“Sometimes it’s as if I’m missing
That part of my soul
That fits into the puzzle of the world.
I open thousands of boxes,
I find beautiful and colorful pieces,
but it’s inside me that the piece is missing
to complete the puzzle.”con cui completare l’incastro”

(Fabrizio Caramagna, Incastri)

 

Behavioral addictions and post-modern society

The sufferings I mean are the so-called “new addictions,” and in particular, emotional dependence; these are behavioral addictions not related to substance use.

Overall, these addictions involve behaviors associated with immediate gratification and the inability to resist the urge to engage in them despite the negative consequences for the individual’s life. As we will see, they have many similarities with substance addictions. These behaviors are aimed at alleviating dysphoric moods. The individual may experience withdrawal symptoms and develop tolerance, which leads them to increasingly engage in the behavior, perceiving themselves unable to control it.

• Addiction to new technologies: internet, smartphones, online games, social networks and online pornography;
• Compulsive gambling (GAP);
• Compulsive shopping
• Emotional dependence
• Workaholism
• Physical activity addiction

Behavioral addictions are linked to the lifestyle of contemporary Western society and underlie the existential malaise of the postmodern individual. Gestalt therapy focuses not on the individual but on the organism in its environment, highlighting how the context in which we live is part of our identity.

“Experience occurs at the boundary between the organism and its environment…experience is the function of this boundary.” (Perls, Hefferline, Goodman Theory and Practice of Gestalt Therapy)

Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt Therapy, understood how cultural contexts determine psychopathologies, which in Gestalt Therapy we prefer to call “sufferings,” placing more emphasis on the unique experience of the individual than on the nosographic classification of the disorder they suffer from. Psychopathologies, in the Gestalt perspective, are sufferings in relationships that express a lack of meaningful encounter with the other.

Postmodern society, our environment, is an individualistic one in which the self prevails over the we. Baumann defines it as a “liquid” society in which bonds between people and with institutions are very fragile. Traditional social structures such as family, school, or religious communities no longer constitute solid points of reference. The human need to develop a sense of belonging in order to build an identity is being ignored by an increasingly fragmented and complex community. On the one hand, the individual has, in the author’s opinion, many more opportunities than past generations to encounter differences and have potentially richer and more transformative experiences. Consider extended families or coexistence with people of different ethnicities and the potential cross-fertilization that results, expressed in terms of opportunities to experiment with different ways of being in the world.

On the other hand, however, the opportunity to take root in certainty, in the predictability of shared rules and values ​​that constitute the cornerstones of the traditional social context, is disappearing, giving way to a purely individualistic vision of existence: post-modern man exists to assert himself, to achieve his own personal fulfillment, not to promote community goals or to sacrifice his own needs for the common good.

The right to personal happiness becomes central in a culture that views the individual primarily as a consumer of ephemeral goods tied to an illusory promise of well-being and self-affirmation. This individualistic drift creates a social dimension in which, lacking any stable sense of belonging, everything dissolves into an uncertainty that becomes the norm, not the exception, of being in the world. We can think of postmodern man, taking things a bit to the extreme, as a tree without strong roots that struggles to develop its branches in harmonious and balanced growth. A society that doesn’t support the development of belonging produces lonely, confused, fragile individuals, focused on the surface of their being and incapable of staying in touch with their emotions and identifying their needs. The personality structure of those who grew up without references and certainties is often fragile, and while success may be achieved professionally, significant difficulties arise in relationships. We can identify some characteristics that, to varying degrees, recur in individuals:

• Deep sense of loneliness and isolation
• Inability to form intimate relationships
• Compulsive seeking of stimuli
• Seeking novelty as a source of excitement and escape from inner emptiness
• Inability to get in touch with one’s emotions
• Behavioral and substance addictions to alleviate a painful feeling of emptiness

The potential for forming friendships or finding partners online is potentially endless, and you can constantly meet new people. However, this very availability of opportunities has made relationships more superficial and ephemeral. It’s more difficult to engage in the process of building and engaging with others than to change people with the illusion that, sooner or later, the right match will come along, bringing happiness and love and resolving your life.

