Growing up changes your actual dependence on your caregiver. It doesn’t automatically update the attachment system that learned during childhood that maintaining that relationship was necessary for survival.
Knowing you don’t need them isn’t the same as feeling you don’t need them
You’ve been living on your own for 15 years. You support yourself. So why do you often feel like you need your caregiver’s approval or permission? It can be a confusing experience. What is likely happening is a mismatch between what your nervous system expects and what your conscious brain understands. Consciously, you know you are an adult who has to answer only to yourself as you make decisions. However, your nervous system is still running on the original programming from early in life, unaware that your situation has changed.
Your nervous system learned its rules in childhood
As an infant or young child, you were entirely dependent upon caregivers for survival. Your nervous system learned early in childhood that you needed to do what you could to keep your caregiver satisfied with you, so they would continue to care for you. If your caregiver withdrew affection or withheld needed resources like food when they believed you were disobedient, you quickly learned that you needed to be compliant to be safe or ensure survival.
Growing up doesn’t automatically update those rules
You likely lived the first 18 years of your life under those survival rules. Becoming financially, physically, and practically independent doesn’t by itself cause the nervous system to update its survival rules. It will continue operating under the expectation that survival depends upon keeping your caregiver from being unhappy with you.
Your nervous system predicts the present from the past
Although your survival no longer depends upon your childhood caregivers, survival itself remains your nervous system’s top priority. That never changes. The nervous system uses previous experiences to anticipate or predict what will happen in the present. Situations that echo or resemble those that would have threatened your relationship with your caregiver as a child can trigger those childhood responses even though you are an adult now.
For example, as a child, disagreeing with your caregiver may have risked anger, rejection, withdrawal of affection, or other consequences you had little ability to escape. As an adult, telling that same caregiver that you disagree with them may pose no threat to your actual safety or survival. You may have your own home, income, relationships, and support. Yet the prospect of disagreeing with them can still produce intense fear or an urgent need to back down, apologize, or make things right. Your circumstances have changed, but your nervous system recognizes the old pattern and responds according to what it learned when preserving that relationship really was essential.
The intensity of these reactions does not necessarily reflect how dependent you are on your caregiver today. Your nervous system may be responding according to what separation or rejection meant when you were a dependent child.
Familiar relationship strategies can follow you into adulthood
As a child, you learned strategies that helped you maintain the attachment relationship with your caregiver. Examples of such strategies include:
- appeasing
- monitoring moods
- avoiding conflict
- accepting mistreatment
- taking responsibility for others’ emotions
- working to earn love
These strategies follow you into adulthood because your nervous system is still operating from the rules of childhood. This is why as an adult you may feel a strong need to avoid conflict with a childhood caregiver even though you are no longer dependent upon them.
Why your feelings can make you question what you know
When your conscious awareness reminds you of your independence as an adult but your nervous system is screaming at you that you can’t lose your childhood caregiver, it can be confusing. Some people may distrust their conscious knowledge and interpret the unconscious feeling of dependence as evidence of actual dependence.
Can this feeling of dependence or need be changed?
You may now understand why you feel a need to preserve the relationship with a childhood caregiver even as an adult, but that is unlikely to resolve the issue. The good news is that your nervous system learned the rules of attachment relationships originally, and it can learn new rules that match your adult situation now. You can help your nervous system understand the new situation through repeated experiences of surviving boundaries, separation, disagreement, independence, and safe connection with the safe and reliable people in your life.
Feeling like you need them doesn’t mean you actually do
Your new understanding of the situation can help you now. When you realize you feel like you need your childhood caregiver, that you must preserve that relationship at all costs, you can remind yourself that this is a rule you learned early in your life. Then, this rule was adaptive and contributed to your survival. Now, it’s an echo of a situation that no longer exists. That doesn’t make the feelings of need vanish, but it can allow you to move on despite having those feelings.