevitable, a central aspect of the human condition: it comes with the package of embodiment. But this is not bad news! Depending on other people can be, I believe, one of the best experiences in life – just as celebrating our independence can equally be a peak experience. If this is true, then we need to consider what shifts in our culture are producing the anti-dependent attitude I have described.

This anti-dependent attitude is not confined to prospective clients: it has been taken up by a number of practitioners. Some of these¹ are coming from a radical position which critiques the power imbalance of the therapeutic relationship – a critique with which I largely agree; I believe, though, that by foregrounding and examining power issues in therapy, we can make them into a useful and empowering feature of the therapeutic encounter².

The other main group of practitioners who take an anti-dependency stance are proponents of brief and solution-focused therapies; and here the arguments about power are knotted up with practical issues, financial constraints and pressures which militate against long-term intensive therapy. If you are only offering six or 12 sessions, dependency is indeed an undesirable development. Some at least of the arguments around dependency seem to me to be ex post facto justifications of the unavoidable.

Both sets of arguments, though, need placing in the wider context of the ever-increasing value which our society puts on independence, autonomy, self-sufficiency. Once one becomes sensitised to it, the anti-dependency assumption is visible everywhere, in all registers of discourse and fields of life. In a quick trawl of The Guardian website (www.guardian.co.uk) I found the following, ranging from international politics, through the climate crisis, to social policy and disability:

welfare dependency that breeds poverty and inter-ethnic strife … the financial dependency on America that hobbled Macmillan and Wilson … the growing foreign dependency of European energy supply … without growth, the country will not emerge out of its culture of dependency … the purpose of state funding is to avoid dependency on a small number of individuals … reduce your dependency on mains water … people will be thus empowered to make the move away from dependency on council-run services … a culture of dependency by the Iraqi police and security forces … cycles of dependency … ending a dependency culture … many charities are guilty of 'mollycoddling' homeless people and creating a dependency culture … the new era of means-testing and tax credits has created a new form of dependency … physical impairment need not and should not equal dependency …lessening dependency on fossil fuels …

I want to underline the assumption built into these quotations that dependency is a bad thing. Many of the arguments could equally well be made the other way around: not 'reduce your dependency on mains water' but 'let yourself depend on rainwater'. It reaches an extreme with the suggestion that 'physical impairment need not equal dependency': plainly a fantasy, the actual point being that dependency on others need not be demeaning or restrictive.

Resistance is high

Anti-dependency is not just a matter of rhetoric: it affects the concrete parameters of our lives. We live in smaller and smaller units, tending towards aloneness – the Government has announced a housing crisis because for the next 20 years the number of households in Britain is expected to rise by around 200,000 a year, of which 150,000 will be due to a higher number of single people living alone³. Attempts to create multiple-occupancy car lanes come up against the stubborn unwillingness of people to share their cars, their personal space: in the US in 2000, only nine per cent of work trips were made in multi-occupant vehicles, compared with 16 per cent in the 1980s⁴.

As Avrum Weiss⁵ says: 'When we become ill, we try to manage our affairs so that we will not become 'a burden to anyone', depriving not only ourselves of the love and comfort that may be necessary for recovery but also depriving our loved ones of the opportunity to give in a meaningful way and to feel helpful. When we are in financial trouble, we borrow money from a bank because it's 'a bad idea to borrow from friends'. When we are sad, or in pain, we isolate ourselves, convinced that no one would want to be around someone who feels the way we do. We create social institutions (Medicare, insurance, social service agencies, psychotherapy etc) to protect ourselves from the experience of dependency.'

Notice that Weiss includes therapy among the institutions which shield us from dependency. Certainly therapy can be positioned as a substitute for personal intimacy, a sort of prosthetic family connection – far safer than real intimacy, because no demands will be made on the client. This allows the apparatchiks of national and international psychotherapy organisations to move in with claims of unique expertise: psychotherapy is a 'new paradigm for living' and will provide 'the replacement of old religious and spiritual values'. 'Ordinary people's lives are too cluttered to pay such attention to self and others', so therapists must take on the task; 'as women are now absorbed into the work force, the function of holding individuals' well-being safe needs to be taken care of by professional structures'⁶.

The privileging of independence is not (yet) universal, but specific to white mainstream culture. Ethnic minority cultures generally are more interdependent than European American cultures⁷. African American, American Indian, Asian American, and Latino American cultures all privilege interpersonal relationships and group identity, rather than the autonomy of the individual⁸. In Japan, the infant is considered to be completely independent at birth, and the cultivation of the capacity for appropriate dependency is one of the important tasks of the parents⁹. Quoting a talk by Dr U. Kim of Chung-Ang University, Korea, Jordan¹⁰ argues that in contrast to the West, 'East Asian society emphasises the process of affective ties, role fulfillment, and self-cultivation which leads to the societal goal of harmony, long-term relationships, and family welfare'.

