What does it mean to emotionally heal? It means that you know what you are thinking or doing that causes fear, anxiety, depression, guilt, fear, anger, jealousy, and so on, and how to learn from and heal these painful feelings. It means that you no longer turn to addictions to avoid loneliness, heartache, heartbreak, sorrow or grief because you know how to manage and release these painful feelings. It means that you do not feel like a victim of others’ choices and instead operate from a place of personal power, taking loving care of yourself rather than being reactive. It means that you are able to manifest the gifts you have been given and spend your time in what brings you joy. It means that you know how to fill yourself with love and share love with others rather than trying to get love and approval from others.

How Does Healing Occur?

Are you love or approval addicted?

• Do you often feel empty inside if you are not in a relationship?
• Do you often feel empty inside even if you are in a relationship but your partner is not paying attention to you?
• Do you get anxious when a person you are dating does not contact you when you expect them to?
• Do you get anxious when your partner goes out of town?
• Do you tend to ruminate/obsess about what your partner or someone you are dating is thinking or doing?
• Do you get angry when someone is not saying or doing what you believe they would say or do if they cared about you?

People turn to addictions when they are not taking responsibility for filling themselves with the love they need. Love and approval addiction is like any other addiction: you are using something external – in this case another’s attention to you – to fill the emptiness that is the result of your own self-abandonment.

Most of us learned to abandon ourselves, with various addictions, as we were growing up because:

• We had no role models of how to take loving care of ourselves.
• We could not handle the big feelings of loneliness and heartbreak that are often a part of childhood.
• We did not receive the nurturing we needed to handle the heartache, heartbreak, and loneliness of childhood.

When your parents or other caregivers were upset or unhappy, what did they do? Did you see them doing an inner process to discover the inner source of their upset and shift their thinking and behavior to make themselves happy? Did you see them comforting themselves with deep caring and compassion when life’s challenges were causing them loneliness and heartbreak?

Or, did you see them:

You are emotionally dependent when your happiness, sense of safety, and sense of worth are dependent upon others’ love, attention, and approval.

When you were growing up, perhaps you heard statements like:

“What will the neighbors think?”

“What will__(so and so)__think if you do that?”

Where you taught that what others think of you matters? That you are okay if you are approved of and not okay if you are not? Was your worth tied to your achievements – such as your grades or sports? Did you learn to define your worth externally by your performance or your looks?

Most people were brought up to believe that others are responsible for defining their worth, and the media certainly plays on this, implying that if you buy this car or that product, you will get the approval that defines you as worthy. The media even implies that the product itself somehow enhances your worth.

This is a hard way to live, as you have to constantly prove yourself. And what happens to your happiness, safety, and sense of self worth when you grow old and lose your looks, or you lose your money in a down market? What happens to your worth if you gain weight or never make it financially? Does this mean that you have no worth as a human being?

There are two major decisions you need to make to heal from emotional dependency: