How To Stop Being Clingy & Build Emotional Permanence

Reading time: 14 minutes

Clingy people always feel like they are one step away from being left unloved.

They often think:

“Is he going to leave me?”

“Has she started to hate me?”

Clinginess in a relationship is when a person needs a lot of reassurance, attention, physical closeness, and emotional support from their partner. It seems like they want to literally cling to their partners for eternity.

Experts prefer the term anxious attachment style to describe one’s approach to their relationships with high anxiety and low avoidance.

Clingy people want, and even demand, to be repeatedly told that they are loved; otherwise they assume the love has gone.

“Promise me you’re not going to leave me ever?”

“Tell me you love me at least five times a day!”

It comes from an unsaid fear of being rejected or abandoned. So they get insecure when apart from their partner, and constantly text or ask them to be physically close.

Paradoxically, their constant checking in, jealousy, and panic can annoy and push their partner away.

But clingy people can build stable relationships by developing their emotional permanence.

What Is Emotional Permanence?

Emotional permanence is the ability to trust that someone’s feelings for you continue to exist even when they are not physically present. It helps maintain a sense of security, trust, and boundaries in relationships, allowing one to feel loved and valued without needing constant reassurance.

How To Stop Being Clingy And Build Emotional Permanence

Clinginess in a relationship makes it fragile. The fear of being left forever may actually cause their partner to leave them forever.

Some helpful ways to build your trust that your partner still loves you when they are away are:

1. Find The Roots of Your Insecurity

Clinginess rarely exists in isolation. It typically has roots in past experiences of abandonment, like:

• parental absence (physical or neglect) in childhood,
• previous relationship hurts like ghosting, or
• low self-esteem due to childhood abuse.

Take a long, hard look at these experiences. Find out how they are influencing your current relationship patterns.

You could use journaling, therapy, or self-help resources to benefit from this process of self-discovery.

2. Practice Self-Assurance (Even If It’s Hard)

Clingy behavior is often fueled by negative thoughts like:

• “I’m not good enough.”
• “He doesn’t really care about me.”
• “She will leave me as I’m always doing stupid things.”

These thoughts are mostly distortions of reality — not realities. Your partner is most probably not thinking what your thoughts tell you.

Two things to do:

1. Write down what he says about your anxious thoughts — read them when you feel insecure.
2. Challenge your insecure thoughts by assuring yourself — “my thoughts don’t always tell the truth.”

A few things you could tell yourself:

• “I may not be perfect, but that doesn’t make me unlovable.”
• “She needs personal space, but this does not mean she’s abandoning me.”
• “We may have had a disagreement, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love me.”

What you’re doing is rationalizing your negative thoughts with self-affirming statements.

This is called Cognitive Restructuring (questioning and updating your thoughts to make sure they are more realistic, accurate, and helpful). It helps build a stronger sense of self.

Of course, it is okay to ask your partner sometimes, “Do you care about me?” But don’t make this need for external validation into a habit.

3. Develop Self-Soothing Strategies

Clinginess is mounted on wobbly rocks of anxiety, stress, and uncertainty.

It may take some willpower, but the right thing to do is to stop yourself from immediately seeking reassurance from your partner.

Instead, try one of these self-soothing strategies:

• Calming activities — Belly breathing, listening to soft music, reading an easy book, or indulging in a soothing hobby.
• Mindfulness — observe your feelings of neediness, notice the times they get triggered, and let them pass un-judged without acting on them.
• Socializing — reach out to people who support you, share with them your neediness for constant assurance of love, and discuss some balanced ways to respond.
• Visualization — Visualize love as a constant, invisible thread connecting you and your partner, not something that needs to be proven or shown every moment.

Build your own repertoire of self-soothing techniques, as you alone know what works best to regulate your emotions and reduce your dependence on your partner for emotional validation.

4. Reinforce Your Self-Worth

Self-worth is how much you value yourself. A strong sense of self-worth helps develop emotional permanence.

When you feel confident that you are good, important, and capable on your own, you feel less need for external validation.

