My Greatest Triumph: Having Achieved Emotional Autonomy
One of our greatest achievements on a personal level is to reach full emotional autonomy at some point in life. That’s when we take full responsibility for ourselves without toxic addictions, without depending on anyone to fight with dignity and balance and achieve everything we want and deserve.
It’s not easy. Emotional autonomy is an aspiration for personal growth that not everyone can achieve. This autonomy, defined as the ability to make decisions according to one’s own will, has many obstacles, high walls, and an army of battle-hardened enemies. External pressures and our internal saboteurs restrict this goal at all times.
Life, by itself, does not always allow us to enjoy total and absolute personal autonomy. However, what we have in our favor is the ability to decide; where emotional autonomy reaches its maximum relevance. The moment we manage to develop adequate mental clarity to regain voice and dignity, we will be able to say what we want, when we want, what we don’t want and who we don’t want in our lives.
We need to learn to live with our own power references.
How to achieve our emotional autonomy
Living as strategists in emotional autonomy implies mastering everything we define as self-reliance. Build a strong identity to ensure your integrity, to make decisions and take responsibility for the consequences of your actions. Keep a positive attitude towards life and make it a very special trip. A journey into ourselves to become aware of all our aspects, whether positive or negative.
We propose to start this journey through the following steps:
The foundations of self-sufficiency
If someone chooses things for you, you don’t feel capable. If someone solves your problems, if you expect the other to approve of your ideas, give you permission, or indicate where to go or not to go, you will never develop adequate self-reliance. Even if you doubt, hesitate, are afraid or don’t feel capable, do and decide to act for yourself.
One of the biggest enemies of emotional independence is certainly “committed autonomy”. These are complex situations built especially between couples, where both live in a very destructive self-deception.
We can say “do what you want”, “decide what you need”, “whatever you say is fine”, “go out tonight with your friends if you want”, when in fact, we expect just the opposite . In fact, they are implicit mandates that we need to know how to manage for emotional autonomy to be authentic and complete in this relationship.
Emotional autonomy also means that no one person has the right to decide for us what we can do or have. “You’re fine where you are”, “This is good for you, this is what makes you happy and not all that nonsense that goes through your head”.
Another aspect we need to reflect on is that many of us know very well what are the components that make up emotional autonomy: we know what self-esteem, assertiveness, resilience are… However, despite this, we face multiple emotional blocks .
Perhaps we should take into account the advice that Erich Fromm left us: “Dare to be free” . Because most of the time, it is only necessary to dare, to take a step forward to become what we really want.
Images courtesy of HuanLe.
