While Hyper-Independence Is Glamorized, It’s Not the Antidote for Healing
Humans have a biological need for community, support, and connection… And that starts from birth. We form these healthy attachments based on the ability to trust that our needs will be tended to. The more we can depend and trust as a youngster, the more we actually learn how to be interdependent and secure as an adult.
From the very beginning of our lives, our capacity for self-regulation is limited. We are reliant upon our primary to soothe and take care of us. While healthy adults are able to self-regulate and self-soothe, we don’t outgrow our need for soothing from others… especially our more intimate bonds.
What’s interesting is that our modern society’s message seems to clash with this notion. It’s no secret that independence is idealized and glamorized in our culture. As a woman, you’re considered a “bad b****” if you can do it all yourself while men tend to push away a lot of vulnerability to focus on finding value in what they provide. Meanwhile, the importance of connection and healthy dependency with others seems to fall by the wayside. This has made it challenging for many individuals to understand their longing for a deep, mutual connection.
While we are rewarded for being independent and self-sufficient, as if these were the keys to “adulting,” that couldn’t be further from the truth when it comes to our biological needs. Independence and self-sufficiency are signs of surviving, not thriving.
It’s not independence that’s the key to fulfillment as an adult… It's authentic connections with others which brings about a sense of safety. This feeling of safety is what allows us to coregulate, be interdependent, and feel secure in ourselves and relationships.
Connection: A Biological Imperative
While independence is touted as a possible solution to our relationship woes, it's actually just a protective stance one often takes when they’re experiencing pain. It’s coregulation, social engagement, and connection that indicate we are operating at our most evolved state.
According to Polyvagal theory, coregulation is the reciprocal sending and receiving of signals of safety. Developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, Ph.D., Polyvagal theory describes how our brains (namely our nervous systems) are constantly scanning for cues of danger in our environment. When we aren’t in survival mode (fight, flight, or freeze), we are accessing what Porges refers to as our social engagement system. Therefore, thriving is when we move out of a protective state and feel safe enough to depend on our closer bonds and community.
If we experience the world around us by involuntarily scanning situations and people to determine if they are safe or dangerous, it’s easy to see how our feeling of belonging hinges upon our perception of safety.
Biologically speaking, we need to feel safe in order to connect and we need to learn to depend on the right people to help us feel secure. Deep down, it’s as if we are constantly asking one, ever-present question:“Are you with me or are you against me?”
Safety, in this sense, is more than just the absence of danger. It’s a deep, nourishing connection between two nervous systems helping each other regulate. Coregulation isn’t just a desire that us humans share, it’s been programmed into our biology through evolution. It’s how we’ve come to survive as a human race and proves just how normal it is to need each other.
We are programmed to seek interpersonal connection with each other… Connection is a biological imperative.
Coregulating As an Adult
If we are fortunate as children, our primary care giver teaches us how to self-soothe and self-regulate through warm and responsive interactions in response to our cries for love and support. This is where we first have an opportunity to learn coregulation.
Coregulation between a caregiver and child leads to interdependence (not independence) in adulthood. Someone who is interdependent is able to lean on themselves and others with balance. They are secure in their self and relationships, so giving and receiving comes quite naturally.
The problem is, a lot of us weren’t given/taught coregulation as children and thus didn’t learn how to self-regulate… And biologically, we cannot just wake up one day with this skill.
As adults, we can learn how to coregulate through our interactions with a healthy support system. Coregulation can be learned and strengthened, just as we would train and strengthen a muscle. But this requires remaining in community with others and not hiding in a shell we call independence.
Leaning into healthy support and allowing for coregulation to happen in our adult relationships sounds easy enough. But the way our society idealizes independence may make interdependence seem out of reach…
Our Solution Focused World
The message that healing should be done “all by yourself” is pointing many people down a path of more loneliness and despair and lacks what many people are longing for: A deep feeling of interconnectedness.
As it were, our society’s pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, away from connection and healthy dependence. We are goal focused… fixated on success, wealth, status, and power. None of which activate our right brain or fall into the category of our biological need to connect with others.
It’s in the right, healthy relationships that healing happens. Insecure and anxious people especially need to learn to lean on more secure people and feel connected. It is that paradox that actually builds the wiring for more security from within. When insecure people get the right messages around how to heal in forms of healthy dependency and co-regulation they are no longer misguided into feeling they need to be independent as a solution to their suffering. Developing the ability to self-regulate is formed by healthy co-regulation and support. Security and “self-love” is built when we depend on dependable people and internalize positive experiences. It just does not happen alone, and thanks to neuroplasticity the healing that happens in healthy relationships changes our physiology. We as humans are inherently designed to reach out and move towards warm, non-judgmental relationships and it’s important to understand that independence is not that path to thriving.
Therefore, this cultural message needs to be reframed… It’s normal to need people and above that, healing codependency and insecure attachment is not about being independent, it is healed by being in relationships that are supportive and create a sense of safety and trust for someone to build inner security.
Without this connection and safety in our relationships, we will likely remain stuck in a defensive state. What suffers is our relationships with others and our understanding of how we fit into a complex, non-linear world in which everything is connected. We’ve become a society of independent, non-connected individuals. The healing that many seek simply cannot happen alone on an island.
The answer is not to support this path of stark independence nor is it to forgo our unique sense of individuality. But rather to be in community that is supportive while we get to openly express ourselves as individuals.
Once we feel safe in our relationship with another, we can move away from a sense of “needing” one another and instead genuinely choose one another every day. That’s interdependence. It’s when emotional intimacy is valued just as much as maintaining a firm sense of self is.
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