Interdependence Expands Freedom
Independence is defined by ability to choose your actions, make decisions. When independence is understood as self-reliance, however, freedom suffers. If you were truly self-reliant, you would spend your day figuring out how to get enough food and water and keep yourself safe. You wouldn’t need love or understanding, nor would there be a point in offering it. Interdependence, relying on and caring for others, increases options and thereby freedom.
Nearly everyone relies on a network of relationships each day. We may eat food that someone else grew, use streets we didn’t pave, and live in a home we didn’t build. We rely on friends, coworkers, mentors, teachers, spiritual leaders, and strangers. Yes, we often depend on people we’ve never met, and support people we will never know.
Interdependent Family
The basic family structure is by nature interdependent. Infants require extensive care, and as children grow more capable, other family members increasingly rely on them. Aging parents become more dependent on their children, yet grandparents may help with childcare or other support. They, along with siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins, may help in times of need with meals, healthcare, referrals, mentoring, shelter, financial support, or work. For a variety of reasons, a family may or may not be genetically related to each other. Someone separated from their birth family by distance, death, estrangement or life circumstance may still find and offer support within a ‘chosen family.’ Also, a community that relies on each other to meet life’s needs may or may not refer to themselves with the word ‘family.’ They could be an athletic team, a street gang, a religious order, or a military unit, to name some options.
However a family is composed or named, its members rely on each other for material, functional, emotional, social, or spiritual daily needs. A strain or fracture of any pair of relationships affects the health of the whole. Although some amount of conflict is healthy, unreconciled harm causes unmet needs for one or many members, and can easily have severe consequences.
Strengthen Networks to Bring Stability
When someone is in need, individuals and institutions sometimes state a misaligned goal to help that person ‘towards independence.’ However, the need is often present because the person is forced to be self-reliant, and those ‘helping’ often take away autonomy in their aid criteria. When someone is in need, their network of relationships is lacking, leaving them to either meet their needs on their own, or to live (or not) without them. Some causes of such isolation include abuse, mental and physical illness, incarceration, addiction, trauma, disability, and social stigma. Also, someone may have a robust network of supportive relationships that is severely under-resourced, perhaps due to racism, or systemic poverty.
Assisting someone, then, means attending to whether there are enough reasonably healthy relationships in their network, and if members have needed resources to care for each other. Joining the network as a longterm ally, offering support for resolving conflict and tending relationships, and offering or opening pathways to resources over an extended time are the tools for helping people to thrive. This is what people who are not needing support already have in their family and social networks.
Resources that make a network thrive are quite broad, including skills, knowledge, and qualities, in addition to material support. Someone may need round-the-clock physical care, yet offer wisdom, insight, a talent for encouragement, or making others laugh. Someone may have a mental illness yet be creative, or accepting of others’ difficulties. Someone who has been through a lot of pain, fear, sorrow, or mistakes may struggle with trauma, yet share courage and survival through adversity.
Partnership and Peace
Many networks are plagued by a faith in dominance that ranks some members’ value or decisions over others. Those within a dominance-based network or family often have some needs met, but are forced to suppress others. They may hide their pain and cause harm through actions and projections related to their own unmet needs.
Social systems researcher Riane Eisler has been sharing the implications of dominance and partnership-based systems on violence from the family level to the world. Healthy interdependent networks of care are partnership systems. Nurturing partnership as our model of safety and freedom shifts our values away from the perspective that dominance is moral, a belief which profoundly influences support for war, terrorism, authoritarian regimes, ethnic violence, and genocide.[1]
Interdependence is why love and justice are always linked and why it’s critical to attend to relationships in order to bring peace to situations where violence threatens or has occurred. When people live within a stable family of interrelationship, they take care of each other, prevent serious harms, and rally in support when difficult things happen. They offer each other resilience.
Furthermore, it is only through interdependence that people have time and energy in their lives for creativity, innovation, research, development, dreaming up things and then carrying them out. Interdependence makes space for people to follow a talent or calling that stirs them. Conversely, barriers to healthy interdependence crush people’s ability to develop talent or follow their calling, causing internal anguish that can be expressed outwardly as violence, detachment, indifference, and depression.
Everyone is Needed, Everyone Belongs
Nothing teaches us more deeply than experience. Our stores of knowledge, listening skills, and people’s shared stories are all very helpful. Yet, we still need each other’s varied life experiences in order to make sound decisions from a place of wisdom. We also bring differing ways in which we’re in need, and in which we have abundance. When we share our own particular abundance with people who have the same abundance, but not the people who need it, we disempower ourselves and others. Our energy is trapped, imprisoned, and so are we. However, when we bring both our abundance and our need to each other, offering the one and receiving the other, we’re able to come to a place of wholeness. Valerie Kaur, founder of the Revolutionary Love project, advises us to see ‘strangers’ as simply “a part of myself I do not yet know.”[2] All of these parts are needed for us to live in peace as one body.
If your family or network is facing harm, increasing your attention to healing, advocating, nurturing, or outreach can enhance safety and thriving within the group. Bringing in new members can strengthen your group. In addition, joining a new group forms a link between your own existing network and the new one, allowing the strengths of one to flow to the other. Joining reduces isolation. It opens pathways for people to share resources, talent, joy, and love. It opens windows to witness complexities, harms and needs. When you are there because you need each other, you can work in mutual respect together. Respect is necessary for loving relationships and therefore for justice.
Expanding Freedom
Below are four ways of using awareness of the link between interdependence and freedom to enhance safety and promote thriving networks and communities:
1. Attune to your own needs and resources
What do you long for? What can you bring? Perhaps you have material things, stability, or time, but need to witness tenacity, courage, or faith to feel more at peace. Needs and resources are both highly varied. What can you bring?
2. Attend to care within your circles
Who is in need, including you, within your networks or families? What is that need and what can you can do?
3. Join a vulnerable community Be an ally. Offer your abundance, whatever it is. Center the voices of those living a harmful experience.
4. Join a community you need
Find a group that has a skill or resource that your existing network lacks. Bring your gifts, and the resources of your network to offer, and allow people in the new group to witness and respond to you and your network’s needs.
[1] [2] Eisler, Riane. Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape our Brains, Lives, and Future. Oxford University Press. 2019.
[2] Kaur, Valerie. See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. One World. 2021.