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How to Distinguish True Love from Mere Dependency

Dutch still life with a lobster
To grow, the lobster must first shed its shell.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

When worldly ambition fails to validate us, we often turn to romantic love. We rely on another person to lend our life weight and meaning. First, we ask the crowd; then, we ask one person.

The Greeks had several words for love: eros, philia, storge, and agape. Eros is passionate love, philia friendship, storge familial love, and agape universal love. But we reduce all these types of love into just one word, which we associate with romantic love.

The Rise of Romantic Love

What we don’t realise is that romantic love, unlike passionate love, is a fairly modern concept. If you think about it, romantic love barely features in the 73 books of the Bible. The Bible’s greatest love stories are David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, and, above all the love of man for God. In the ancient world, passionate love was not seen as ennobling but as a dangerous affliction: think only of Helen and Paris, Dido and Aeneas, Antony and Cleopatra.

How, then, did this dangerous affliction become our highest ideal? As religion retreated, our need for religion remained. We still longed for meaning and transcendence. Gradually, the sacred seeped out of God and into romantic love. We stopped loving God and began loving love.

That’s why love speaks the language of religion: adoration, devotion, eternal union… We expect one person to provide us with everything: intimacy, friendship, intellectual stimulation—until death do us part.

What Love Really Is

But once a person is given the role of God, disappointment becomes inevitable. When things go wrong, we conclude that we chose the wrong person, or that love has died—not that we are asking far too much.

This brings us back to the original question: what is love? Beneath all its forms—philia, eros, storge, agape—love is a reaching out beyond ourselves towards someone or something that lends weight and meaning to our life. It is the force that enables us to cross the boundary between ourselves and the world—to shed our shell, like a lobster, and grow beyond it. That’s why people of little love are so small.

This definition of love is useful, in that it gives us a litmus test by which to distinguish love from mere dependency. We can ask: Is this person enlarging my world, or am I merely asking them to save me from myself? Are we growing together, or merely leaning against one another?

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If this essay spoke to you, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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The Crucial Difference Between Self-Confidence and Self-Esteem

woman looking in a mirror

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Living up to people’s expectations is a source of anxiety. But meeting those expectations cannot release us from that anxiety—because success achieved in the eyes of others leaves us dependent upon those same eyes.

The problem is not with success itself. Money can buy freedom and security; renown or recognition can create opportunities. But success cannot answer the deeper question: Am I enough?

To understand why, we need to distinguish between self-confidence and self-esteem—two things which are often confused.

Self-Confidence vs Self-Esteem

Self-confidence asks, “Can I do this?” Self-esteem asks, “Am I enough?”

Performing in the world can make us self-confident, while leaving us profoundly insecure as a human. Just think of all those celebrities who can command an audience but then struggle behind the scenes.

When we confuse self-confidence and self-esteem, ability and worth, we begin using achieving to repair self-esteem. Each new achievement brings a bit of relief, but, of course, our list of achievements, or CV, can never be long enough.

This is how ambition becomes a trap. We put our authentic lives on hold and neglect everything that’s important, in the hope that we might finally feel enough. A person can succeed brilliantly at the wrong life.

The Secret to Self-Esteem

Fame and fortune are external goods, and what comes from outside cannot establish our worth. And if this is so, our sense of worth can only come from inside us, from how we live and relate to ourselves.

The answer, then, is not to abandon ambition, but to subordinate it to our values. An ambition works for us when it expresses our values. Whenever we stand for who we are, we become someone we can love and trust. By backing ourselves, we become our best selves.

Outward success can do many things for us—but it cannot make us enough. ‘Enough’ is not a prize awarded by the crowd, but the quiet consequence of living up to our ideals.

The greatest success is to become ourselves—and no longer to need success.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy The Art of Failure, an unconventional exploration of success, ambition, happiness, and the good life.

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The Stoic Method for Reducing Anxiety

The Stoic archer
Antoine Bourdelle’s Herakles the Archer (1909) captures the Stoic ideal: complete commitment to the action, complete detachment from the outcome.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Whereas depression weighs upon life as it is, anxiety points towards the future: what might happen, what might go wrong, what might be expected of us.

Of course, some concern for the future is necessary. It motivates us to do what’s needed, pay our bills, and avoid danger. So the aim cannot be to abolish anxiety altogether—simply to prevent occasional alarm from becoming a permanent state.

Modern Life

The modern world makes this difficult because threats are seldom all-or-nothing. Our ancestors faced a predator, or did not. We have emails, deadlines, mortgages. And when we look on social media, we feel we are falling behind.

Because the pressure is diffuse and continuous, we internalise it. Eventually, nobody needs to chase us; we carry the pursuer in our head.