“Man’s attention tends to focus on the satisfactions that relationships are hoped to bring precisely because, in some way, they have not been deemed fully and truly satisfying and when they do satisfy fully, it is often discovered that the price of such satisfaction is excessive and unacceptable” (Bauman, Liquid Love)

The renunciation of engaging with others and building relationships through patient mutual understanding becomes, in effect, the renunciation of self-knowledge, because it is through relationships that we truly know ourselves. As Aristotle states:

“We cannot contemplate ourselves starting from ourselves, the self-sufficient man will need a friendship to learn to know himself”

There’s a painful sense of emptiness that individuals escape by any means because they’re afraid of it. It’s a void of nourishing contact with others, but above all, a void of self-presence, which is the foundation of feeling whole before the world. Many behavioral addictions lead to the absolute loneliness of those who experience them.

Substance addictions and behavioral addictions develop in response to the sense of emptiness and profound anguish it arouses in the individual. This emptiness can be filled with food, which evokes emotional nourishment; alcohol, which transmits warmth; a person who becomes the center of one’s life; or work, which allows one to ignore one’s emotions and lose oneself in a whirlwind of commitments and responsibilities; or an exaggerated concern for one’s physical appearance, which becomes an obsession with the perfect image and leads one further and further away from the pleasure of feeling alive.

This tragicomic game structures the daily lives of many people who try to fill their time with countless activities, trying to distract themselves from situations of awareness regarding their existence. To avoid encountering their own loneliness, to avoid experiencing their own emptiness, people often take refuge in situations of dependency that further empty their lives of value. Then they fill the voids by shooting themselves, drowning themselves in alcohol, hypnotizing themselves in front of a television, and in a thousand other ways. In reality, the emptiness, no matter what you do, is dragged along anyway; the more you try to avoid and fill it, the more it grows. (Antonio Lo Iacono, Psychology of Solitude)

Our offices increasingly welcome patients with behavioral or substance addictions, of which they are often relatively aware. Substance use among young people, for example, is highly normalized and linked to moments of conviviality that substances make enjoyable by inducing euphoria and relational openness. Young people often experience an absence of essential intimate relationships and are unable to sustain bodily arousal in encounters with others. Unsustained arousal turns into anxiety, and desensitization is the creative adaptation to pervasive feelings of anxiety and uncertainty.

“The desensitization that young people suffer from in our postmodern society (which we find blatantly expressed in the bodies of people with dependent modalities) protects them from the anxiety resulting from the lack of relational containment, so that through the powerful sensations of a dependent bond, one is able to feel one’s own sensations, one’s own body: I ​​exist! I’m alive!” (Giancarlo Pintus, The Absolute Relationship)

If psychopathology is the suffering of relationships, it finds its cure in relationships. That missed encounter that prevented the patient from developing a sense of integrity emerges in therapy as a need for a specific experience of contact.

The therapeutic process offers the opportunity to experience the restorative encounter that allows the patient to gain self-awareness and achieve fullness in their relational experience. In therapy, an I and a Thou are formed, where the other is finally recognized as different from the self and not used as an object of one’s own projections. If the patient has not fully developed self-awareness, in fact, they will always be driven by need in the relationship with the other and not by the desire for an authentic and reciprocal encounter.

Stefano Bolognini explored how relational suffering can also make it difficult to continue the therapeutic process, which requires perseverance and a willingness to trust in the encounter with the other.

Some of these patients shy away from the idea of ​​dependence on a human being, while others accept a connection, but almost never fully…. Many patients today, in fact, reject the idea of ​​being intensively and openly dependent on someone. For complex but not necessarily mysterious reasons, they seem to show signs of a substantial distrust and/or lack of habituation regarding the presence and constancy of the object, its essential reliability, and, ultimately, the resulting dependence on it. (Stefano Bolognini, New Psychopathological Forms in a Changing World: A Challenge for 21st-Century Psychoanalysis)

How can we experience the human need to love if we haven’t established a foundational trust in others? The failure of primary relationships leaves the existential message that it’s impossible to be accepted and recognized in an encounter with another. Developing a dependency can be a substitute for instant gratification, an illusion of fulfillment; even a relationship with another person can be experienced, instrumentally, to fill a void without allowing oneself to experience true intimacy in the encounter. This is the mode of emotional dependency.

Emotional dependency

Romantic relationships characterized by emotional dependence are all-encompassing relationships in which the loved one becomes so central to the dependent partner that their entire world loses interest and clarity, rendering it devoid of consistency, direction, and growth.

A person experiencing emotional dependence (hereinafter AD) constantly needs the physical closeness of their partner and experiences fear of the relationship ending, even in the absence of signs of crisis or withdrawal from their loved one. In the AD’s experience, love is intertwined with fear, and the fear becomes increasingly strong, leading to obsessive thoughts, controlling behaviors, and constant requests for reassurance from their loved one. The separation from their partner leaves the AD with a profound sense of emptiness, which they experience physically as a constant, excruciating physical absence, as if their partner, by moving away, were taking with them vital parts of their sense of existence and place in the world.

“When, after the initial stages of a love relationship, one partner begins to demand more space for themselves, to the detriment of the primary confluence, the other partner experiences feelings of abandonment and suffering. Lovers spend their time interpreting every minimal change in their partner’s behavior and mood, searching for obscure meanings that create pain, fear, and mistrust.” (Giancarlo Pintus, The Absolute Relationship)

Why do we define emotional dependence as an addiction and include it among behavioral addictions? Because the relationship with a partner is similar to that established with a substance of abuse:

• The partner monopolizes thoughts (salience and obsessive thinking)
• There is a constant need to be with your partner (craving)
• The absence of a partner causes strong anxiety and feelings of emptiness (withdrawal)
• Over time, the physical presence of the partner becomes increasingly necessary (tolerance)
• The feeling is so pervasive that it compromises the social functioning and psychophysical well-being of the DA

It will not escape the reader’s notice that, especially the first points of the classification, can also be found in the initial phase of a romantic relationship, the phase known as falling in love. However, it is clear to the clinician that the aspect of overwhelming emotional suffering is characteristic of AD. Typically, moments of well-being are experienced in the company of a partner (“like being in a bubble”), and suffering begins as soon as one is alone. The partner’s withdrawal is perceived as abandonment and becomes saturated with fear. Another aspect that characterizes the experience of AD is the negative consequences on the individual’s life.o.

First, a toxic relationship tends to take on such importance that everything that doesn’t concern it fades into the background. Personal interests and activities, as well as work and/or academic tasks, duties, and responsibilities, end up being neglected. The same happens with all relationships outside of the one with the partner, leading the love-dependent person to isolate themselves socially. (Paolo Antonelli, Love Dependencies)

In addition to social isolation, ADHD is at risk of developing substance addictions (used to treat anxiety and depression) and engaging in risky behaviors such as drunk driving, even suicidal behavior. Abuse by abusive partners is often linked to a history of emotional dependence; in some extreme cases, ADHD is willing to endure beatings, betrayal, insults, and humiliation rather than end the relationship with their partner.

It’s clear that experiencing emotional dependence can mean losing one’s freedom and betraying oneself; the AD is often painfully aware of this and can experience profound feelings of shame related to their condition. Moreover, it often happens that ADs choose partners who are very distant, emotionally unavailable, or emotionally attached to other people. The asymmetry that characterizes these relationships thus takes the form of tension toward an unattainable partner with whom one experiences very strong emotions (as if in a bubble from which the whole world is shut out) during contact, followed by sudden distancing (which feels like the ground opening up beneath one’s feet). It is precisely this intermittent contact that contributes to strengthening dependence and obsessive control dynamics. It is typical of the AD to squander one’s talents on someone who turns out to be an exploiter. For the AD, love means sacrificing oneself, annulling oneself for the benefit of someone else. Social media is full of blogs dedicated to the relationship between ADs and so-called malignant narcissists. What strikes me is that the articles never focus on the AD’s suffering, but rather on ways to reconnect with the narcissist who has distanced himself. This creates a sad market for advice and strategies that rarely includes the suggestion of starting therapy or joining a self-help group.

In other cases, however, the DA experiences codependent relationships with partners who are also often addicted to substances (Norwood’s book “Women Who Love Too Much” describes this dynamic) and identifies with the role of helper, thus unknowingly ensuring that he or she will not be abandoned by a partner who needs his or her assistance.

In my opinion, every story of emotional dependence is unique and takes on a specific meaning depending on the existential journey of those experiencing it. Certainly, situations that lead to a sense of increased fragility can predispose one to this type of experience, especially if one comes into contact with manipulative people who view romantic relationships as power struggles. I would say that one is more exposed to this possibility if one has experienced childhood deprivation or abuse, but also if one is going through painful phases in life such as bereavement or difficult transitions such as menopause in women. The experience of emotional dependence can be a one-time experience or it can be a fixed relational pattern that people call love, confusing love with suffering.

