Translator: Gemma Heron

Reviewer: Trina Orsic

My name is Silvia Congost,

I’m a psychologist
specializing in self-esteem,

emotional dependence and relationships.

And today I want to confess to you

that on June 23rd I awoke,

it’s already been a few years since then.

Just like there are people

who use before and after Christ

as a reference point.

In my life too there is

a before and after date.

By then I was already a psychologist,

I had recently opened

a practice in my town

and one day Cristina called

for an appointment.

Cristina was a 36-year-old woman.

She was a doctor in a hospital

in the neighbouring town

and she told me that

she was booking an appointment

because she didn’t know

what more she could do

to make her relationship work,

to solve those conflicts,

those non-stop problems

with the person she had by her side.

She was desperate

and I was her last hope.

The day of the session arrived

and Cristina explained to me

that she suffered from anxiety,

that she had insomnia.

She told me that she had gained

20 kilos in recent months

and that she was about to

request leave from work.

She also told me that

she had problems concentrating,

that she was losing her memory

and that she had even

considered taking her own life.

Right away I realised

that she was in a toxic relationship,

but the question is:

then why didn’t she leave?

If it was bad, why didn’t she

leave that relationship?

If she could tell that her quality of life

was worsening every day,

that by the day her health

was also deteriorating,

that staying in that relationship

was a constant battle to make it work,

that there wouldn’t be

these problems they were having

in resolving these differences,

if she didn’t even like

the person by her side

because all she wanted was to change him,

why didn’t she leave this person?

I decided to ask her that queation

and Cristina was very clear.

For two reasons.

Firstly she said to me:

“Because I love him.”

And secondly she said to me:

“Because I’d rather be like this

even if it’s bad, than lose him,

than be without him.”

With those two answers

I understood what was going on
a little bit better.

On one hand with the first reason,

“because I love him”,

I realised that Cristina

was clearly deceiving herself.

Why? Because you can’t love somebody

with whom you’re

destroying yourself at times.

You can’t love somebody in a healthy way

if you are constantly suffering

in that relationship,

if you feel like that

relationship isn’t working,

that it’s not getting you closer

to where you want to go

and that every day you feel worse

and that you’re losing yourself.

There was a clear self-deception here.

That is, she was trying

to convince herself

that the love she was feeling

was what justified her

continued commitment to this person

with whom things weren’t going well.

And secondly, upon telling me

“I’d rather be like this than lose him”

or “I’d rather be
in bad company than alone”,

which unfortunately is something

that we would often prefer,

what I understood was that Cristina

was afraid of being alone.

The fear of being alone

ia a very frequent fear, very common,

that we human beings have.

That terrible panic

of being left without that person

and not finding anyone else

who wants to be with us.

Then the question resurfaced:

“So why don’t you end it?”

And in understanding that,

in listening to her

and after doing little reflecting,

that’s when I felt that “click”

inside me, that light.

I felt like something was pushing

on the pit of my stomach.

I started to feel dizzy,

I started to feel worse and worse.

I ended the session as I could

and in that moment,

after Cristina’s appointment,

she closed the door to the office,

I stayed there for almost three hours

without being able to stop crying.

I couldn’t stop crying

because I had just realised,

upon doing that session,

that I, like Cristina,

had spent more than six years

trapped in an unhappy relationship,

in which I didn’t feel able to end it

or to distance myself from that person,

fighting to make it work, to get on well,

to make it easy like I wanted it to be,

but without accepting who was by my side.

So I didn’t know why

this was happening to me.

I didn’t know why I wasn’t able

to end this relationship.

It was a feeling like,

“Am I going crazy

or what’s happening to me?”

Because if I’m not doing well,

why can’t I end it?

I decided that one day

the answer would come to me

and from that moment I focused my practice

only on helping people

who weren’t doing well

in their relationships.

Very soon I realised that

every relationship

can be classified
in one of three scenarios

that I’m going to lay out for you now.

All relationships.

If in this moment
you are in a relationship,

you will see very clearly

which of these three scenarios

you fall into.

The same with relationships

you’ve had in the past,

and those that you’ll have

in the future as well.

What are they? The first

is the healthy relationship.

They are the relationships that work.

The relationships with someone

who matches our values,

with someone who has the same life plan,

a plan in common,

who we can go hand in hand with,

with whom we’re not looking

in two opposite directions,

because then we’re going to separate.

The healthy relationship

is the one we have

with someone who allows us to grow.

It’s when we are at ease with that person,

when we feel peace next to that person.

The relationship brings us calm.

There’s another
very frequent characteristic,

and of course we have conflicts

in healthy relationships,

but we know how to use these conflicts

in a constructive way,

in a way that helps us

to get to know each other better

and to bind us stronger together.

