Do you spend time looking towards others to give you something? Or wait for them to be the one to connect? Or do you reach out? Do you find that generally you are around those who reciprocate? Or do you find you are the one that gives and gives a lot not receiving much in return?
In my education we were taught to be good and to give when we could. We were also taught that it wasn’t really possible to ask for any kind of help and rely on receiving it. In my own life I had many experiences of being cast out alone into situations in which I could only depend on myself. Then it was harder to let others depend on me at all. On some level I think that I began to associate depending or letting others depend on me as standing on dangerous ground which could be pulled out from under me at any time. Despite this I am the kind of person that if I say I will do something I do it, the exception was with my last ex partner who made so many demands of me that in time I said I would do things that I then wound up resenting doing and so then may have failed to do, or pulled the pin on as I felt I was being used and controlled. I then got labelled a someone inherently unreliable, something my old friends just could not validate, knowing me well.
My ex had a lot of unmet dependency needs from childhood. It was only natural he would take them into the next relationship and then face difficulties that could have best been addressed by therapy but sadly he was never the one with the problem. It was his partners. I think in time he may have found someone who had been given more in childhood and so could give him what he needed. I could not. And that in the end made me feel a failure. But I now see I was not. I had been through so much alone and never allowed myself to fully depend that that injury had to be healed outside of the relationship. I was badly in need of receiving and he told me once that he could not care about my needs, as his needs and surfing always came first!
Now I am faced with a situation where I need some significant help. I am finding it hard to ask for and accept it as I feel a lot of guilt. Why should I be given to? The person is willing to give but I am finding it hard to receive. I realise that this is a wound in me, one I need to address. What is my fear of depending, of opening up, of being vulnerable? Is it a fear of control? At the moment I am not sure but I am going to do some work on this issue. As I need to overcome my fear of depending on others. Its hard to say I need but we all have needs as humans and I seem to have spent a lot of the past years denying mine. It seems the statute of limitations on this issue is now due.
Emerging From The Dark Night 