If the DA finds the courage to ask for help by joining a group or making an appointment with a therapist trained to deal with this suffering, he or she can begin a long journey at the end of which, if the work has been done well, he or she has the opportunity to find, or rediscover, himself or herself.

The ECOS model: a treatment proposal

After years of working with patients experiencing emotional dependence, either as a recurring pattern of romantic relationships or occasionally during particular periods of their lives, my colleague and friend Angelo Stera and I have identified the phases that punctuate the therapeutic journey and that allow us to establish certain steps and define a shared treatment model.

Our approach is Gestalt-based and therefore begins with working on the patient’s contact boundaries. This emotional and physical work also includes a highly engaging psychoeducational component. Overcoming emotional dependence is a daily process that requires significant commitment. Psychotherapy sessions are essential, but our experience has shown that they are often insufficient, especially in the emergency phase. With this understanding in mind, Angelo and I created a free self-help group open to the public, which has proven to be a highly effective tool, especially as a complement to participants’ psychotherapeutic programs.

ECOS Model

• Emergency
• Awareness
• Origin
• Overcoming

Emergency

People experiencing AD usually come to therapy in a moment of emergency; often they have been dumped by their partner or their life is literally starting to fall apart and they realize they can no longer manage it.

These patients exhibit a physical stiffness due to hypervigilance, their eyes are often wide open as if in a state of stupor, breathing is difficult even if they are not aware of it (in particular, they struggle to exhale), their speech is continuous and often slurred, obsessive thoughts about their partner constantly inhabit them, and they feel a pervasive anxiety that prevents them from feeling at ease in any situation.

The therapist, in the co-created field of the session, may experience the same difficulty breathing and a sensation of bodily tension; in the dialogic exchange, he or she often feels ineffective, as if his or her words fail to reach the patient or slip past him or her without a trace. He or she may also feel literally overwhelmed by the patient’s stories and unseen.

In my therapeutic work with some patients with AD, I feel as if I’m under a spell: their eyes look at me but don’t see me, and I know it will take a lot of work to get my patient to truly be present in the session. At times, I feel a sense of helplessness, as if everything is too much, and I have to return to my body, to my feelings, and ground myself so as not to get lost in the confusion and sense of impotence and inevitability of suffering. It helps me to tell myself that this is only the first phase, that I’m not useless, and that it’s especially important to build a bond with the patient. I try not to focus on the events, much less on the results of our sessions in terms of behaviors related to emotional dependence.

Typically, these patients, in the early stages of therapy, use interviews to understand the person on whom they are dependent. They expect technical answers from the therapist in order to reconnect with their partner. Obviously, the therapist should not indulge in this implicit request, even though it is difficult not to respond to the constant solicitations. The work consists of gently guiding the patient to their feelings regarding their partner’s behavior without expressing judgment or offering suggestions about possible behaviors. Falling into this trap, in fact, jeopardizes the therapy. If the therapist, for example, goes out of his way and advises the patient not to meet with her ex-boyfriend because such behavior would cause her pain and reinforce her dependence, there is a risk that, once she has met her boyfriend, she will feel she has disappointed the therapist and will have difficulty continuing the interviews. This dynamic, moreover, is not far from what patients experience in friendships or family relationships; Often friends, after having supported them even for long periods, begin to expect their behavior to change and, faced with the repetition of the dynamics with their partner, end up distancing themselves, considering them “lost”.

At this stage, attending support group meetings can be of great help to the AD because the time between therapy sessions often feels too long and the feeling of loneliness is intense. In the group, one interacts with people going through the same experience, and this immediately makes one feel less alone. Engaging isn’t always easy or predictable; some people wait months before sharing their story, but they work on themselves thanks to the stories of others, which resonate deeply with them. The group also offers perspective to those who feel they don’t have one; the sharing of those who are further along in the process and feel stronger and more liberated from their addiction is invaluable. Our experience as facilitators has been that, not immediately, but after a few months, participants began to connect with and support each other outside the group. I remember a woman who had decided to go on a date with her ex but feared she wouldn’t be able to handle the meeting and fall back into the addictive relationship; a participant offered to pick her up an hour later and take her home. It is difficult for ADs to have the same availability from the people in their lives because they often do not understand the level of difficulty of the dynamics of addiction. Friends are generous with advice based on appeals to rationality and common sense, but ADs know perfectly well how they should behave, but they are simply not capable of doing so.

