The Dependency Wound: When Care Was Never Something You Could Count On

One partner wants sex constantly and can't understand why they're being refused. The other has quietly stopped wanting it at all and feels like they're constantly being pestered. Most people assume these two have opposite problems. Often times, they don't. They have the same challenge underneath, but they are coping in different ways.

We're going beyond the standard "anxious or avoidant" here. Most of us learned early on whether care was something we could count on, and when the answer was unreliable, we did what smart, adaptive human children do: we picked a coping strategy and got very good at it. There are two main choices children make — pursue harder, or stop needing.

Those two roads lead to very different adults, very different ways of existing in relationships, and very specific erotic desires. This episode will help you understand the challenges, drawbacks, opportunities, and desires that come from each path, and how to work with those to have better connections, easier relationships, and a more satisfying sex life.

This is episode three of the attachment wounds and erotic emotions series, and the second one on specific wounds.

In this episode:

• Where the dependency wound comes from, including causes that have nothing to do with bad parenting and everything to do with circumstances that made consistent attunement hard
• The two survival strategies it creates, and what each one actually feels like from the inside
• Why the under-dependent's deepest erotic craving is often identical to the over-dependent's, just buried under years of pretending it isn't there
• How both patterns land on a partner, in and out of bed
• Why over-dependents and under-dependents are drawn to each other, and why that match can go sideways fast
• What movement actually looks like for each, including the single most important thing an under-dependent can do before they quietly shut someone out for good

Your needs are real. Both sides of this wound are just different ways of coping with the same early experience, and you can learn to count on care being there.

Topics: dependency wound, attachment wound, anxious avoidant attachment, my partner never wants sex, sex feels like obligation, mismatched libido couples, desire discrepancy, over-dependent, under-dependent, erotic emotions, somatic sex coach, intimacy coach Asheville

Get my free guide: Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and "Shoulds" Around Intimacy at https://laurajurgens.com/guide

More links:
Substack at https://laurajurgens.substack.com/

Wheel of Erotic emotions, go to: https://laurajurgens.com/wheel

Copyright notice: All content in this podcast is copyrighted and copying, scraping, data mining, or using the content to train AI is prohibited. 

Transcript

Welcome to Pleasure Uprising. I'm Dr. Laura Jurgens, intimacy coach, somatic practitioner, and your guide to getting out of your head and into your body, your desire, and your real capacity for connection. This show is for people who are done performing and ready to actually feel it. Let's go.

Hello, everyone. Welcome. We are going to talk today about dependency wounds and what they mean for us later in life if we, as little wee ones, didn't really have caretakers that we could regularly depend on in a consistent way.

I want to start with a little story, because these people are super normal, really common, and in fact, all of these types of attachment wounds are really normal and common. But we don't necessarily notice them in our day to day life and how they're coming up for us, because they've been with us for so long.

So here's the setting. This is a heterosexual couple in their 50s. The husband is this sweet guy. He brings out a lot of caretaker in people. He seems kind of deeply confused and frustrated that his wife just won't meet his sexual and emotional needs — she's just withdrawing while he's constantly chasing her. He really wants more than anything to feel cared for, and he wants sex. He does what he thinks she wants him to do, chore-wise, in order to try to earn sex as a reward, and then comes to her being like, "Don't you want to have sex with me? I just mowed the lawn."

At the same time, we have this woman in her 50s. She's very capable, very self-sufficient, barely ever asks for help. She has everything locked down, and she performs intimacy completely for her husband because eventually she starts feeling guilty and wants to placate him and get him to stop pestering her. But she has zero interest in it for herself, and she's generally just really turned off by him wanting sex as a reward for good behavior. She has completely given up on getting her own needs for attunement, pleasure, or just a partner who doesn't expect anything from her met, and she's quietly closed the door on her hope every time it has gone unmet. She has decided that depending on anyone is foolish.

I want to say neither of these people are wrong. And whoever you most relate to, and whoever you find yourself most judging, says more about what your wounds might be and what your coping mechanisms are than it does about these particular people. Because both of them actually have the same developmental wound in a lot of ways — they've just developed very opposite coping strategies. Neither of them are bad or wrong or impossible to be in relationship with, and none of this is impossible to solve. But they are both showing up in their relationship in very different ways, and it's driving each other nuts. Even though they have the same developmental wound, the completely opposite coping mechanisms are what's driving each other crazy.

