#Dependency

[star-girlfriend]

I confuse instinct with desire - isn’t bite also touch?

(Wolf OR-7 Natalie Diaz)

i’m your man mitski // cop car mitski // unknown // canisalbus tumblr // unknown (tiktok) // pinterest // sarah alex g // unknown // let dead dogs lie silas denver melvin

[alpaca-clouds]

Something about the Astarion romance

There is one thing about the Astarion romance, that I kinda feel like should be talked about a bit more.

Now, I am very much a lover of the Astarion romance. I just wanna hug that horriblem man. He definitely needs all the hugs you can give him. But...

We are all aware that the relationship - at least for now - is not a healthy one, right?

Like, no matter whether you let him ascend or not, the relationship is one of emotional dependency. Astarion is going to be emotionally dependent on the player character, no matter whether it is Tav, Durge or one of the other Origins.

Which is completely natural, mind you. Of course someone with his trauma will just latch onto the one person who makes him feel good emotionally and not let go. Duh. For someone that traumatized that is completely natural behavior.

It is this fact that drives him so much, when it comes to the Ascension Ritual. If you have played the game not romancing him, you might have noticed, that at least dialogue wise he is much easier convinced that maybe the ritual is a bad idea. Like, sure, the persuasion checks are still the same, but in the dialogue choices, when he goes: "Oh, all the power I could have." And you go: "I don't think that's a good idea." When you are a friend he is just going to go: "Hmm, I don't know. Maybe you are right." But if you are romancing him? Then he is going to be all: "I am doing it for us, my sweet!"

And I think the main reason behind this is, that this is the first time in a long while that he allows himself to really care about someone else and he is so fucking afraid that he is going to loose you. Thinking that Ascension would allow him to protect you. (Which of course does go south fairly quickly, if you let him ascend, because in that case he mistakes control for protection.)

But even if he does not ascend, he is still very emotionally dependent. And post-game it is going to take work for him to overcome this dependency. Because while his dependency as a vampire spawn is much less toxic compared to Ascended Astarion, it is not good. Especially not for him.

I see a lot of "How sad is it, that if you have a short-lived Tav (like a human, halfling or orc) Astarion will see him die rather soon, even if he gets healed?"

And I am like... Alright, here is my death positivity coming through. Sure, it is sad, but... if Astarion is not completely dependent on Tav/Durge/whoever... It is going to be alright. It is not going to be soul crushing. Like, even a short life well lived is worth more celebrating than mourning, right?

Just, you know... something to think about. Something to consider.

[whump-place]

When Whumpee needs Whumper. Not because they want to, but because they need to.

Maybe they are sick, and Whumper has the power of healing them. Or maybe they just have been so conditioned to be near Whumper and to accept their abuses that it has become normal for them.

They know it's toxic. They know that's not right. But that's the only thing they know.

Anger, and violence, and cruelty, because Whumper has the control over them. After a long time surrounded by nothing but toxicity taking a breath of fresh air feels like burning inside.

And when they are with Caretaker they start to question small things of their new life.

Whumper wouldn't like that curtains color. That's not the way Whumper would have reacted. Whumper hates coffee, tea is much better.

Whumpee doesn't need Whumper anymore, Caretaker is much better and kinder and doesn't manipulate them or hurt them as a price for their help.

And even then, for some reason, Whumpee just... misses Whumper.

[pratchettquotes]

That was the problem with witchcraft: It was as if everybody needed the witches but hated the fact that they did, and somehow the hatred of the fact could become the hatred of the person. People then started thinking: Who are you to have these skills? Who are you to know these things? Who are you to think you're better than us? But Tiffany didn't think she was better than them. She was better than them at witchcraft, that was true; but she couldn't knit a sock, she didn't know how to shoe a horse, and while she was pretty good at making cheese, she had to have three tries to bake a loaf that you could actually bite into with your teeth. Everybody was good at something. The only wicked thing was not finding out what it was in time.

Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

[vladdyissues]

At the root of it all, Vlad just wants someone to love him.

He couldn't get love when he was young and shy and awkward. He can't get love now that he's rich and powerful and confident. He thinks if he can just win Maddie and Danny's affection—keyword: win, as if love were a prize, a trophy, something to be earned and possessed instead of grown and nurtured, like a seedling—then he'd finally be complete. He'd have everything.

But he's wrong. Eventually, I think, he would realize it. Even if Maddie left Jack and Danny loved Vlad like a father, it wouldn't fix the brokenness deep inside him. It would be a temporary, inadequate fix. A bandage on a compound fracture. Vlad requires more serious care. The broken bone needs to be set so it can heal properly and grow straight again. It's a process that's going to hurt very badly at first, but once everything begins to align and the scar tissue heals over, it will get better.

But as long as Vlad continues to put the key to his happiness in other people's pockets—Maddie, Danny, his wealth and power—he'll never be able to heal.

[leosh444]

Please just love me.

[lumpyorganelle]

Passive dependency

Source: The Road Less Travelled - M. Scott Peck

Passive dependency has its genesis in lack of love.

The inner feeling of emptiness from which passive dependent people suffer is the direct result of their parents' failure to fulfil their needs for affection, attention and care during their child-hood.

It was mentioned in the first section that children who are loved and cared for with relative consistency throughout childhood enter adulthood with a deep-seated feeling that they are lovable and valuable and therefore will be loved and cared for as long as they remain true to themselves.

Children growing up in an atmosphere in which love and care are lacking or given with gross inconsistency enter adulthood with no such sense of inner security.