Awareness

Once the patient begins to feel the therapeutic bond and lean on it during times of difficulty due to the partner’s absence, the therapist can begin working to help them become aware of their emotional dependence and see it for what it is: a true dependence that has nothing to do with love. This is a difficult but crucial step because, starting from this awareness, the patient can refocus on themselves, gradually withdrawing their emotional investment from their partner.

To help patients disinvest from others, psychoeducational work is essential, aimed at making them aware of how they actively fuel their dependence on a cognitive and emotional level. Patients typically quickly benefit from these self-observation techniques and feel more present and have more energy available to spend in other areas of their lives. Often, partners who establish power dynamics with people predisposed to AD, when they sense that the patient is feeling better, engage in behaviors aimed at weakening and keeping them tied down. We could say that the magician who cast the spell attempts to prevent the emotional prisoner from escaping by further deluding them with promises, special moments, and finally tender and fulfilling sexual encounters. The therapist, therefore, should not be discouraged by enthusiastic speeches about the renewed emotional connection with the partner, nor should he bring ominous prophecies to the patient. Rather, this will be a valuable opportunity to support them, with curiosity, in exploring whether they have noticed any differences in their relationship with their partner. This observation, developed in the session, will prove especially valuable in the subsequent phase, linked to the partner’s new, predictable distancing, when the patient will mistakenly believe they’ve returned to square one. However, this is never the case, even when the changes are difficult to detect.

As soon as the emotional emergency subsides, the therapeutic journey begins to take shape. Once the dragons of obsessions and the ghosts of constant monitoring have been overcome, this stone world that seemed like the patient’s life begins to come alive. People other than the patient’s partner, friends, and colleagues appear in the sessions, and different dynamics are recounted with a new emotional engagement.

This is the point where I believe it’s important to work on emotional regulation, guiding the patient to embrace their emotions in all their nuances, describing them and feeling them in their bodies, learning to distinguish and recognize them one by one. “What does it mean to you that you love your friend? What do you feel when you’re with her? How do you feel after meeting her? How do you feel here with me as you talk to me about her?”

“Emotional dependence may be based on a deficit in mentalization due to negative experiences with the caregiver. The ability to recognize and respond to one’s own mental states is a necessary prerequisite for forming satisfying intimate and romantic relationships…this ability tends to be compromised in people who were emotionally neglected in childhood due to a lack of reflection with their caregiver. The result is that, by failing to mentalize their emotions, they fail to learn to manage them. In emotionally dependent individuals, the object of their dependence thus functions as an external regulator of their emotions.” (Paolo Antonelli, Affective Dependencies)

Patients with AD are like people who have listened to heavy metal music at full volume for years and now can’t hear a song on the radio at a normal volume. In order for them to thrive in relationships with others, they need to discover, or rediscover, a more subtle and delicate sense of connection after the powerful emotional rollercoaster they experienced with their partner. This new emotional literacy, which may require a long period of therapy, leads the patient to see themselves and others in a new way, as if moving from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional view of reality.

Now the patient can ask himself: “What do I feel?”, “How am I feeling in this situation?” bringing his attention back to himself instead of constantly wondering who the loved one he has investigated in vain to the point of exhaustion really is.

Origins

Now, space is created to address childhood experiences, those painful absences that underlie this pattern of desperate search for love that the patient reenacts in his adult life. Now he is no longer alone in encountering the sadness, loneliness, and desperation he experienced as a child.

I remember a patient’s childhood. He was given 5,000 lire for every birthday. He would go to the movies alone to celebrate. In one session, I guided him to imagine I was in the movie theater with him, and we celebrated his birthday by sharing that precious moment. But when I asked him about the cake, he painfully replied that he had never had a birthday cake. Deep within him was the belief that he was unlovable, and that he took for granted that he would not receive love, care, and respect; that was his reality. Our long therapeutic journey led him to understand himself, to identify his own needs, and to question the unbalanced relationships he experienced, based on his tendency to please others in order to gain affection and closeness.

Wounded parts that refer to a lack of support, if not to mistreatment or abuse, experienced in childhood, must be encountered and welcomed in therapeutic sessions. This will be possible once the patient has developed a “healthy” dependence in the relationship with the therapist, overcoming the substantial distrust regarding the presence and permanence of the object that originated from early experiences.