Once the pursuer is inside us, we try to outrun them by keeping busy. Activity gives us a sense of control, but often we are not addressing the anxiety so much as preventing ourselves from feeling it. We run faster and faster so that we never have to ask where we are going.

There is a Zen story about a horseman galloping down a path at speed. It seemed as if the rider was on some urgent and vital mission. “Where are you heading?” hollered a bystander. “I don’t know!” came the already distant reply, “Ask the horse!”

How to Reduce Anxiety

The first step, then, is to stop running and name the anxiety. A vague anxiety can fill the whole sky; a named fear becomes one object within it. Once identified, it can be worked with, accepted, or dismissed.

In particular, we can determine what part of the anxiety is actually within our control. The ancient Stoics emphasized this distinction between what is and is not in our control. What is not in our control must simply be let go.

The Stoics had this image of an archer. The archer does all he can to shoot accurately. But once the arrow leaves the bow, its fate is no longer within the archer’s control. So the right-thinking archer focuses on the action, not on its result—because the first is in his control, whereas the other is not.

When dealing with our anxiety, we should all become like the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, who wrote, “Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.”

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Meaning of Madness.

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Before We Hurry to Silence It, We Should Listen to What It Has to Say

A man lost in a dark forest
If depression is a journey, recovery cannot always mean returning to the starting place.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Grief knows its object. Depression often does not. But that does not mean that depression is always meaningless suffering. Often, it is suffering whose meaning is asking to be discovered.

Still, we must be careful not to romanticise depression. Depression can be a disabling, even deadly, illness. Such depression requires urgent and intensive treatment. But neither should the most severe cases determine how we understand all depression.

Diagnosis

Today, in England, around one person in six is prescribed antidepressants. Numbers on this scale should make us ask: is this all mental illness, that is, a biological disorder of the brain, or is it also a problem with modern life?

If at least some depression arises from a problem of living, then the depression is pointing straight at the problem. By treating it as a biological disorder of the brain, we are hiding the problem and prolonging the pain. Our depression may be telling us, look, something here is seriously wrong, something here has to change, you can’t go on like this.

Treatment

Treatment cannot simply aim at silencing it. If a fire alarm is sounding, disabling the alarm may bring relief—but it does not put out the fire.

Instead, treatment should be more like an exploration and journey. Already in the thirteenth century, Dante gave us the right image. At the beginning of Inferno, he finds himself alone in a dark forest, having lost the straight path. The forest is dark and dangerous. Yet the only way out is through it.

If depression is a journey, recovery cannot always mean returning to the starting place. Because the starting place may have been the problem.

Depression can be an illness, but it can also be a form of intelligence. Before we hurry to silence it, we should listen to what it has to say.

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If this article spoke to you, you might look into The Meaning of Madness.

If you are struggling with depression, you can also download my practical self-help guide Growing from Depression free of charge.

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Why Empathy Must Remain at One Remove

Doctor empathising with a patient

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Empathy is, in a sense, the opposite of anger. In anger, we are imprisoned in ourselves and unable to see another person’s perspective. We see in people only what they have done to us. With empathy, we reach out to the other and try to see the world through their eyes.

But if we take this reaching out too far and begin to merge with them, it can become a problem. The suffering of our patients can become both corrupting and exhausting.

Sympathy vs Empathy

The danger becomes clearer if we distinguish between sympathy and empathy. If a friend has lost a parent, and I say, “I’m sorry,” that’s sympathy—which is simple concern for another person’s suffering. If I imagine what that loss feels like from within my friend’s world, that’s empathy.

The power—and the danger—of empathy lies in its particularity. It’s not merely a matter of imagining myself in someone else’s situation. I must imagine myself as them, in that situation. I need to understand who they are, where they have come from, and where they are trying to go. As John Steinbeck wrote, ‘It means very little to know that a million Chinese are starving unless you know one Chinese who is starving.’

Why Empathy Must Remain at One Remove

Yet, to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes is not to become that person. Empathy must remain at one remove. That distance enables me to think objectively and be of help. After all, if I drown alongside a drowning person, I can hardly pull them out of the water.

If that boundary collapses, empathy can corrupt as well as exhaust us. It can lead us to favour the person before us over the many people we cannot see. And, as empathic distress, it can lead to compassion fatigue and burnout.

Regulating empathy, therefore, is not callousness but the condition of effective care.

Doctors who understand their patients without being engulfed by them are not only more effective but more fulfilled in their work.

Ultimately, the doctor’s task is not to carry the patient’s pain, but to stand close enough to understand it—and far away enough to help.

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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.

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