Emotional Independence
I also found this list on the Web, to help with building emotional independence:
Here are the top five ways to become more emotionally independent in relationships and life from experts and from my own personal observations:
1) Recognize your self-worth and work on improving your self-esteem, which can be through focusing on positive thoughts about yourself, realizing your limitations and your achievements, working on goals, helping others and doing what makes you feel better. Accept your decisions and realize you are capable of doing what’s best for yourself (and get help if you’re not capable).
2) Realize that you control yourself, including your feelings, emotions and actions. Sometimes there are uncontrollable events in life, but you need to realize what you can control. Don’t let someone else determine how your life will turn out.
3) Spread out and recognize your emotional needs and don’t depend on one person. Work on building a variety of friendships and even talk to a therapist or psychologist.
4) Don’t schedule your life around everyone else. Realize that your needs are important and that you need to take control of your life and be independent. You can compromise and recognize others’ needs, but remember that you have to live with yourself and you don’t want to be miserable.
5) Awareness of all the above issues and about emotional dependency and co-dependency in general can allow you to work toward more independence and healthy relationships.