Tony White

I have mentioned before about the dependency hump.



How in normal development the child in the first year of life develops a high degree of attachment and psychological dependence on the parents. Some people make it to the top of the hump but then get stuck there and live life like line C. The most obvious example of this is the Dependent personality.

There are others who follow line A and never make it up to the top of the hump and these are sometimes called the “Hurried child syndrome”. They are forced to grow up in a hurry before they are psychologically ready to do so. These people find it very hard to become dependent in relationships and thus can suffer greatly because of that. Sometimes the goal of longer term therapy with character disorders is for the client to go through the dependency hump with the therapist.


Do I trust him to catch me?



Dependency is an interesting thing in that it is a double edged sword. It leaves the dependent party in a paradox.

On the one hand dependency can leave the person with secure and comfort feelings as they know and trust that the other party will look after them and protect them in a competent way.

At the same time the dependent party knows that they are dependent on the power figure and needs them to survive. This can lead to feelings of resentment and anger at the powerful figure. In addition when one is dependent on another person, then that is ‘stopping’ them from growing because to grow and develop one must eventually leave the dependency at least to some degree. So the dependency is indeed inhibiting the dependent party from growing. This can also lead to some resentment at the powerful figure by the dependent party.

Adolescence is a classic example of when these two contrary emotions can exist in one person at the same time and indeed they can both be felt at the same person at the same time. This of course can lead to relationship difficulties because the parent and the adolescent may be confused about the conflicting emotions being felt and expressed.



Sometimes however they can be split between mother and father. Where mother gets the negative emotions expressed at her for the dependence inhibiting development and father gets the good emotions expressed at him for the security the dependency offers. This can particularly happen when the parents have separated.

This can also be reflected in the process of transference development. See this diagram that I have blogged about before.



Clients will initially go through a period of positive transference in relation to the counsellor. At this time the positives of the dependency is felt by the client where their Free Child at last feels like it has a secure dependency on which to rely and it feels great.

But sooner or later the Free Child starts to feel like it wants to grow and develop into its own person and hence an anger or resentment starts to be felt at the counsellor because the dependency is holding it back from developing. Hence the negative transference arrives and the angst gets felt towards the therapist.



I have long suggested that it is wise for therapists to encourage the expression of adversarial feelings towards the therapist by the client in the positive transference stage. This probably reduces the excessive dependency whilst still allowing and permitting a functional level of dependency in the client so that he can proceed through the dependency hump.

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