The Myth of Independence: Honouring Interdependence

Independence is one picture of psychological health, and it is a cultural one. Much Western therapy treats separating from family as the goal. For many people from collectivist or South Asian backgrounds, connection is part of who they are. Interdependence means you can stay close to the people you love and still have room for your own voice. Both can be true at once.

There is a strong narrative in Western therapy that says: "To be healthy, you must separate." You must have strict boundaries. You must put yourself first.

But is this true for everyone?

Where does the idea of independence come from?

The independent self can feel like a fact of nature. It is closer to a cultural habit. In 1991 the psychologists Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama described two broad ways of understanding the self. In what they called an independent view, a person is defined mainly by their own inner qualities, and the task is to stand apart and express them. In an interdependent view, a person is understood through their relationships, and the task is to fit in with others and keep those relationships well (Markus & Kitayama, 1991).

Neither view is more mature than the other. They are different answers to the question "who am I?" You can read more about the broader idea of individualism and its counterpart, collectivism, in the glossary.

The difficulty comes when a therapy built mostly in one tradition is offered, without much thought, to people raised in the other. Then a daughter who phones home every day, or who weighs her parents' feelings before accepting a job, can be read as someone who has not yet grown up.

Is it okay to need other people?

For many of us, especially from collectivist or South Asian backgrounds, our identity is woven into our families. The idea of "cutting off" or purely serving the self feels not like liberation, but like a loss of self.

Needing other people is not a flaw to be trained out of you. Human beings have always lived through each other. Being looked after, and looking after others in turn, is part of how many people experience love and meaning.

What does interdependence look like in everyday life?

Imagine you are living in Amsterdam, a few years into a good job. You speak to your mother most evenings. When a promotion would mean moving again, you talk it through with your parents before you decide. Each month you send money home, and you feel proud that you can.

None of this is a symptom. It may be how you belong.

Now imagine the same calls happen, but you dread them. You hide parts of your life because the reaction would be too painful. You say yes to things you do not want, and afterwards you feel resentful and then guilty for feeling resentful.

From the outside the two pictures look almost identical. On the inside they are very different. That inner difference is what counselling can help you look at.

Is interdependence the same as enmeshment?

No. Enmeshment describes a family where the edges between people blur so much that one person's feelings become everyone's responsibility, and having a separate opinion feels like betrayal.

Interdependence has more give in it. People rely on each other, and each person still has a self that can feel and think things the others might not. You can be deeply connected and still be allowed to disagree.

It is worth saying gently that some closeness does become suffocating. Respecting interdependence does not mean pretending every family arrangement is fine. It means not assuming the problem is the closeness itself.

What did Carl Rogers mean by autonomy?

Person-centred therapy is sometimes heard as an individualistic approach, and some of Rogers' language does lean that way. I think that is worth being honest about.

But look closely at what he was describing. Rogers was interested in where our judgements come from. He wrote about the locus of evaluation: whether we weigh our experience by our own sense of things, or by rules we have absorbed from outside and never examined (Rogers, 1961). His idea of conditions of worth describes how those outside rules can crowd out what we actually feel (Rogers, 1959).

Nothing in that requires you to stop caring about your family. Choosing to care for an ageing parent can come from your own values just as much as moving away can. What changes is whether the choice is felt as yours, or as something you are not allowed to question.

Do I need strict boundaries?

The word boundaries can sound like walls. In many families, walls would feel like rejection.

Boundaries can be much smaller and softer than that. It might be calling every other evening instead of every evening. It might be telling your aunt that you will not discuss marriage this visit, and then talking about something else. It might be keeping one decision to yourself until you are sure about it.

These are adjustments inside a relationship. They are a way of staying connected with a little more air.

If you'd like to think this through in more practical detail, I've written a longer page on boundaries with family, and the duty and self reflection tool offers a few quiet questions to sit with on your own.

How can counselling honour your family and your own voice?

In our work together, I challenge the assumption that independence is the only goal. We can explore how to honour your obligations and your connections while still making space for your own voice. Interdependence is a strength, not a pathology. That fits how person-centred counselling works: the direction comes from you, not from a theory of how families ought to be.

This might mean looking at what you owe and what you want, side by side, without deciding in advance which one wins. It might mean noticing where guilt is a sign of care and where it has become a habit. It can also mean grieving a little when the two cannot both be met.

What happens to family duty when you live abroad?

Living abroad adds its own weight. You may feel duty most sharply exactly when you cannot act on it: when a parent is unwell and you are a flight away, or when a family celebration happens without you. Some people describe feeling guilty for building a life somewhere else, even when their family encouraged them to go.

These feelings do not mean you chose wrongly. They mean the connection is still alive. I write more about this in family duty and self.

Distance can also bring a quieter loneliness, the sense that nobody nearby knows the whole of you. The page on expat loneliness looks at that, and the living abroad and migration resources gather trusted outside reading. It can also help to know what to look for in a counsellor. I've written about that in cultural safety in the therapy room.

If you would like a space where closeness to family is not treated as a problem by default, you can read my page on counselling for South Asian women and families. You don't have to choose between your people and yourself before we begin.