Detachment is Letting Go of Your Need to Be an Emotional Vampire

“Detachment is the absence of a need to hold on to anyone or anything. It’s a way of thinking and being that gives us the freedom to flow with life. Detachment is the only vehicle available to take you from striving to arriving.”
Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

Detachment is a form of surrender. We finally realize and accept that we can’t control life or other people; and, with the help of our Higher Power, we gradually begin to let go. First, we let go of our misconceptions concerning the amount of power we thought we had over other people. Second, we learn to detach from our addictions to certain “things.”

Many of us grew-up with the illusion that we somehow had real power to manipulate and control other people. And some of us even thought we had the power to stop the world from spinning, if necessary. We were starved for emotional attention and this intense emotional neediness made us into emotional vampires. We’d suck the life out of our victims because our need was so great for love and attention. Simultaneously, we’d manipulate our victims with caretaking, people-pleasing, sex, whining or whatever means was necessary. We knew we had to keep our victims under our trance and we were constantly striving to control their every thought, mood and movement in order to ensure our own happiness.

Being an emotional vampire is hell. The worst part of it all is the intense feeling of constant neediness. There’s no feeling known to humans as devastating as the empty feeling of a black, bottomless inner-pit. It’s like living with a soul that’s been blown full of bullet holes. The need to hold on to someone is extremely intense. And the desire to suck the very life out of that person in order to make us feel OK about ourselves is inescapably overwhelming. It becomes a do or die feeling that no victim could possibly satisfy. No one could ever do enough to free us from our inner-bondage. No one, that is, outside of ourselves.

We have to provide the inner-love, nurturing and healing to make ourselves OK. We need to be the ones who calm our inner-turmoil; to end our inner-neediness through self-love and appreciation. Self-love is the stake we have to drive through the heart of our inner codependent vampire. Once we are able to start loving, accepting and appreciating ourselves, the holes in our souls will begin to close up and heal. The need to hold on to someone will subside and we will be able to let go and detach from having to possess power over others.

During this process, however, we need to be careful not to transfer any lingering inner-neediness to “things.” Instead of providing good self-nurturing, it’s very easy for us to attach to food, cigarettes, alcohol, soft drinks, television or other addictive things. When we find ourselves attaching to these sorts of things, it’s a sign that we are still trying to control our feelings and our lives, instead of being willing to face our feelings as they are and accept life as it is.

Detachment is letting go of our need to have someone or something outside of ourselves to make us OK. It’s accepting and loving ourselves and our place in life. It’s going with the flow of life while loving ourselves through it. It’s allowing God to be God, life to be life, people to be people and us to simply be us. It’s accepting what we can’t change and loving ourselves enough to change what we can for the better. And, as Wayne Dyer says, it’s “arriving” at a healthy, peaceful place where all is well because we no longer need to strive or attach ourselves to others in order to be happy. So detach from the painful neediness of negatively holding on to others and things and allow your soul to shine!

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