What happens is that life

is about change, we all know that.

Everything is constantly changing

and relationships can change too.

That’s why there are relationships

that are healthy for a period of time.

We think they could last a lifetime,

we don’t even consider

that anything could happen,

but one day they suddenly become toxic.

This could be, it can happen

because one of the two changes.

Or because we have had

a very traumatic experience

which greatly upsets us,

and our values change,

we no longer want the same thing,

we stop admiring the person

who we have by our side.

When we ask ourselves

“What do I like about this person?”

it’s hard for us to find an answer,

and it could be that we start to desire
a third-party, someone from the outside.

We fall in love with somebody else

and we begin to fantasize

that we would be better off

with that other person.

Or we may experience an infidelity,

and it creates a gap between us,

a very deep wound

that makes it very difficult to heal

and get the story back on track.

Here the relationship becomes toxic

and it no longer satisfies us,

it’s no longer worth it,

it no longer makes us happy.

And then there’s a third scenario:

toxic relationships,

and they’re toxic from the start.

You know those cases

that you see and you say:

“What are they doing?”

You can see from miles away

that this is going nowhere.

“Those two? They don’t match at all,

there’s no way’“.

From the outside

we always see it so clearly,

but there are many people trapped

in relationships that haven’t worked

since the beginning,

in which they don’t match at all,

in which there’s psychological abuse,

which is unfortunately very common.

People that experience

a constant lack of respect,

slights, humiliations.
They experience and suffer
from punishments

at the hands of their partner,

punishments, for example,

like not speaking to you.

That one is very common,

and how do you feel

when your partner stops speaking to you?

That’s psychological abuse,

even if it’s not done

in a conscious and premeditated way.

And, of course, we suffer a lot

in those relationships.

So, when I understood that there are

these three relationship models

and that every relationship

could fit into one of them,

I asked myself again:

“Why don’t we leave

when the relationship is toxic?”

And in that moment,

I was ready to know the answer:

because of emotional dependence.

That’s when I discovered

what emotional dependence was,

that it was happening to Cristina,

that it was happening to me

and it’s what happens to hundreds

of thousands of men and women

in many countries across the globe.

It is this inability
to sever the relationship

in those cases where we should all end it,

because it’s no longer there,

we’re no longer doing well there,

there’s no longer healthy love there.

We feel a terrible, unstoppable panic,

at the thought of being left

without that person.

The idea of seeing them

with somebody else,

with another partner, paralyzes us.

We can’t even imagine them

with somebody else.

Saying “we’ll never be able

to take those trips again, to plan them.

We’ll never be able to go

to that restaurant together again”,

“never again”, that never again

is absolutely devastating.

This inability also leads us to realise

that we are dealing with an addiction.

Emotional dependence is an addiction,

just like other forms of addicitons.

In this case it’s towards

the person in question.

Imagine, for example,

the case of gambling addiction,

of ludomania.

Imagine the person

who inserts some change

and is unlucky enough to win.

Then they start to see

the coins coming down

and “Wow, Wow, Wow”.

Come on, another day,

they insert another coin. And another.

“Come on, there aren’t any

winning coins for a while now.

I have a hunch.
I think this is the one.

Another one, another one...”

And clearly you’re hooked,

you don’t win.
It’s the same with relationships.

It’s like one more chance.

“Come on, a little longer.

Come on, until summer.

It’s just that now

he’s told me he’ll change.

Come on, one more reconciliation.”

And when we’re like that

the relationship isn’t working.

If it were a healthy attachment,

upon seeing that it’s not working

and that we aren’t

compensated, we would leave.

But when there’s dependence,

the attachment between us is toxic.

Therefore we’re there more due to need,

because we need that dose, that drug,

although afterwards,
by returning to that person’s side,

we immediately realise that we’re not well

and that we shouldn’t be there.

The most common symptoms are:

there are many,

but I want to highlight obsession.

We are totally obsessed with finding a way

to make this relationship work.

When there’s dependence,

our entire life revolves

around mulling it over,

around how to avoid

having these discussions,

how to make sure they don’t

get angry about something,

doing this, that, and the other...

And we put so much energy into this issue

that our brain is left

totally worn out and really, really tired.

And so we find it hard to concentrate,

we forget things and

we don’t remember things

because our brain can’t take it anymore.

We feel helpless.

We’ve tried so many times

to get things back on track

that we no longer know where to turn.

It’s like a feeling of

“I just don’t know what else to do

to get things back on track

and really make it happen.”

And we feel, of course,

a great deal of general malaise.