For someone like me, who tends to be on the I'm not allowed to have needs side, I've had to learn how to have needs. My knee-jerk is to really understand her. But I've also learned how to have some needs, and I really see what's going on with him, and how painful it is. It's actually really painful for both of them, just in different ways. He's in touch with how painful it is. She's shut down how painful it is. But there's still underlying pain for both of them — pain that is optional moving forward. It was not optional in the past, and it has been painful for years and years in this particular marriage.

They'd gone to a lot of couples counseling and Christian counseling in particular that had been actively retraumatizing and incredibly problematic, so it's really important that these folks were able to get the right help in order to solve it. And solve it they did. They learned to understand each other and themselves, which is really exciting and wonderful. Everybody gets to have more fun and pleasure.

What the Dependency Wound Is and Where It Comes From

Where these kinds of patterns of behavior and coping strategies come from is really what we're getting at today. This is part of our series on attachment wounds and how they play out in our erotic lives and our relationships. If you haven't listened to the first overview episode, I highly recommend it — it's number 130. We tackled the safety wound after that, and now we're here with the dependency wound.

Our second major developmental task as a little baby, as a species, after safety — after feeling like it might be okay to actually just be here on this planet in our bodies — is learning that we can actually depend on other people to meet our needs. This is important for humans in particular because we are an incredibly social species, and we are actually born more helpless than the vast majority of other animals.

Most mammals are pretty precocious when they're born — they can actually do a lot of stuff. Like a moose: if you are a baby moose, you get dropped out of your mama moose onto the ground, and a few minutes later you're up on those spindly little legs wandering around. That's pretty amazing. Humans, on the other hand, cannot do that. There's a reason they call it the fourth trimester when humans are born, because we actually have many more months of development to go outside the womb. We really can't even crawl, let alone walk right away. Our eyes don't even focus. We are incredibly helpless. We don't have a lot of the physical gifts other animals have — we can't run super fast, we don't have big teeth and claws. We have a big brain, and that big brain is limited by the pelvic opening, which means we have to be born way earlier than most other mammals.

So when our caregivers are not 100% available — intermittently available for any reason — the loop of having a need, signaling for it, and it being met doesn't reliably close. And I want to say that this is often not through any fault of the parents themselves. Sometimes the parent really isn't prepared, doesn't want to be a parent, or doesn't have the capacity. But a lot of times it's just circumstances. Things like economic stress, a health crisis in the family, a parent who doesn't do great with younger babies and has older children pulling on their attention, postpartum depression, and then just culture.

There is an entire generation of people — mostly my generation, the Gen Xers — who, as infants in the 70s, were subjected to expert parenting advice, by men by the way, that said to let babies cry and they will eventually give up. I cannot overstate how popular this was. This wasn't a fringe thing. This was advice given to all new parents. There were parenting books about it. Doctors were telling you this is what you should do when your baby cries — ignore them, let them cry themselves out, and they will eventually stop. What that actually was, was a baby giving up on having its needs met. This has since been recognized as psychologically damaging to the attachment system. Very well-meaning parents who were trying to follow what they'd been told were inadvertently creating massive dependency wounds in their children.

Two Roads from the Same Wound: Over-Dependent and Under-Dependent

Regardless of how it happened, there tend to be two roads, two paths of coping mechanisms from the same wound.

The first one is pursue harder. When my needs are at risk of not being met, I decide I need to stay really close, keep signaling, try to keep this connection active to eventually get my needs met. This leads to what we can call the over-dependent coping mechanism in adulthood.

The second path: the baby decides, hey, my needs are not being met. I am giving up. It is useless to depend on anyone, and needing is not working. I have to take care of myself. We can call this the under-dependent.

What we're shooting for as adults is healthy interdependence — where we can depend on people, trust people, ask for things, but we're also taking care of ourselves, parenting ourselves, asking for help when we need it, asking for connection when we want it, asking for some reassurance when that would feel particularly good, but not completely relying on other people to do it all for us. That's healthy interdependence.

