Translator: Gemma Heron Reviewer: Trina Orsic
My name is Silvia Congost,
I’m a psychologist specializing in self-esteem,
emotional dependence and relationships.
And today I want to confess to you that on June 23rd I awoke,
it’s already been a few years since then.
Just like there are people who use before and after Christ
as a reference point.
In my life too there is a before and after date.
By then I was already a psychologist,
I had recently opened a practice in my town
and one day Cristina called for an appointment.
Cristina was a 36-year-old woman.
She was a doctor in a hospital in the neighbouring town
and she told me that she was booking an appointment
because she didn’t know what more she could do
to make her relationship work,
to solve those conflicts, those non-stop problems
with the person she had by her side.
She was desperate and I was her last hope.
The day of the session arrived and Cristina explained to me
that she suffered from anxiety, that she had insomnia.
She told me that she had gained 20 kilos in recent months
and that she was about to request leave from work.
She also told me that she had problems concentrating,
that she was losing her memory
and that she had even considered taking her own life.
Right away I realised that she was in a toxic relationship,
but the question is: then why didn’t she leave?
If it was bad, why didn’t she leave that relationship?
If she could tell that her quality of life was worsening every day,
that by the day her health was also deteriorating,
that staying in that relationship was a constant battle to make it work,
that there wouldn’t be these problems they were having
in resolving these differences,
if she didn’t even like the person by her side
because all she wanted was to change him,
why didn’t she leave this person?
I decided to ask her that queation and Cristina was very clear.
For two reasons.
Firstly she said to me: “Because I love him.”
And secondly she said to me: “Because I’d rather be like this
even if it’s bad, than lose him, than be without him.”
With those two answers I understood what was going on
a little bit better.
On one hand with the first reason, “because I love him”,
I realised that Cristina was clearly deceiving herself.
Why? Because you can’t love somebody
with whom you’re destroying yourself at times.
You can’t love somebody in a healthy way
if you are constantly suffering in that relationship,
if you feel like that relationship isn’t working,
that it’s not getting you closer to where you want to go
and that every day you feel worse
and that you’re losing yourself.
There was a clear self-deception here.
That is, she was trying to convince herself
that the love she was feeling
was what justified her continued commitment to this person
with whom things weren’t going well.
And secondly, upon telling me “I’d rather be like this than lose him”
or “I’d rather be in bad company than alone”,
which unfortunately is something that we would often prefer,
what I understood was that Cristina was afraid of being alone.
The fear of being alone ia a very frequent fear, very common,
that we human beings have.
That terrible panic of being left without that person
and not finding anyone else who wants to be with us.
Then the question resurfaced: “So why don’t you end it?”
And in understanding that, in listening to her
and after doing little reflecting,
that’s when I felt that “click” inside me, that light.
I felt like something was pushing on the pit of my stomach.
I started to feel dizzy, I started to feel worse and worse.
I ended the session as I could and in that moment,
after Cristina’s appointment,
she closed the door to the office, I stayed there for almost three hours
without being able to stop crying.
I couldn’t stop crying because I had just realised,
upon doing that session,
that I, like Cristina, had spent more than six years
trapped in an unhappy relationship,
in which I didn’t feel able to end it or to distance myself from that person,
fighting to make it work, to get on well,
to make it easy like I wanted it to be, but without accepting who was by my side.
So I didn’t know why this was happening to me.
I didn’t know why I wasn’t able to end this relationship.
It was a feeling like,
“Am I going crazy or what’s happening to me?”
Because if I’m not doing well, why can’t I end it?
I decided that one day the answer would come to me
and from that moment I focused my practice
only on helping people
who weren’t doing well in their relationships.
Very soon I realised that every relationship
can be classified in one of three scenarios
that I’m going to lay out for you now.
All relationships.
If in this moment you are in a relationship,
you will see very clearly which of these three scenarios
you fall into.
The same with relationships you’ve had in the past,
and those that you’ll have in the future as well.
What are they? The first is the healthy relationship.
They are the relationships that work.
The relationships with someone who matches our values,
with someone who has the same life plan,
a plan in common,
who we can go hand in hand with,
with whom we’re not looking in two opposite directions,
because then we’re going to separate.
The healthy relationship is the one we have
with someone who allows us to grow.
It’s when we are at ease with that person,
when we feel peace next to that person.
The relationship brings us calm.
There’s another very frequent characteristic,
and of course we have conflicts in healthy relationships,
but we know how to use these conflicts in a constructive way,
in a way that helps us to get to know each other better
and to bind us stronger together.