Even within white mainstream culture, the stress on independence is a gendered one. A number of feminist writers, notably those connected with the Stone Institute in the USA, argue that women grow through and toward relationship, rather than toward self-sufficiency and separation. This makes women particularly vulnerable to the pain of disconnection and loss; and it is argued that therapy for women therefore needs to be relational in its emphasis, offering transformative connection to help clients move out of the suffering caused by disconnection and isolation^11–14. I believe that this does not apply only to women, although it may be more masked in men.

The shadow

Anti-dependency has a powerful shadow side – seen, for example, in the strong tendency to view those who are understood to be more dependent, for example women and children, as also inferior. A different sort of shadow is the tendency to export dependent aspects of our existence elsewhere, or make them invisible: as Isobel Conlon points out (personal communication), the whole stance of 'independent' consumerism is based on massive personal debt, dependence on banks and other financial institutions (the average UK household owes £47,546, with every adult owing an average of £25,195¹⁵). Much the same is true of 'independent' nation states dependent on the global economy, and 'independent' drivers and fliers dependent on petroleum technologies. And, of course, it is people's unwillingness to pay taxes towards the common good that creates the financial constraints out of which short-term therapy and counselling have developed.

None of us is independent; as John Donne said long ago, no one is an island, but 'a piece of the Continent, a part of the main'. The fact of embodied existence makes us dependent on everything we need in order to stay embodied: not only the physical needs of the organism for food, water, air, shelter and so on, but also its equally urgent emotional needs, for touch, holding, psychological contact, communication, understanding. Like doing without physical nourishment, doing without emotional nourishment will be damaging; and part of the damage is our adaptation to scarcity, taking on the illusion of independence as a defence against vulnerability.

Avrum Weiss⁵ describes this outcome as 'excessive psychological self-reliance or the impaired capacity for dependency'. I am suggesting that this state is becoming endemic, and culturally dominant: an inability to lean on others, created by fear of emotional abandonment and deprivation, is being turned into a pseudo-virtue of illusory independence. If this is right, surely therapists and counsellors have a responsibility to speak out against such a process. We are in a position to know that depending on someone who is dependable is a healing experience, allowing enormous relief of tension, relaxation from the often unconscious sense that one is all alone and that nothing and no one can be relied on. In my own discipline of body psychotherapy, we distinguish two sorts of groundedness: vertical grounding, the ability to stand on my own two feet, and horizontal grounding, the ability to lie back and let myself be held up by the earth. Both are important, and in fact interdependent: each supports the other.

Interdependence

Interdependence, mutual support, is really at the centre of what I am talking about. Dependence seldom runs in one direction only. Even in the classic dyad of mother and baby, while the baby is plainly dependent on the mother for physical and emotional survival, the mother is generally deeply dependent on the baby as well – this is what we mean by 'bonding'. Mutuality of need and trust is also what makes grownup relationships work – as is well argued in extensions of Bowlby's and Ainsworth's attachment theory to adults by writers like Hazan and Shaver¹⁶. And at several removes, interdependence, mutual need and trust is also the foundation of the social bond, the glue which holds society together.

In his book The Presenting Past: The Core of Psychodynamic Counselling and Therapy, Michael Jacobs¹⁷ synthesises attachment theory and other psychodynamic approaches into a model organised around three developmental positions which he calls dependency, autonomy and interdependence. To help us think about these issues I want to privilege interdependence, and to add another position, manipulation, or distrustful dependency; so that we can create a relationship triangle like above.

Each person's preferred relationship style could be placed somewhere within this triangle, indicating a particular balance between dependency, autonomy and manipulation – a particular way of missing or approaching interdependence, the ability to both lean on the other and be leant on by them. In my view, interdependence is not only a crucial skill for personal relationships; it is also an essential way of understanding and relating to both the social sphere and the ecosphere. The illusion of independence damages the individual and those who come into contact with him or her. It also damages society as a whole, and the whole planetary biosphere, when people believe that they can take without giving, and that taking does not make them dependent on the sources from which they take.

As usual, therefore, I am arguing that therapy contains an inherent political dimension. Offering our clients the opportunity to depend on someone who is dependable is offering them entrance into a different perception of the world, which in turn suggests a different way of relating to society and to the planet.

As I have suggested, it also helps create a firm foundation for genuine independence – which is always, in reality, interdependence. In a society trending towards anti-dependence, therapists and counsellors need to speak up for the importance of depending on each other.

Nick Totton is a trainer and psychotherapist in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. www.erthworks.co.uk, email nick@3-c.coop. 

References

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