What is Dependent Personality Disorder?
Dependent personality disorder is a common psychological problem that causes people to have a strong need for the care and companionship of others. This need is not true love, but a compulsive, blind, and irrational desire. People with this problem will give up their own interests and values, and feel satisfied as long as they can find someone to rely on. Doing so will make them more and more lazy, fragile, and without their own opinions and creativity. They may also feel depressed and frustrated because they are always accommodating to others. This kind of depression and depression will gradually make them lose their dreams and hobbies.
If you have five or more of the following symptoms, you may have dependent personality disorder:
- Don’t dare to make your own decisions, always listen to other people’s suggestions and guarantees.
- Have no independent opinion and let others arrange important things for you. For example, where do you live, what do you do, etc.
- Fear of being abandoned. Even if you know that others are wrong, you will not dare to object and will only obey.
- Lack of independence and inability to make plans or complete tasks on their own.
- Being overly accommodating and doing things you don’t like or shouldn’t do in order to please others.
- Don’t like to be alone, feel uncomfortable and helpless, or find ways to avoid loneliness.
- Feeling helpless or broken when a close relationship ends.
- Frequently worried about being abandoned by others.
- It’s easy to get hurt when you don’t get compliments or when you get criticism.
How to Overcome Dependent Personality Disorder
If you think you have dependent personality disorder, don’t be discouraged. You can improve it by:
1. Change habits
The expression of dependent personality has become a habit, so if you want to change it, you must first change your habit. You can record every day which things you rely on others to do and which things you do yourself. After recording for a week, divide these things into three categories: strong, moderate, and poor sense of autonomy. Summarize it every week.
For things with a strong sense of autonomy, you must insist on doing it yourself when encountering the same situation in the future. For example, one day you wear a beautiful dress to work according to your own preferences, then continue to wear such clothes to work in the future, and don’t change because of what others say, unless you don’t like it anymore. These are small things that can help you overcome bad habits.
For things with medium levels of autonomy, you can propose ways to improve them and implement them step by step in the future. For example, when making a work plan, you listened to your friend’s opinion, but you don’t agree with it, then you should state the reasons why you don’t agree and tell your friend. In this way, your work plan will have your own ideas. As you have more and more ideas, you can gradually switch from listening to other people’s opinions to making your own decisions.
For things with poor autonomous awareness, you can gradually enhance your autonomous awareness and improve your ability to create yourself. Add your own subjective flavor to what others ask you to do.
2. Build confidence
If habits are simply changed without finding the root cause, the dependent personality may relapse. Building self-confidence is the root of the problem.
**The first step is to eliminate the shadow of childhood. **
People with dependent personality lack self-confidence and have low self-awareness, which is related to the bad education they received in childhood. You can recall the hurtful words your parents, elders, and friends said to you when you were a child. For example: ‘You are so stupid, you can’t do anything.’ ‘Look at how clumsy you are, let me help you do it.’ etc. You sort out these words, and then change your views on them one by one, and tell your friends and relatives, so that when you try to do something, they should not use these words to criticize you, but encourage you enthusiastically ,help you.
**The second step is to build courage. **
You can choose to do something a little adventurous once a week. For example: a person travels to a nearby scenic spot; a person goes to participate in an entertainment activity; or one day a week is designated as an ‘independent day’. On this day, no matter what happens, you do not rely on others. By doing these things, you can increase your courage and change your weakness of always relying on others.
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