What happens is that life is about change, we all know that.
Everything is constantly changing and relationships can change too.
That’s why there are relationships that are healthy for a period of time.
We think they could last a lifetime,
we don’t even consider that anything could happen,
but one day they suddenly become toxic.
This could be, it can happen because one of the two changes.
Or because we have had a very traumatic experience
which greatly upsets us,
and our values change, we no longer want the same thing,
we stop admiring the person who we have by our side.
When we ask ourselves “What do I like about this person?”
it’s hard for us to find an answer,
and it could be that we start to desire a third-party, someone from the outside.
We fall in love with somebody else and we begin to fantasize
that we would be better off with that other person.
Or we may experience an infidelity,
and it creates a gap between us, a very deep wound
that makes it very difficult to heal
and get the story back on track.
Here the relationship becomes toxic and it no longer satisfies us,
it’s no longer worth it, it no longer makes us happy.
And then there’s a third scenario: toxic relationships,
and they’re toxic from the start.
You know those cases that you see and you say:
“What are they doing?”
You can see from miles away that this is going nowhere.
“Those two? They don’t match at all,
there’s no way’“.
From the outside we always see it so clearly,
but there are many people trapped
in relationships that haven’t worked since the beginning,
in which they don’t match at all, in which there’s psychological abuse,
which is unfortunately very common.
People that experience a constant lack of respect,
slights, humiliations.
They experience and suffer from punishments
at the hands of their partner,
punishments, for example, like not speaking to you.
That one is very common,
and how do you feel when your partner stops speaking to you?
That’s psychological abuse,
even if it’s not done in a conscious and premeditated way.
And, of course, we suffer a lot in those relationships.
So, when I understood that there are these three relationship models
and that every relationship could fit into one of them,
I asked myself again:
“Why don’t we leave when the relationship is toxic?”
And in that moment, I was ready to know the answer:
because of emotional dependence.
That’s when I discovered what emotional dependence was,
that it was happening to Cristina, that it was happening to me
and it’s what happens to hundreds of thousands of men and women
in many countries across the globe.
It is this inability to sever the relationship
in those cases where we should all end it,
because it’s no longer there, we’re no longer doing well there,
there’s no longer healthy love there.
We feel a terrible, unstoppable panic, at the thought of being left
without that person.
The idea of seeing them with somebody else,
with another partner, paralyzes us.
We can’t even imagine them with somebody else.
Saying “we’ll never be able to take those trips again, to plan them.
We’ll never be able to go to that restaurant together again”,
“never again”, that never again is absolutely devastating.
This inability also leads us to realise that we are dealing with an addiction.
Emotional dependence is an addiction, just like other forms of addicitons.
In this case it’s towards the person in question.
Imagine, for example, the case of gambling addiction,
of ludomania.
Imagine the person who inserts some change
and is unlucky enough to win.
Then they start to see the coins coming down
and “Wow, Wow, Wow”.
Come on, another day, they insert another coin. And another.
“Come on, there aren’t any winning coins for a while now.
I have a hunch. I think this is the one.
Another one, another one...”
And clearly you’re hooked, you don’t win.
It’s the same with relationships.
It’s like one more chance.
“Come on, a little longer. Come on, until summer.
It’s just that now he’s told me he’ll change.
Come on, one more reconciliation.”
And when we’re like that the relationship isn’t working.
If it were a healthy attachment, upon seeing that it’s not working
and that we aren’t compensated, we would leave.
But when there’s dependence, the attachment between us is toxic.
Therefore we’re there more due to need, because we need that dose, that drug,
although afterwards, by returning to that person’s side,
we immediately realise that we’re not well
and that we shouldn’t be there.
The most common symptoms are:
there are many, but I want to highlight obsession.
We are totally obsessed with finding a way
to make this relationship work.
When there’s dependence,
our entire life revolves around mulling it over,
around how to avoid having these discussions,
how to make sure they don’t get angry about something,
doing this, that, and the other...
And we put so much energy into this issue
that our brain is left totally worn out and really, really tired.
And so we find it hard to concentrate,
we forget things and we don’t remember things
because our brain can’t take it anymore.
We feel helpless.
We’ve tried so many times to get things back on track
that we no longer know where to turn.
It’s like a feeling of “I just don’t know what else to do
to get things back on track and really make it happen.”
And we feel, of course, a great deal of general malaise.
