I'm not sure that this article reaches the best conclusion about Dependency in therapy, it all feels a little unfinished, and I was really hoping for a more radical point about the end, but I thought people here might enjoy discussing it. http://www.gisc.org/gestaltreview/do...chotherapy.pdf

One thing that I think that the article gets right is the fact that Dependency is so highly pathologized. I have often felt a great deal of shame in therapy for needing my therapist deeply, and I'm really stating to come around to the position that this kind of shaming is a larger cultural problem that that therapy perpetuates unknowingly. I'm not entirely sure what therapists should do differently, but I don't think that people should be made to feels so immature and wrong for needing so deeply. To me it seems that the more that we just push way these needs or try to correct them, the more alienated and isolated we become. Needs are a time to develop a real connection with another persons, and sometimes it seems that therapists deny this connection in the name of therapy.

I do however think that too much dependency can result in the loss of ourselves. But on the other hand not knowing that someone is there for us at the end of the day can make it damn near impossible to feel that it is safe enough to enter the world and develop our person. Maybe dependency should not be so much about discounting the patient form engaging in manipulative behaviors, but about meeting the deeper need that lies beneath the behaviors; namely, the need to know that someone is truly and undeniably there fore us.