Emotionally Dependent Relationships
by Peterson Toscano
WARNING—This article may bring up gunk for you.
Some of you may shudder when you see or hear the words Emotionally Dependent Relationships. This is especially true if you attended an ex-gay program that warned against the perils of emotional dependency.
Today I received a voice mail from a friend who attended Love in Action with me over ten years ago. Just the other day when we spoke on the phone he sounded chipper with a wonderful attitude about himself and life in general, but on the recorded message his voice sounded desperate. If I hadn't understand the words in his message correctly, I would have inferred from his tone of voice that he had spent the night strung out on crack cocaine engaging in multiple unprotected sexual encounters. He sounded defeated and demoralized. What terrorized him? It wasn't a "sexual fall," as we called it back at Love in Action. No, he encountered the specter of emotionally dependent relationships.
Now this is a guy who has not really had sex with another guy in his whole life. Like some who come to a place like Love in Action, he pretty much always had sexual feelings for guys, but he was much more interested in a romantic relationship than in hooking up. The staff drummed it into him that his drug of choice came in the form of intense relationships with other guys. Explicitly and more subtly they stressed that such relationships were unhealthy, abnormal and sinful.
For many of us, the results of these teachings exacerbated our feelings towards the objects of our affection along with the toxic feelings of shame and fear. Ex-gay ministers taught us to distrust strong feelings towards anyone, especially anyone of the same-sex even if that person were not gay or lesbian.
Christine Bakke recently wrote about this topic and did some art work which she shares in her blog post In Mesh. She writes,
The biggest problem I still face is fear of close relationships with others - especially women. Fear of "emotional dependency" or "enmeshment." Fear of needing someone. Fear of...I don't know. Just fear, and now just a consistent inability to wholly participate in friendships with others.
I know that it's not true - that while some relationships can be unhealthy, most are not. And closeness and yes, even at times emotional dependency should not be demonized. There are times when we all need others, and to be shamed for relationships that we had while ex-gay, those that others deemed unhealthy; relationships that may have been getting us through some of the tougher moments in our ex-gay process...it is a great harm and a great disservice to us at a time when we were the most vulnerable, and the most laid bare, needing others around us.
Those ex-gay providers who expound on the hazards of enmeshment and emotional dependency most often target lesbians with these teachings, but gay men also fall under the sway of these misguided ideas. The fear and shame-soaked lessons about emotionally dependent relationships gave us false and dangerous guidance that still affects some of us today years after we left the ex-gay world.
We may not always be conscious of it, but today some of us still hold others at bay not allowing them to get too close lest we form some sort of negative bond with them. We secretly hold the beliefs that we are emotionally broken, flawed, dangerous. We live independent lives without deep and intimate connections with others. And when we begin to feel a drawing closer to a person, so often doubts and fears seem to come out of nowhere, and before we know it, we squash the blossoming attachment.
The reality is that humans need intimate, meaningful relationships.
It is not good for man or woman to be alone.
The concept of a single person is an abnormal modern construct. Up until recently most of our people lived in family units of some kind. Fellow citizens viewed the lone hermit as the rare saint or more often the town crazy person. Not everyone lived with a romantic and sexual partner, but they lived in families made up of all sorts of configurations. Modernity created the single person who so often lives detached from other humans except for business transactions, work, and long-distance family ties that tenuously hold people nominally responsible for each other.
Not that I want to bash the single life; I am single myself. But many of us long for something more. That longing comes from legitimate need—a human need, just like we as humans need physical touch. Without it we begin to grow depressed, to detach, to fade.
All sorts of research has been conducted that highlights the positive affects of skin to skin touch. After I have spent extensive time with someone who loves me, and we held each other, cuddled and touched, I felt joy even weeks afterwards when we were physically far away from each other. I'm not even talking about sex here (not that there is anything wrong with sex), but simply the human need for touching, holding, being physically present with another.
Some ex-gay teachings on intimacy and relationships run counter to our natural, healthy human needs. They instruct us to divorce ourselves from reality, from our genuine needs as well as from our sexual orientation. They demand that we live lives devoid of physical intimacy except for the rare cases when ex-gays marry someone of the opposite sex. Other than that all relationships and forms of intimacy remain suspect and taboo. They allow us to be intimate with the Spirit of God, but we need to avoid physical and emotional connectedness with other humans.
no, No NO! We need to live in reality. We need each other. We need deep and meaningful relationships and that human touch—emotionally and physically. We need to depend on friends and lovers and loved one and have them depend on us to supply each other with the things only humans can give to each other.
In fact, in regards to these teachings, I see the ex-gay movement as an Ex-Human Movement.
No, we need each other, and when we don't have our emotional and physical needs met, we mourn, we feel the loss and the pain of detachment, of emotional solitude. At those times I need to acknowledge reality and express my need to myself, to God and to others. It is not a matter of whining (and yeah some of my friends get tired of hearing it), it is a matter of being present in the pain of unmet need and then putting into words, images, prayers, sighs, and groans what we long for, what we need. We ask, we seek, we knock.
The false ex-gay teachings on emotionally dependent relationships rest on a faulty foundation. They overlook reality and in turn paralyze people and force them into a stagnant way of life. The best way I can think to counter lies like these is with simple, rational, truth. Then I can begin to detox from the noxious teaching that enabled me to be an emotional stranger for so long.