Dependency Is a Cage With Soft Walls

Support should help a person become more capable. This chapter examines what happens when help instead replaces responsibility and teaches someone that he cannot function without being continually carried.

The distinction does not require isolation or rejecting care. Guidance, treatment, community, and tools can be necessary and useful. The question is whether they strengthen honest action and growing capacity, or become an identity that protects helplessness.

Dependency is considered beyond any single setting. It can attach to approval, motivation, a job title, technology, a relationship, or the comfort of being rescued from every decision. The chapter asks what remains the person's responsibility even while help is present, and whether that help is building the ability to carry it.