Suffering in a toxic relationship and being trapped in it
is something that, sometimes we don’t consider it,
but it affects us in all areas of life.
It will affect us in our work life, in our personal life,
in terms of self-esteem, at work, with friends, in all areas.
And it affects both those who are inside and have to leave,
and those who have already left,
because there are many patients who contact me and tell me:
“Silvia, I’ve spent a year already without this person.
This person, my ex-partner, is already in a relationship
and I still don’t understand why they left me.
I’m still asking myself what happened. I don’t understand.”
That is, they are still obsessed, going around and around,
you think “but they’re already there, living another life,
it’s already over.”
But what’s happening to them?
They don’t cut contact, they keep looking for information
on social media,
they still allow people to update them
and they keep drinking the substance that they’re clearly addicted to.
So I imagine you’re asking yourselves,
“Fine, OK, good. That’s pretty much clear.
What do we do when we’re emotionally dependent?
How do we get out of there?
Of course, I experienced it and when it happened to me,
I refused to accept that there was no way out,
it’s like “Ok, I’m hooked. I have an addiction. It is what it is.”
Because I had never been talked to about what emotional dependence was,
neither in my psychology degree nor anywhere else,
but I was convinced that I could get out
and so I have been able to prove this over the last 20 years.
Clearly, there has to be a process of personal growth,
a process to heal and to learn from all of this.
But I’m going to lay out the four steps for you,
which for me are without a doubt the most important ones,
and the path we should be on and what we must keep in mind.
The first of these four steps is of course: understanding.
It’s very important to understand what emotional dependence is,
to have, to receive the information
that allows us to know what we are talking about.
When someone doesn’t know something, it’s as if it’s alien to them
and if it happens to them, they won’t even see it.
They’ll suffer the consequences, but they won’t understand it.
When you educate yourself and give yourself more information,
it empowers that person, it gives them tools.
And that’s when that person is able to decide what they want to do
or where they want to go.
Therefore, I think it’s very important to invest in education.
If we don’t receive it from outside, let us look for it ourselves,
because we’ll benefit much more than if we don’t have it.
The second step: acceptance.
Accepting doesn’t mean you don’t have a desire for growth or improvement.
No, accepting is coming to terms with what is happening to us,
that we haven’t been able to control it up to that moment,
understanding that we aren’t to blame, simply nobody taught us, educated us,
we didn’t have the information to identify it in time.
But it’s like the alcoholic who says:
“Well yes, I have an alcohol addiction and I can’t control it.”
And it’s the same as saying;
“Yes, I’m suffering from emotional dependence
and I don’t know how to get out of it.
I need tools.”
And when we accept it we’re able to answer a question
that has always seemed very important to me,
that of “what is life trying to teach me?”
“What is it that life wanted me to learn
by making me live or suffer that experience?”
’What is it that I have to learn?”
Because when you learn from an experience,
something changes in you.
And that change in you is what protects you from going through
the same thing again.
It’s what makes you say to yourself when something similar happens to you
and you identify it. “No, not around here.”
Once we’ve accepted it, it’s very important
to raise our self-esteem.
Self-esteem, whenever we’ve suffered
emotional dependence, is damaged.
Because after so many attempts to make it work
and not achieving it, not getting the success we’re seeking,
in the end we connect with beliefs like:
“I’m not worth it. I’m not able. I can’t. I don’t deserve it, I’m not worthy.”
And that has to be reversed, it has to be turned around.
We have to strenghten ourselves in order to not feel that way.
We have to work to empower ourselves again
and to regain contact with our self-worth
and with the ability and the feeling of worthiness
that we should all bear in mind.
And once we have understood, we have been able to accept that yes,
this is happening to us, that we have suffered
from emotional dependence
and we have made a process to strenghten our self-esteem,
we have reached the last step, which is also very important,
which consists of two things.
Firstly, I think it’s important to stop and look back.
Looking back means analyzing where we came from,
to really analyze that experience we’ve just had, with perspective
and say in a totally sincere way “Thank you” while we smile.
Say: “Thank you, thank you for what this experience has taught me.”
“Thank you for what I’ve learnt.”
“Thank you for the person that I have become today,
much stronger, much more mature and much more aware.”
And once we’ve connected to gratitude,
once we have really been able to say “Thank you”,
it’s time to start looking forward again,
and with the utmost conviction and the utmost security
strongly embrace life and say to it loud and clear:
“Yes, now I’m coming for you.
But I’m coming for you free, healthy and happy.”
Thank you very much.
(Applause)