And what's important to understand is that these coping mechanisms in little kids are intelligent. They are protective. They make total sense when you are a tiny child completely dependent on someone for everything. The problem is that the coping mechanism gets really wired in early, and then doesn't serve us very well as adults in our adult relationships and with adult intimacy.

These dynamics are well known in lots of different psychological frameworks. Hakomi calls these the dependent-endearing and the self-reliant. The Somatica Institute®, where I was trained, calls them over-dependent and under-dependent, which I happen to like because it's very straightforward — it names the wound and tells you which direction the coping mechanism is going. The neuroaffective models map both of these under the attunement survival style. There's a Freudian label called oral that I find really not useful, so I don't spend any time on it. Different traditions, same wound, consistently observed.

What It Feels Like from the Inside

But what does it actually feel like to real humans when we are in it? Because you don't care what it says in the textbook. Neither do I, that much.

For an over-dependent person, it's this sense of never quite being taken care of enough, even when care is being offered. It's like, this is how much an adult is offering — it's not taking care of your deep, deep needs. It feels like it's never quite enough. The real wanting underneath is that little infant who wants their needs to be intuited. A lot of those needs are nonverbal because of that — you don't have words for them, and you feel confused and enraged when people around you somehow just don't know, don't intuit it, because you don't have words for it and you don't want to have to say it. You want people to just magically know, and when they don't, there's this deep anger, oftentimes rage and disappointment and confusion, often really disproportionate to what's happening on the surface. And you can see that and still feel all those ways. You might even feel a little bit crazy. But you're not crazy. This is just a dependency wound, and the rage isn't wrong. It makes total emotional sense, because an infant whose needs aren't being met does feel rage — have you met one? They are screaming. This is the feeling of having that little one inside you, and the adult getting kind of taken over by that little one that's just screaming in there.

If you have this tendency, you do tend to lean into being taken care of when you are. There's often some good self-care, some capacity for rest, some ability to receive — those are real benefits. But you might not be tracking what needs to happen around you as much as some other people, not because you're lazy, but because you're not wired to scan for how to take care of things yourself, or to ask, what specifically is my need and how do I give it to myself?

In contrast, that's kind of what the under-dependent is doing all the time. I can explain the under-dependent experience best with my own story, because this was me.

When I was doing my PhD, I was working outside at some saltwater tanks, and I fell off a little bench and sprained my ankle. It was pretty bad — I could not put any pressure on it. I hopped down the hallway to my office, sat in a rolling chair, and used that to get to another room where I could find some ice. And here I am icing my ankle, rolling around in the hallway, and people are coming up to me and literally offering to drive me to the hospital. I turned them all down and drove myself. Luckily it was my left ankle, so I could drive with my foot up on the dashboard. That is kind of nuts.

I could not conceive of saying yes to help. I could not imagine being even a tiny bit of a burden on somebody — of receiving something, of actually having a need. I would rather drive myself to the hospital to get an X-ray. Thankfully, I'm better now. I've done a lot of work on asking for help. You can too if this is you.

There is this classic pride in not needing anything. It's often culturally celebrated, especially in the U.S. with our hyper-independent, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps stuff, as if humans are not interdependent. Communicating needs tends to feel pointless or vaguely humiliating, and sometimes we don't even know we have needs because we've been suppressing that signal for so long.

What happens is that we'll sometimes wish people would magically take care of our needs so we don't have to ask for it — and that's actually something we share with the over-dependent. If somebody had just come up to me and said, "Hey, I happen to be going to the hospital right now, would you do me a favor and just get in?" I probably would have been able to do that. I couldn't ask somebody to help me, but if they were already going — maybe. So it's not that you don't have needs. It's that you refuse to admit that you have them.

And when we get hurt or let down by people, we tend to shut down and go very quiet. We don't say, "Hey, that really hurt." It's like, oh, I knew it. It's so stupid to have needs. Of course people are going to let me down. It's this almost like "got you" moment: see, I knew it. This is why I don't ask for anything. If you've ever heard that in your head, you too may have an under-dependency wound.

