Skillful Dependence: The courage to take support

The other day, another milestone for my beautiful nephew Benjamin: just passing his first birthday, he toddled from one parent to the other, getting a little push/support off the starting line, and a quick catch at the finish. This is after some months of his wheeling around on the house, holding onto walls and couches and chairs, and knees and the edge of prone parents, and finally his walky cart. And that after some months of more and more skillful crawling, as supervised by his folks. It’s a bit like watching some kind of magical box, that once the “go” button is pushed, it opens and unfolds, pauses, then unfolds with another amazing form.

It’s funny, though, what we take for granted in infants and children, and then learn to studiously deny to ourselves.

As adults, the general notion is that we’re not supposed to lean on things. And that’s often the message we got at some point in our childhood or adolescence: don’t depend on anything or anyone, because if you do there’s something wrong with you. If you’re male, then it means you are weak, feminine, and in possible danger. If you’re a woman, then you’re histrionic, clingy, and weak. (There’s certainly a cultural gender bias here, in terms of dependency, with woman be encouraged to be more relational, nurturing, connected. But having to lean on someone or something for support, that’s got a pale cast to it regardless of gender.)

This is one of the misgivings I hear most often with folks new to psychotherapy: “I don’t want to have to be dependant on you or on therapy.” What I say in response is, “My work is not to encourage weakness; my work is helping you learn to recognize when to be skillful dependence.”

So what do I mean by “skillful dependence”? Skillful dependence is what Benjamin was unselfconsciously and without apology displaying in his run-up to the Big Walk. Namely, he recognized his need for support, and took it. He didn’t debate his need; he simply saw it, and went about getting it so that he could learn what he needed to learn. That’s the natural relationship to need.

But what happens with unskillful dependence is that by leaning on crutches–be they people or habits or addictions–we avoid building the muscles that we naturally have available to us, for building, and effectively “outsource” parts of ourselves. That is, we have the capacity, and refuse (for whatever reasons) to grow it as it naturally wants to be grown.

The other unskillful dependence, is what is known in psychology as “counter-phobic”: we are scared of the feelings/experience of dependence (of recognizing that we don’t or aren’t all we need), and so decide that we’re never, ever, under any circumstances going to be dependent. Here one leans towards the caricature of American individualism, the Texas of the soul, the classic American male.

But what happens here is that although strength is actually built, and things often get done, the achievements are made possible by a rigid and patterned building of the psychic muscles. The strength is one of resistance and stubbornness, which, if the only strength available, is actually quite brittle at its core. And the consequence of that strength being overcome is of a profound collapse, because what’s underneath that hard shell is unformed, unable to tolerate stress without coming apart.

Also, the other consequence of not being vulnerable to one’s own need, is that part of you knows how secretly, truly vulnerable you are to serious hurt, by virtue of that very rigid strength that has been cultivated. So this makes it even harder to grow because your very survival at some level is taken to be the result of the armor that is worn. And if it’s worn for a long time, one even starts confusing the armor with one’s self…and then it can be terrifying if not inconceivable that there’s actually something softer and subtler underneath. It’s very hard to remove the armor then.

So, then, skillful dependence is what happens when we can tolerate the reality that we actually need each other. Learning doesn’t really happen unless we can realize this and allow ourselves to be children (in relation to what’s to be learned), which means that we need support and help. To push that away is to short circuit the learning process. Or for emotions and relationships, it stunts the maturation process. In order to grow, we simply need support. And at some point, when we are strong enough to stand on our own, to continue with the same kind of support is actually to stunt the next stage of growth (imagine what would happen if that supportive structure holding up the space shuttle never let go when the rockets fired).

What is created when one allows the world to support us, allows ourselves to be contacted and held in our need, is not at all the feared dependency. It’s actually an incredible resiliency, that of the proverbial reed in the river, bending with the currents quiet and torrential. We become skilled in knowing how much of what we actually need to keep growing and developing, and we become unafraid of showing what’s actually true for us, that we do need support and we do need each other.