We grew in a society chocked by mental and emotional distress. Most of our friends are battling with anxiety, poor confidence and depression. We feel that this is the by-product of our culture, and we learn how to drink or meditate to cope with it. Our passive approach has grown this global mental crisis to be the number one illness on the planet. Do we want to carry on coping, or shall we focus clearing the cause of our pains, and make this world a better place?

With 25 years of research and healing the mind, I realized that we are targeting the wrong culprits, focusing mind-healing on traumas and bad habits. Working successfully with over 3,000 clients, I’ve proved that traumas are just secondary causes in mental challenges, and poor habits are often merely byproducts. The unspoken cause, responsible for most of the anxiety, fear and addictions that dramatically affect our society, lies in a condition still unexplored: Adult Emotional Dependency (AED).

Adult Emotional Dependency (AED) defines the devastating mental condition caused by the continuation in adulthood of Emotional Dependency – a vital behavior, hardcoded in our mind to protect and stimulate our development during childhood.

During Childhood, we learn how to become self-sufficient adults. Throughout this period, children are inexperienced, vulnerable and unaware of their needs – thus, nature has included in human’s DNA a hard-coded behavior that actively compels in kids the need of been cared, protected, loved, validated and guided by their parents and caretakers. This precious behavior, defined as Emotional Dependency, is programmed by nature to terminate as soon we become self-reliant, typically just before puberty.

Children learn self-reliance from their parents, which are typically great educator in the physical aspect of becoming independent, teaching their children how to eat, dress, take care of their bodies and generate income. Unfortunately, most parents are unaware of the emotional side of self-reliance, being Emotional Dependent in adulthood themselves, therefore they don’t teach their kids the skills to self-provide love, validation, protection and guidance.

If you don’t know that you can or you have to do it, you don’t do it. Therefore, young adults don’t embrace their own emotional fulfillments. This, lack of self-reliance keeps active Emotional Dependency in adulthood, which carries on compelling emotional needs yet redirected from parents to friends, partners, colleagues and people in general. But people are not surrogating parents bound by parental love, thus are usually unwilling and unable to satisfy our emotional needs. This is felt as rejection and lack of support, triggering fear of rejection, judgment, abandonment, lack of confidence, lack of identity, feeling unsafe, being a people pleaser, narcissism or emotionally numb if the pain is too great, and byproducts such as anxiety, fear, anger, addiction sadness, social anxiety, isolation, neediness, confusion, overwhelm and feeling stuck, poor performance, procrastination, lack of focus, depression and addictions. These emotional struggles massively misuse brainpower causing poor performances in every aspect of life, work, school and sport. This condition defines Adult Emotional Dependency (AED).

Fortunately, we can resolve these condition in a rather short time implementing emotional self-reliance. As soon the missing parental self-reliance models are acquired and implemented, AED ceases and the connected emotional consequences are cleared. The emotional freedom produced by the termination of AED, provides the ability to transform the needs produced by dependency to the autonomy of choice offered by interdependency; it also frees all the brainpower misused by AED, which becomes available for high-performance, creativity and happiness.