Neither of these is bad or wrong. They're just coping mechanisms you picked up a long time ago for a very difficult situation for a small child, and we've just gotten so used to them that we almost don't notice them anymore. They're the glasses that we see through.

How the Dependency Wound Shapes Your Erotic Life

These types of wounds tend to shape what we deeply desire — the feelings we really want to have in the erotic space. And it can actually be a really fun, liberating, healing experience to play with getting some of these things in the erotic space.

For an over-dependent person, the erotic space can be a place to finally receive full, attentive, unconditional love and care that was missed. Sex can become almost hyper-significant for some people with an over-dependency wound, because if you haven't dealt with this wound at all, it might be one of the only times in your daily life when someone is entirely focused on you and your needs are really getting met. So it becomes the place they most want to be, and they can put a lot of pressure on a partner through a kind of hypersexuality, especially if they're not in touch with the rest of their emotional needs — they're just hyper-focused on sex, and that can be exhausting.

That was one of the things happening with the couple I described. He was hyper-fixated on sex. It was the only time he felt really cared for, and he wasn't actually offering very much care to his partner or any care for her pleasure at all. That's not an adult dynamic — that's an infant-mother dynamic, and it's really deeply not sexy to most partners. There's nothing wrong with wanting sex for connection. But when we're not dealing with the rest of our emotional life and it's putting so much pressure on sex, it can really backfire.

For an under-dependent person, once you've done some of the emotional work, there's not so much pressure on sex. You're still going to tend to want a lot of the same things — feeling wanted, cared for, held, adored, loved, attuned to, unconditional love and pampering sometimes. And there's nothing wrong with that.

Some people in this wound category also really enjoy age play — mommy dom, daddy dom, any dynamic where there's a nurturing parental presence. Over-dependents are not the only people who are into this, but the connection makes a lot of sense. The erotic space gets to be a place to finally, in play, be a vulnerable child who gets completely taken care of, with full safety and full agency, with a consenting partner. That can be really satisfying.

With any type of dependency wound, the important thing to know is the flavor is always very specific to each person. Not everyone with an over-dependent coping mechanism wants age play. You might just want something very specific that makes you feel really turned on, and it will be unique to you. But it's often in that family of being really cared for.

For someone with an under-dependent pathway, they tend to be really focused on things like mutuality, feeling no hierarchy, deep trust, collaboration. Some of the erotic emotions tend to be passionate, not responsible — as in, I don't have to be the one who holds everything together for once. I get to just relax. Collaborative, mutual, and cared for.

And here's what I actually see a lot with under-dependents: the thing they crave erotically is often exactly the same thing as someone with the over-dependent coping mechanism. It's to be deeply cared for and attuned to, because that's the desire the under-dependent had to exile. The erotic imagination reaches for what we've exiled.

How These Patterns Show Up in Relationships and Sex

Going back to this couple. The partner of someone with an over-dependent coping style may feel drawn in initially by the warmth and endearingness, and then gradually starts feeling worn out — like they can never fill the cup, they can never be enough, they can never quite get it right in bed. The over-dependent person might want constant reassurance and struggle to be fully present without constant validation that the other person is engaged. If you go inward for a moment to focus on your own sensations, they can feel like you've pulled back or don't care. They can often want a lot of performative sounds and reassurance, which becomes overwhelming, because now instead of just experiencing your own pleasure, you have to narrate how good a job they're doing.

They can also be very oversensitive to feedback. If you need something different, instead of taking that as a gift — hey, I want to be with you, I just need it a little to the left — the over-dependent person can feel rejected. And sometimes they are being pushed away, because they're coming so hard for their needs to be met constantly that it feels exhausting.

The partner of someone with an under-dependent coping style may actually feel helpless or unnecessary — like there's no room for them to support this person. They can often feel left out of the inner life of the under-dependent partner. And what's quietly happening in the background is that every letdown is getting filed under "I knew it," and the partner often doesn't know any of this is happening until a lot of doors have already quietly closed.

