What Is Emotional Independence? Life After Letting Go of a Pattern

Emotional independence starts to take shape when you have room to ask what you want and act on it, even if someone might be disappointed or might not understand. After working to release what has been holding you back, you can choose a goal of your own, take a step in everyday life and see how you handle it when things go differently from what you planned.

In earlier articles, we looked at why we repeat patterns we already understand and how jealousy after a breakup can reveal what an automatic response is trying to protect. Here I want to talk about what comes afterwards.

Say you’ve spent years fitting in to keep your place in a group. When the need for approval loosens, there’s more room for what you want. Then a question comes up that you may not have asked aloud in years. What would I choose now?

You may have to sit with that question for a while. The old role gave you a place, even if keeping it meant giving things up. Without that role, you can feel the fear of being left out again. I know that fear from my own life as well as from my work.

Why does being shut out hurt so much in adulthood?

The need to belong stays with us into adulthood. In their review of the research, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary described the need for lasting relationships as a basic human motivation. Sometimes we return to a familiar pattern to hold on to our place in a relationship, even when that response costs us something.

I worked with a man in his thirties who was suddenly shut out by his close circle of friends. His calls went unanswered. Messages he sent hung in the air. Nobody had warned him that anything was wrong.

As he experienced it, the place he’d had among his friends was suddenly gone. Researchers have looked at the relationship between social rejection and physical pain. The picture is complicated, and brain imaging studies have also found distinct patterns of activity for the two experiences. In coaching, what mattered was what being shut out meant to him and what he was willing to give up to get back in.

He began searching for what he might have done wrong. He pleaded for a chance to make it right. He was ready to set aside what he wanted and what he could accept if that was what it took for them to open the door again.

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott used the term ‘false self’ to describe a way of adapting to other people’s expectations. That adaptation can go so far that it becomes difficult to hear what you want. ‘What do I need?’ gives way to ‘What do I have to do for them to accept me?’

I’ve written elsewhere about repeating the same script. A role can give us a way to belong while keeping the possibility of rejection at a distance. That’s a bargain I know firsthand.

For me, it started with tattoos.

As a teenager in Israel in the 1990s, I was looking for a place in the world. Tattooing was still underground. I remember seeing a tattooed man at the beach for the first time. I was drawn to the way he carried himself, like an outsider who belonged to a world I knew nothing about.

My family was firmly against it, so I got tattooed in secret. I became a regular at the studio. After I left the army, a place opened up for an apprentice. I had no background in art, but I wanted to be part of that world. I learned the craft, and within a year my teacher and I had gone our separate ways. I was young, running a studio and tattooing people myself.

From the outside, it looked like I had found my place. I was part of a scene people were curious about, and people wanted to be around me. I wore that identity like a leather jacket. Underneath, I knew I’d never felt at home in the work itself. For a while, wearing the jacket had given me somewhere to belong.

We can carry that bargain into adulthood. The role can change and cost us more, even as we grow older and do well for ourselves.

If you recognise yourself changing roles to fit in, the coping style questionnaire can help you notice which response tends to come back.

You can see it in the rush to keep up with every trend, the fear of missing out, or the jump from one community to the next. Sometimes curiosity really is what pulls us in. Sometimes it’s the fear that if we miss what happened last night or stop speaking the right language, we’ll be left out again.

What do you do after you let go of the pattern?

You can look again at the role you’ve been playing. Which parts of it still fit? What did you do because it interested you, and what did you do because you were afraid of losing your place?

That’s the move into the Advance stage of the M.S.A. approach. After working to release the barrier that held the pattern in place, we look at what you want to build. What draws you now and feels worth pursuing? What goal would give that some direction? What step could you take this week?

Say you want to make things again, but for years you’ve chosen what earned other people’s approval. A first step might be to set aside an evening for something you’re curious about. Afterwards, look at what happened. Did you enjoy it? What did you do when you started doubting yourself? What would you like to try next time?

That’s how you build trust in your ability to choose and handle what comes next. Someone may question your choice. The first attempt may fall flat. You can take what you learned, adjust your next step and keep moving towards something that matters to you.

If there’s a choice you’ve been putting off, try putting it into one sentence. What would you like to happen, and what are you afraid might happen if you try?

You can bring that choice to individual coaching for personal growth and work on what holds you back and how you want to move forward.