Rather, they have an inner sense of insecurity, a feeling of "I don't have enough" and a sense that the world is unpredictable and ungiving, as well as a sense of themselves as being questionably lovable and valuable.

It is no wonder, then, that they feel the need to scramble for love, care and attention

wherever they can find it, and once having found it, cling to it with a desperation that leads them to unloving, manipulative, Machiavellian behaviour that destroys the very relationships they seek to preserve.

As also indicated in the previous section, love and discipline go hand in hand, so that unloving, uncaring parents are people lacking in discipline, and when they fail to provide their children with a sense of being loved, they also fail to provide them with the capacity for self-discipline.

Thus the excessive dependency of the passive dependent individuals is only the principal manifestation of their personality disorder.

Passive dependent people lack self-discipline.

They are unwilling or unable to delay gratification of their hunger for attention.

In their desperation to form and preserve attachments they throw honesty to the winds. They cling to outworn relationships when they should give them up. Most important, they lack a sense of responsibility for themselves.

They passively look to others, frequently even their own children, as the source of their happiness and fulfilment, and therefore when they are not happy or fulfilled they basically feel that others are responsible.

Consequently they are endlessly angry, because they endlessly feel let down by others who can never in reality fulfil all their needs or "make" them happy.

I have a colleague who often tells people, "Look, allowing yourself to be dependent on another person is the worst possible thing you can do to yourself. You would be better off being dependent on heroin. As long as you have a supply of it, heroin will never let you down; if it's there, it will always make you happy. But if you expect another person to make you happy, you'll be endlessly disappointed."

As a matter of fact, it is no accident that the most common disturbance that passive dependent people manifest beyond their relationships to others is dependency on drugs and alcohol.

Theirs is the "addictive" personality.

"They are addicted to people, sucking on them and gobbling them up, and when people are not available to be sucked and gobbled, they often turn to the bottle or the needle or the pill as a people-substitute."

In summary, dependency may appear to be love because it is a force that causes people to fiercely attach themselves to one another. But in actuality it is not love; it is a form of antilove. It has its genesis in a parental failure to love and it perpetuates the failure.

It seeks to receive rather than to give. It nourishes infantilism rather than growth. It works to trap and constrict rather than to liberate. Ultimately it destroys rather than builds relationships, and it destroys rather than builds people.

[ethiack]

How America Became So Stupid

[wanderingmind867]

I still haven't told my dad about my 14,000 posts on here, and I feel that adds a bit of a sour undercurrent to my interactions on here. Because my dad is my only friend in real life, and he deserves to know about me being on here. He tells me about his coworkers, he tells me some vague details about a new person he's texting with, but I don't have the guts to admit to making 14,000 posts in 2-3 years, and just never telling him? Well, that tracks for me. I am known for being cowardly and not saying stuff i'm worried will make people judge me. But I don't even think my dad would judge me that much! He'd probably understand! But would I forgive myself? Now that's the hard part...

[mvpdepressed]

- I’ll love you forever sid

- you will?

- yes that’s the problem

[deviousreign]

That urge to make wifey implode

[hexa-decimal]

Please, do not give me your honesty,

So that I may lie to you as well.

Force my sinuses to fill

With the stench

Of dopamine and yearning, evermore,

And suffocate me

With the weight of your departure.

Tell me how much you'd missed me,

And I'll say I never missed you once,

Just like a person drowning misses not oxygen,

And one parched misses not a water drop.

And I shall cry when you leave,

For with you or without you, my pain persists,

But at least when you're here, the silence is ever so slightly less deafening,

And for a fraction of a second

The bitterness may be sweetened by the fib.

- A.L

[dk-thrive]

'I sometimes think the world is divided into people who survive from their own inner strength and those who have to latch on to others to survive.'

— Elizabeth Jolley, interview in Good Weekend, in Helen Garner's "One Day I'll Remember This: Diaries 1987–1995" (Text Publishing Company, October 12, 2021)

[secular-jew]

I say this as someone who once attended CPAC and went through a lot of life as a self-identified Milton Friedman fangirl: You have very clearly only read about postwar US social policies from a conservative perspective. I'm not even saying you have to change your mind, but you need to have the guts to read about things like LBJ's policies and the welfare state from other sources, especially black sources, and not just Thomas Sowell, to form a truly robust opinion. You owe it to yourself.

I read almost everything. LBJ was an avid racist, used the "N"-word liberally and regularly, and basically hated black people - but he was a Democratic pragmatist and understood that the Democrat party needed more black votes in order to gain a lock on power. LBJ therefore dramatically increased the entitlement state in order to buy black votes. Much like Biden is trying to do with the youth demographic in his illegal student loan forgiveness (both Pelosi and the Supreme court has reaffirmed the obvious: THIS IS ILLEGAL & NOT THE FUNCTION OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH). But the Democrats don't care about what is legal or illegal, they only care about buying votes and almost every entitlement program (not all but almost all) is designed to buy votes, and does little if anything to address the problems. For example, LBJ's Great Society was supposed to (was advertised to) eliminate poverty in a generation. TEN TRILLION TAX DOLLARS LATER, has poverty been eliminated? No, of course not. It's only gotten worse. BUT, 90-95% of black people now vote Democrat. The Democrats are doing the same thing on our borders, opening them up wide -- with the obvious rationale in buying buy votes and a future lock on power. Get off the Democrat reservation. Voting Democrat not only costs you more of your hard-earned money (assuming you earn money), it also solves nothing and ultimately, causes MORE DEPENDENCY and more poverty. That's all it does. #JEXIT

[leosh444]

Its me, I'm mfs.

[yandere-vent]

i’m going to collapse in on myself without you here