Every time you need to ask them if they love you, sit with those feelings, and speak kindly to yourself:

1. “I can be secure in love without constant reassurance.”
2. “Even if I don’t hear it right now, I am loved and valued.”
3. “I am capable of giving myself the love I seek from others.”
4. “I trust in the love she has for me — it’s there, even in silence.”
5. “My worth is not determined by how much attention I receive.”
6. “My partner’s love is steady, even when not expressed every moment.”
7. “I am whole on my own; my partner’s love adds to my joy, not defines it.”

To have a healthy sense of self-worth and feel more confident in your own skin, try these:

• Practice self-compassion — treat yourself as you would treat your best friend.
• Practice gratitude — feel thankful for the good things and people you have in your life.
• Practice self-love — list your appreciable qualities, good habits, and remarkable achievements.

5. Practice Degrees of Separation

If you’re used to spending most of your time with your partner, start practicing brief periods of separation.

• Try spending an evening apart, doing separate hobbies, or going on individual outings with friends.
• Gradually increase the time and distance apart to build your tolerance for separation.
• Be open and honest about how you are coping, and discus how you can get better.

Over time, it would make you realize that your relationship remains secure even when you’re not physically together.

6. Communicate Openly But A Little Less

Excessive communication is one of the signs and causes of clinginess. You may need to cut it down a bit.

Discuss this with your partner first, or they may feel oddly left out.

Tell them, and show them, that from now on, you will avoid constant reassurance-seeking. And bring in more moments of silence or silent togetherness in your relationship.

• Write down your needs, urges, and concerns that you want to talk to your partner. Share it with him at a later time.
• Practice silence, talking to your partner only when it gets too uncomfortable, but only in a calm and respectful manner.
• Have weekly sessions of doing things in the same room without talking to each other, followed by how you felt during those moments.

7. Reframe Your Distressing Thoughts

Reframing your negative thoughts can help you view them objectively or even positively, lessening their impact.

For example, instead of thinking “He didn’t text me back; he must not care,” you could reframe it as “He is probably busy, and I’ll hear from him when they have a moment.”

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8. Three Strategies From My Personal Insight

• Start labeling your emotions. Labeling emotions clearly can help better emotion regulation and emotional stability.
• Practice intentional solitude. To grow emotional permanence, make time to be alone, to learn to handle being lonely and love solitude, find and do activities that increase your self-worth and self-confidence.
• Involve your partner. Share with your partner your feelings of abandonment, and helping them help you build trust in the relationship. You don’t have to suffer it alone.

9. Seek Professional Guidance

If you’re struggling to overcome clinginess on your own, seek professional help from a therapist or counselor.

They can lay out a recovery plan personalized for you, teaching you coping mechanisms for managing your anxiety and insecurity.

Therapy is a safe and supportive space to explore these challenges and develop healthier relationship patterns.

Why Do We Need Emotional Permanence?

• Relationship Stability: Emotional permanence is an essence of handling relationships like an adult — feeling security and trust even in our partner’s absence.
• Antidote to Unhealthy Relationship Dynamics: It acts as a powerful antidote to clinginess, fear of abandonment, fearful avoidant attachment, and excessive dependency, promoting healthy interdependence.
• Fosters Freedom and Respect: It builds a sense of freedom and mutual trust, while encouraging respect for each other’s boundaries without constant reassurance-seeking.
• Enduring Connections: It assures us that our feelings and connections persist even during physical separation, not weakening the bond in any way.
• Enhanced Resilience: It gives us a strength to bounce back stronger after wading through life’s challenges and sad moments, and growing closer.
• Authentic Joy and Meaningful Relationships: It lets us maintain meaningfulness and joy in our relationship without constantly seeking validation.
• Healthy Emotional Processing: It allows us to approach our emotional experiences in a healthy and helpful way, preventing us from being overwhelmed by another person’s presence or absence. It promotes self-sufficiency.
• Roots in Childhood Experiences: Emotional dependence often originates in childhood experiences, where unstable, emotionally distant, or absent parenting can create abandonment issues and anxieties that affect adult relationships.
• Addressing Underlying Issues: Cultivating emotional permanence involves improving current relationships and addressing potential underlying issues stemming from earlier life experiences.

Emotional Permanence Deficit (Emotional Impermanence)

Most of us have emotional permanence. Some people, however, lack it. A lack of emotional permanence is called emotional impermanence or emotional permanence deficit.

These people need, even demand, to be told every so often that they are loved; else, they may assume the love has gone.

