Independence: Healthy or not so healthy?
This column seeks to help educate our community about emotional healing through grief. People may write questions to Golden Willow Retreat and they will be answered privately to you and possibly as a future article for others. Please list a first name that grants permission for printing.
Dear Dr. Ted:
With the July Fourth, around the corner, I’m hoping you can write an article on independence and if that is what we are all striving for, or is independence actually unhealthy?
Thanks, Trey
Dear Trey:
Great idea to have an article on Independence Day about independence.
It is amazing how complex holidays, recognized or not recognized, interplay within people’s emotional and intellectual realms of their lives. Poignant calendar markers cause pause and pondering for most people. This may be negative, positive, sad, joyful, loving or fearful. It may be melancholic or highly charged, and, of course, possibly no reaction at all.
Independence Day is a holiday in the United States honoring the Declaration of Independence in which the 13 colonies declared they were no longer under the rule of Britain. I don’t believe you were seeking a history lesson but there is a great correlation between this historical moment and the psychological realms of independence.
Part of your developmental stages of life are to move from dependence (birth) to codependence and then independence, with a level of interdependence being the final phase of emotional growth and interaction with other people. When you are born, you are dependent and intertwined with your caregivers for survival, and as you grow to realize you are a separate entity, you realize you are separate but are looking for that external lifeline (external locus-ofcontrol) to keep you alive.
From this stage you may move into a state of independence in which you question authority and feel you are completely self-sufficient of everybody and everything. This independence doesn’t hold up well as very few people are 100% self-sufficient and have a need for others in order to make it in the world.
This leads to the next phase of development which is interdependence – when you develop a level of autonomy within your life in making decisions and responding to these decisions. As well, within that decision process, you are asking for help and collaborating with others to meet the needs of many as well as your own. Interdependence derives from introspection and what do you need for your personal well-being and principles, and then reaching out to the external world to see how you can work together for something larger than only you.
A healthy interdependent relationship is built on all players involved – coming from their needs and wants, communicating these needs and wants and agreeing on what works for each person. Then, as a collective, the group can move forward meeting the needs of the entire group rather than one individual. This takes a high level of maturity with honest communication, compromise, collective learning and a willingness to work together, but not at the expense of anyone’s moral compass.
I hope this Fourth of July, we all can take a moment as an individual, town, state and country to see how we each can make a difference by working together to have needs met and goals reached in a collective decision-making process, rather than completely independent and possibly at the expense of others. If we can shift in this direction, I believe we would be acting from an interdependent manner and celebrating the collective rather than recognizing a historical benchmark.
Thank you for the question. I wish you well. Until next week, take care.
Golden Willow Retreat is a nonprofit organization focused on emotional healing and recovery from any type of loss. Direct any questions to Dr. Ted Wiard, EdD, LPCC, CGC, founder of Golden Willow Retreat at GWR@newmex.com.
‘Interdependence derives from introspection and what do you need for your personal well-being and principles, and then reaching out to the external world to see how you can work together for something larger than only you.’