““While you weren’t “born shy,” you were born dependent. As an infant, you relied on your parents for all your personal care. But as you grew older, the natural progression was toward independence, toward the separateness of adulthood. If you are experiencing problems with dependence now, it is in part because the people you depend on are enabling you to depend on them. You ask for their help, consciously or unconsciously, and they give it to you. They may tell themselves it’s easier to do something for you than to risk your negative, even agitated, response at being denied. They play into your own denial of the problem by rationalizing their objections. Just as you maintain that it’s not that big a deal for your lab partner to handle the oral report, your lab partner, knowing you get anxious when you have to address large groups, may tell herself the same thing. Think about how you might have learned dependence. Did your parents exhibit a willingness to rescue you from new or stressful situations? Do you remember your response? If your parents taught you to avoid stress and anxiety because they would “take care of it,” you began to believe it was easier to rely on them than to risk failure on your own.””
