Interdependence & Human Growth

Growth without normalisation

Interdependence & Human Growth

Independence is overrated. Interdependence is human.

Autonomy is not independence

For Rogers, autonomy meant a person finding and trusting their own direction rather than depending on external authority to supply it. Maslow listed autonomy among the qualities of the self-actualising people he studied. Neither, read carefully, meant physical self-sufficiency. Both, read through the culture they wrote in, have often been heard that way.

A disabled person may rely on care, equipment, healthcare, family, technology, transport and communication support – while still having substantial psychological authorship over their life. They decide what matters, what they want, who they are and what their support is for. That is autonomy. It does not require doing things alone.

So the humanistic goal is not “need nobody”. It may be:

Have enough agency and relational safety that need does not erase selfhood.

Where this idea comes from

Interdependence is a central principle in disability justice writing and organising, which has argued that the ideal of the self-sufficient individual is both inaccurate and harmful, and that mutual support is how all people actually live. Psychoanalytic and object-relations thinkers reached a related conclusion from a different direction: D. W. Winnicott described development as a movement from dependence toward relative independence, never toward complete independence. (See Object Relations and Disability.) Read alongside these, humanistic autonomy becomes a question about authorship, not about how much help a person receives.

How the independence ideal misreads disabled clients

• Growth as independence + accepting more support → progress read as regression. A client who finally accepts a carer may be growing, not giving up.
• Self-reliance as health + hyper-independence → a costly survival strategy praised as strength. Refusing help can be a condition of worth in disguise.
• Dependence as weakness + caring relationships → reciprocity overlooked. Disabled people give as well as receive; support relationships run in both directions.
• Autonomy as doing + autonomy as deciding → choice located in the wrong place. Directing one’s own care is a sophisticated form of autonomy, not its absence.

In the therapy room

• Ask who decides, not only who does: where does the client have authorship over their support?
• Explore what independence has meant in the client’s history – and what it has cost.
• Notice your own reactions when a client chooses more support. Is that relief, or disappointment?
• Name reciprocity: what does the client give to the people who support them, and to others?

Evidence and status

• Documented: autonomy in Rogers (1951, 1961) and in Maslow’s description of self-actualising people (1954); Winnicott’s developmental account of dependence; interdependence as a principle in disability justice writing.
• This site’s synthesis: the distinction between authorship and self-sufficiency as applied to humanistic therapy, the four misreadings, the composite voices and the exchange.

If none of this fits – if independence is something you genuinely value and want to protect – that is your call to make. Interdependence is not a rule either; it is a description of what is already true.

One question to carry: where in your life do you have the most say over the help you receive – and where do you have the least?