“We see how the history of a person who develops an addiction over the course of their developmental cycle is marked by early difficulties in obtaining adequate support for building good contact skills, which undermines the ability to identify and name a need against the background of vague arousal. Wanting something, while rejecting something else, is a skill that develops in a relational context in which one feels recognized and therefore identified; this basic relational process is often missing in the early history of addicted patients.” (Giancarlo Pintus, La relazione assoluta)

Patients with AD are so focused on satisfying the desires of others that they lose the ability to identify their own relational needs. A patient who had been dumped by her partner, for example, couldn’t grasp my point where I explained that she too could choose not to want that relationship anymore. She was astonished that she could express a choice when she felt abandoned. She felt she had no say in the matter, and she couldn’t grasp the meaning of my statement: “You can choose for yourself regardless of what he did.”

The most difficult obstacle to overcome, in the writer’s opinion, is precisely accepting that one must fill the gaps expected of others. There is a kind of mourning to be endured, the mourning of the hope (but it’s more of a conviction) that a partner’s love can be life-saving and heal all the pain and loneliness of the soul. The therapist may encounter the anger of the patient who feels he must give up the expectations he has clung to since childhood. The sense of disorientation in the face of new awareness can lead to protest, as if the therapeutic work is denying him his dream. The therapist’s only option is to accompany the patient through this painful transition, knowing that it is a rebirth. Passing through this pain and emerging from the dream allows the patient to connect with himself and recognize himself, recognize his emotions and needs, and bring them to the therapist for acknowledgement. Here the encounter with the significant other becomes an I-You encounter in which the blocks in the growth path are overcome, and finally there can be that mirroring that allows us to recognize ourselves and say I and to see the other as YOU.

“Maturation requires that in interpersonal relationships, an I that has a sense of its own integrity (it addresses itself informally) encounters a You and experiences it in its fullness. If this does not happen, growth is interrupted, resulting in a perceptual distortion of self and others, which manifests itself either in perceiving oneself as too small and the other as too large (obsessive dependence) or in perceiving oneself as too large and the other as too small (narcissistic independence).” (Giovanni Salonia, The Absolute Relationship)

Overcoming

It’s clear, then, that ending a dependent relationship doesn’t mean overcoming AD. This is demonstrated by the experiences of those who experience all their romantic relationships according to this rigid relational pattern. Likewise, it’s possible that at the end of therapy, the relationship with the dependent partner remains intact, changing one’s attitude within the relationship, especially if the partner isn’t manipulative and doesn’t establish power dynamics. The goal of therapy isn’t the end of the relationship, but rather the patient’s ability to regain ownership of themselves and their life through the restorative experience of therapy. After navigating the emergency phase, becoming aware of their addiction, acquiring the tools needed to avoid nurturing obsessions and controlling their partner, and overcoming the fear of authentic encounters with others and with themselves, the patient may begin a love affair. A new relationship is a valuable opportunity to follow its development in therapy. The patient is now an expert in their own dynamics and, if they have developed a good ability to listen to themselves and see the other, can share in sessions their changes and the struggles of finding themselves occasionally repeating old behavioral patterns or being tempted to reenact them. The fact of not throwing themselves fully into the new relationship can make them suspicious of their feelings, precisely because of the heavy metal effect mentioned above. They will tend to feel less engaged than in previous relationships, remaining on the one hand more calm, but on the other a bit wary of this new state of being. There is no doubt that the early stages of AD relationships are very engaging and all-encompassing, but they are inauthentic (because in reality, they don’t see the other person but an idealization of what they would like them to be). The patient can now accept this awareness without losing the desire to love again. The obstacle may be the fear of feeling bad again, the feeling of not trusting oneself; it is precious not to be alone in this transition. Appreciating the closeness of one’s partner requires the finer sensitivity developed during the therapeutic process, creating the possibility of experiencing a relaxed and authentic presence in the encounter with the other.

I remember a patient who confused her peaceful presence in her partner’s company with a feeling of boredom and brought elements of conflict to create movement. The conflict was the loving dimension she knew and had experienced in her family of origin; she struggled to consider the mere presence of her partner as love. For those who are courageous enough to open themselves to the possibility of a relationship experienced differently, the feeling is often that of being very young again, a beginner, and not knowing how to move. I remember a phrase my dance teacher used when, seeing me trying to reproduce a choreography with precision and focus, he lovingly said to me: “Dance, but without effort.” Escaping emotional dependence creates the possibility of being with another effortlessly, discovering a creative and authentic dimension of being.