Dependent Personality Disorder: Definition, Causes, Symptoms, Diagnosis, and Treatment

By Cristiano Antonino Last updated Jun 20, 2023

The essential characteristic of individuals with Dependent Personality Disorder is dependent and submissive behavior aimed at seeking someone to protect and care for them

It arises from a self-consideration as fundamentally inadequate and defenseless and therefore incapable of facing the world on one’s own strength alone (low self-esteem).

Individuals with addictive disorder are unable to make decisions on a daily basis unless they get too much advice and reassurance from others.

Leaving the responsibility of making decisions for their lives to others, while on the one hand alleviates the anxiety that every decision brings with it, on the other it favors a position of submission within the relationship with the other.

Patients with dependent personality disorder feel distraught and helpless when their intimate relationships end due to an exaggerated fear of being unable to take care of themselves.

It hurts them to be disapproved of, they tend to subject themselves to others and will do anything to please others.

In order to ward off abandonment by the people they depend on, they agree on what they feel is wrong rather than expressing disagreement.

Individuals with addictive disorder have difficulty initiating projects or doing things on their own

They wait for others to start as they believe that as a rule others do better.

They lack self-confidence and tend to downplay some of their skills and strengths.

Thus they tend to blindly trust and rely faithfully on others in the expectation that their efforts will be rewarded with affection and protection.

In general, those who suffer from dependent personality disorder choose partners with strong, sometimes narcissistic characters, who assume dominant and controlling attitudes towards them.

This relational imbalance, in the long run, while constituting a semblance of balance, harms the dependent subject, who sacrifices himself for the purpose of the relationship and who, paradoxically, often ends up being dismissed, as not sufficiently stimulating and worthy of esteem for partner’s eyes.

Dependent personality disorder, if diagnosed, benefits from medium-long term (1 to 2 years) cognitive-behavioral psychotherapeutic treatments, which focus on the acquisition of self-confidence, on the subject’s progressive autonomy from interpersonal relationships and on becoming aware of one’s individual needs, which these people often struggle to recognize and, above all, to affirm.

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