They also struggle with controlling their moods and may have extreme emotional ups and downs.

An emotional permanence deficit is when a person cannot understand or appreciate an emotion if they are not actively experiencing that emotion.

They know that they have experienced that particular emotion several times in the past. They may even explain what symptoms people show when they have that emotion.

But they find it difficult to describe how it feels to go through that emotion themselves.

• A person who lacks emotional permanence cannot feel what joy is unless they are happy at the moment.
• If they are sad, they continue feeling sad because they cannot recall how they make themselves happier by remembering the many shades of happiness and joy they felt in the past.

Most such people have an anxious attachment style, borderline personality disorder (BPD), bipolar disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Those with BPD often struggle to recall a loved one when they are not present, or to feel what love is without being assured.

They may keep feeling rejected or abandoned when their friend or partner is not physically around.

Signs of Emotional Permanence Deficit

Overall, people with emotional performance deficits have problems maintaining stable relationships.

1. They seek constant validation and reassurance.
2. They get caught in extreme emotional turmoils.
3. They can’t remember feeling good when being sad.
4. They have difficulty regulating their moods and emotions.
5. They don’t understand how two opposite emotions can coexist.

2 Odd Effects of Emotional Permanence Deficit

A lack of emotional permanence causes two strange things:

1. They cannot understand the simultaneous presence of two opposing emotions.

First, they cannot reconcile with the fact that a person close to them can love them and still be angry with them sometimes.

Perhaps because they drove home instead of getting a cab while drunk. Now, when she’s angry at him, he might think, “She can be angry at me because she doesn’t love me.”

They may find it difficult to revisit or reflect upon the tender emotions that their loved one has for them while they are angry at the person lacking emotional permanence.

2. They repeat the cycle of needing reassurance and feeling the urge for rejection.

Second, these people ultimately wear off the constant validation of the other person’s love which they need in the first place. Their minds begin to reject the reassurances after receiving them a certain number of times.

Now, since they cannot recreate the feeling on their own, they feel unloved once again, and start craving validation again.

This creates a cycle of reassurance and rejection of the other person’s validation.

This behavior can be traced to a fear of abandonment instilled in early childhood. It can create relationship issues like clinginess and neediness to numbness and isolation to avoidance and sabotage.

Did you know about the dark side of ADHD?

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5 Benefits of A Healthy Emotional Permanence

1. Increased emotional stability: By viewing emotions as temporary, individuals are less likely to become overly invested in their feelings, leading to increased emotional stability.
2. Improved relationships: Emotional permanence promotes a more balanced approach to relationships, allowing individuals to communicate effectively and resolve conflicts in a healthy way.
3. Better decision-making: When individuals are not ruled by their emotions, they are better able to make rational decisions based on logic and reason.
4. Increased resilience: The ability to bounce back from life’s challenges is at the heart of emotional resilience, and emotional permanence is a key component of emotional stability and resilience.
5. Better Mental Health: Cultivating emotional permanence can have a positive impact on our mental well-being. When we are good at regulating our emotions, we are less likely to have symptoms of depression and anxiety. Growing it can also build a strong foundation for personal growth and success.

FAQs

Narcissists lack object constancy and whole-object relations, which means they cannot form a stable, realistic, and nuanced view of others.

The lack of these two together makes a narcissist fluctuate between devaluing and idealizing themselves and others.

So, when narcissists are away from their partners, they may feel a total emotional disconnect from them.

A short absence may signal total abandonment to a narcissist. It is not just a phenomenon of out of sight and out of mind, but also out of the heart.

Can Narcissists Love: 10 Brutal Facts On Narcissistic Love

Final Words

Emotional impermanence may make you have false beliefs like “I am unlovable.” And that can stop you from investing in a relationship since you fear you’ll be ultimately abandoned.

But you don’t have to believe everything that your mind conjures up, as they are not always telling you the truth. Because your emotions are temporary, even the insecure ones.

Bring mindfulness, self-reflection, and gratitude into your daily routine.

Finally, it is perfectly fine to seek the advice of a psychologist, so don’t hesitate to reach out whenever it’s hard to handle life’s struggles.

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√ Also Read: Why Is It Hard To Forgive Yourself (Is It Okay Not To Do So)?

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