Colette Dowling, LMSW

What lay ahead was the work of putting together the first crude essentials of a belief in myself. It seems odd not to have grown up with this, but I didn’t. It seems strange that a privileged girl in a privileged society with a college professor for a father and a perfectly nice woman for a mother should develop so sharp and deep a vein of self-contempt, but that, nevertheless, is how I grew up. Doubting my intelligence. Doubting, as well, my sexual desirability. And that, you see, was the damning double bind: to have no confidence in my ability to make it in this world on my own, the new way, and to be equally doubtful of my ability to succeed in woman’s old way, which is to seduce a man into being her patron and protector. Stricken by the kind of gender confusion that assails so many contemporary women, I never knew where I stood. Through all those years of doing the "right" thing, of going to college, of working on the staff of a magazine, marrying, stopping work, having children, rearing them, and beginning, slowly, to work again, at odd hours, during the children’s naps--through all of that I remained fundamentally in conflict. While the relatives nodded and brought cakes, approving of my role as wife and mother, during all those years of a peculiar kind of Method acting known only to women, I hid from who I was.

So, as the response to the New York article made clear, there were others like me: women who felt dependent, frustrated, angry. Women who yearned for independence but were frightened by what it might mean. Fear was actually paralyzing them in their efforts to break loose. The question was, why was no one talking about this? How many women might be suffering in silent confusion. Is an inner fear of independence epidemic among women?

I wanted facts and I wanted theories. I wanted to hear women themselves talk about their lives now that we are supposedly free to be free. I felt there was something happening that wasn’t being talked about, or written about; something all the articles and surveys missed.

The psychological need to avoid independence--the "wish to be saved"--seemed to me an important issue, quite probably the most important issue facing women today. We were brought up to depend on a man and to feel naked and frightened without one. We were taught to believe that as women we cannot stand alone, that we are too fragile, too delicate, needful of protection. So that now, in these enlightened days, when our intellects tell us to stand on our own two feet, unresolved emotional issues drag us down. At the same time that we yearn to be fetterless and free, we also yearn to be taken care of.

Women’s leanings toward dependence are, for the most part, deeply buried. Dependency is frightening. It makes us anxious because it has its roots in infancy, when we were indeed helpless. We do what we can to hide these needs from ourselves. Especially now, with the new, socially encouraged thrust toward independence, we find it tempting to keep that other part of ourselves cut off, damped down.

That part, buried and denied, is the troublemaker. It crops up in fantasies and dreams. It sometimes takes the form of phobias. It affects the way women think, and act, and speak. Hidden dependency needs are causing problems for the protected housewife who has to ask her husband for permission to buy a dress, and for the career woman with the six-figure income who’s unable to go to sleep at night when her lover’s out of town. Alexandra Symonds, a New York psychiatrist who has studied dependency, says it’s a problem that affects most of the women she’s ever met. Even those women who appear to be the most outwardly successful, she believes, tend to "subordinate themselves to others, become dependent on them, and quite unwittingly devote their major energies to the search for love, for help, for protection against that which is seen as difficult, or challenging, or hostile in the world."