Review of Walter Riso's book: Love and depend

Love and Depend is one of the most popular books written by Walter Riso.

About Walter Riso:
Walter Riso is a popular Argentinean writer and psychologist, born in Spain, and known for many books related mostly to couple relationships. In his first years, he worked as a psychological therapist, but nowadays he is dedicated as a college teacher and lecturer.

About the book:
The book consists in three chapters: I) Understanding dependency, II) Preventing dependency and III) Overcoming dependency. The first part of the book gives us some definitions about depedency, clues to identify it and psychological reasons that justify this behavior.The second chapter is a proposal of a healthy way of life that garantee independency and keep on loving at the same time. The third chapter assumes that the person has recognized that is living into a problematic relationship and he or she has the objective to stop the situation of dependence.


My impression:
The author employs a very simple language, avoiding technical vocabulary, and when using it, he explains psychological terms using examples of real life. All along the book, he presents many cases of people with this kind of problematic that he had as patients when he was a psychologist. Before reading this book, I never considered the existence of this mental disease. I am going to assume that you don't know anything about the topic, so here is the situation...
¿What is emotional dependency?
It is represented by a person with low self esteem unable to reach a healthy love relationship, with an addiction for affection. Thess people are characterized for being jealous, with no goals or life objectives, very sensitive to other people comments and with unstable feelings.

The book is useful as a tool for self diagnostic and for a meticulous examination of our partner's behavior and ours as well. The difficulty of identifying the disease is that it can be confused with excess of love, but you can realize that in the cases of attachment, the affected person is always unsatisfied, he or she feels that is not receiving enough and is always demanding proves of love.
At the other side, dependent people generally are paired with persons with really high self esteem, with high neccesities to be praised, possesive and even violent.
Reading "Love and depend", it will come to your mind the inevitable question ¿Am I dependent?
Fortunately, I don't feel that way in my relationship, but one can recognize the problem between our relatives and friends, and help them to wake from this bad dream called emotional dependency.