Suffering in a toxic relationship

and being trapped in it

is something that,
sometimes we don’t consider it,

but it affects us in all areas of life.

It will affect us in our work life,

in our personal life,

in terms of self-esteem, at work,

with friends, in all areas.

And it affects both those

who are inside and have to leave,

and those who have already left,

because there are many patients

who contact me and tell me:

“Silvia, I’ve spent a year already

without this person.

This person, my ex-partner,

is already in a relationship

and I still don’t understand

why they left me.

I’m still asking myself what happened.

I don’t understand.”
That is, they are still obsessed,
going around and around,

you think “but they’re

already there, living another life,

it’s already over.”

But what’s happening to them?

They don’t cut contact,

they keep looking for information

on social media,

they still allow people to update them

and they keep drinking the substance

that they’re clearly addicted to.

So I imagine you’re asking yourselves,

“Fine, OK, good.

That’s pretty much clear.

What do we do when
we’re emotionally dependent?

How do we get out of there?

Of course, I experienced it
and when it happened to me,

I refused to accept
that there was no way out,

it’s like “Ok, I’m hooked.

I have an addiction. It is what it is.”

Because I had never been talked to

about what emotional dependence was,

neither in my psychology degree

nor anywhere else,

but I was convinced that I could get out

and so I have been able to prove this

over the last 20 years.

Clearly, there has to be

a process of personal growth,

a process to heal
and to learn from all of this.

But I’m going to lay out

the four steps for you,
which for me are without a doubt
the most important ones,

and the path we should be on

and what we must keep in mind.

The first of these four steps

is of course: understanding.

It’s very important to understand

what emotional dependence is,

to have, to receive the information

that allows us to know

what we are talking about.

When someone doesn’t know something,

it’s as if it’s alien to them

and if it happens to them,

they won’t even see it.

They’ll suffer the consequences,

but they won’t understand it.

When you educate yourself

and give yourself more information,

it empowers that person,

it gives them tools.

And that’s when that person

is able to decide what they want to do

or where they want to go.

Therefore, I think it’s very important

to invest in education.

If we don’t receive it from outside,

let us look for it ourselves,

because we’ll benefit much more

than if we don’t have it.

The second step: acceptance.

Accepting doesn’t mean you don’t have

a desire for growth or improvement.

No, accepting is coming to terms

with what is happening to us,

that we haven’t been able

to control it up to that moment,

understanding that we aren’t to blame,

simply nobody taught us, educated us,
we didn’t have the information
to identify it in time.

But it’s like the alcoholic who says:

“Well yes, I have an alcohol addiction

and I can’t control it.”

And it’s the same as saying;

“Yes, I’m suffering from

emotional dependence

and I don’t know how to get out of it.

I need tools.”

And when we accept it

we’re able to answer a question

that has always seemed

very important to me,

that of “what is life trying to teach me?”

“What is it that life wanted me to learn

by making me live
or suffer that experience?”

’What is it that I have to learn?”

Because when you learn from an experience,

something changes in you.

And that change in you

is what protects you from going through

the same thing again.

It’s what makes you say to yourself

when something similar happens to you

and you identify it.

“No, not around here.”

Once we’ve accepted it,

it’s very important

to raise our self-esteem.

Self-esteem, whenever we’ve suffered

emotional dependence, is damaged.

Because after so many

attempts to make it work
and not achieving it,
not getting the success we’re seeking,

in the end we connect with beliefs like:

“I’m not worth it. I’m not able. I can’t.

I don’t deserve it, I’m not worthy.”

And that has to be reversed,

it has to be turned around.

We have to strenghten ourselves

in order to not feel that way.

We have to work to empower ourselves again

and to regain contact with our self-worth

and with the ability

and the feeling of worthiness

that we should all bear in mind.

And once we have understood,

we have been able to accept that yes,

this is happening to us,

that we have suffered

from emotional dependence

and we have made a process

to strenghten our self-esteem,

we have reached the last step,

which is also very important,

which consists of two things.

Firstly, I think it’s important

to stop and look back.

Looking back means

analyzing where we came from,

to really analyze that experience

we’ve just had, with perspective

and say in a totally sincere way

“Thank you” while we smile.

Say: “Thank you, thank you for

what this experience has taught me.”

“Thank you for what I’ve learnt.”

“Thank you for the person

that I have become today,
much stronger, much more mature
and much more aware.”

And once we’ve connected to gratitude,

once we have really

been able to say “Thank you”,

it’s time to start looking forward again,

and with the utmost conviction

and the utmost security

strongly embrace life

and say to it loud and clear:

“Yes, now I’m coming for you.

But I’m coming for you

free, healthy and happy.”

Thank you very much.

(Applause)