In bed, someone who's under-dependent can sometimes be kind of far away. They'll be physically present but kind of off in their own land — and that's different from someone who's in an erotic trance. They may just be going along with things the way someone else wants it without ever quite identifying their own desires. They may have a hard time receiving, or they receive but really for the other person's benefit because the other person wants to give. And they may have a lot of quiet resentments building up, because they're not allowing themselves to have needs and desires.

What Movement Actually Looks Like

So what does actual movement on this stuff look like if we don't want to just keep playing out the dysfunctional aspects of these wounds?

For the over-dependency wound: the work isn't about needing less. It's about learning to parent your own inner child first, so that you're not throwing them at your partner and asking your partner to do a job that only you can do. Once we're adults, we actually have to parent our own inner children, and we want to be a good, loving parent to them. Because once you do, you won't constantly feel this deep void that no one else can fill. No partner can make up the ground that you haven't given yourself. You have to learn to meet that need first, and then your partner's care will have a place to really land. It won't just disappear into a void.

One place to start is getting really specific — actually asking yourself, what do I actually need, not just more, but what specifically? It's not just I need more sex. What do you actually want emotionally from that experience? If you just want an orgasm, you can give yourself that. What is it you truly want? What is that void asking for? How could you bring more of it to yourself? This process can really benefit from some help. I highly recommend a relational therapist or a really good coach for this, not a standard psychoanalytic approach — it's too distant, can feel rewounding, and it's really hard to get in touch with real emotional needs when there isn't genuine warmth and safety in the room. A more relational approach is always going to be better.

For the under-dependency wound: start small. Maybe let someone drive you to the hospital. Start asking for small things — if something's just not quite right, ask for it to be slightly different. If you notice you have a desire for something, or you'd really like some reassurance or comfort, ask for it. Start building evidence. Each time you ask for something small and receive it, you update the old conclusion. You want to be discerning — ask people you have some reason to trust, or who have a vested interest in getting it right. But try it. And if you're so braced against asking that you don't even know where to start, try letting someone know that it's hard for you to ask. I found that really helpful. I would start by saying, "Hey, it's hard for me to ask for help, but would you mind helping me carry this up the stairs?" That takes a little of the pressure off.

An exercise I really suggest: make a big list — like 30 things you would ask for if you didn't think you had to do everything yourself. And let someone know when they've let you down before you shut them out. Give them a chance to do better by actually telling them how they could care for you. People will not magically intuit your needs, and that's okay. But they can learn if you tell them.

For both: there's an inner child here who needs to be parented by you. In one case, that inner child needs to be encouraged that it might be okay to take a risk, to reach out and ask for reassurance and support. In the other case, that inner child needs to be given enough love and filling up from the inside that there's actually a place for someone else's love to land.

Here's what happened for this couple. He started parenting his own inner child, realizing that he was worthy of his own love and approval and not looking outward constantly for it. He started being able to ask for connection without making it a caretaking obligation, so she didn't feel like she had to run away. He also started being able to give her space and offer more of what she wanted, so they had more of a real partnership. She stopped seeing him as one more item on the to-do list. She started realizing she actually did want closeness, and it was stress-relieving when it didn't feel like an obligation. She practiced letting him know what she needed — including when she needed space — and that made everything closer, easier, more playful, and more sexy.

Closing: Your Needs Are Real

Both sides of this wound are just different ways of coping with the same early experience. If you resonate with any of it, your needs are real. You can learn to manage these things in ways that bring you closer to people in your life instead of farther away, and you can play with it in the bedroom, which can be really, really fun.

Next time we're going to dive into the trust wound. We're going to take a week or two off to do some other things first, and then I'll be back with more fun times with attachment wounds. I hope this has been helpful and useful. Please feel free to give me some feedback and let me know how it landed. I'll see you here next time.

Hey, before you go, if you enjoyed this show, I want to invite you to check out one of my favorite things I've ever created. It's a free guide called Get Out of Your Head: A Starter Guide to Releasing the Pressure, Shame, and Shoulds Around Intimacy. It has four reflection exercises that go deeper than anything you'd find in a typical freebie, and most people feel a shift just after part one. So go grab it at laurajurgens.com/guide — the link is in the show notes. And if you're ready to find out what your specific path looks like, I'd love to talk to you. Booking info is also in the show notes, and I will see you here next week.