You don't need anyone, and you have arranged your life so that stays true. Your own money, your own plans, your own way home. People describe you as strong, or guarded, or hard to get to know. Someone once told you they never felt needed by you, and you had no answer. Some nights it is very quiet. I don't love being alone that much.
It sits next to radical self-sufficiency. That page is about tasks, and doing them all yourself. This one is about people, and how close anyone is allowed to get to being counted on.
01
What it looks like
You keep things separate. Your finances, your plans, your bad days. You are generous with other people and take little back. You tell people what happened after it has been handled.
In a relationship you are present and somehow not leaning on it. You may have a reason that sounds like a healthy one. I want it to be a choice. Not something I'm in because I couldn't manage on my own.
And the people nearest you often don't know when things are hard. The people closest to me have no idea how bad it actually is right now.
02
What it protects
Across the rules below, it keeps you out of one position, which is waiting on another person for something you can't do without.
Why that position has to be avoided is the part the behavior can't tell you.
03
The rules it can serve, and what is under each
"Asking creates a debt I don't want to carry."
If relying on someone means owing them, a life with no reliance in it is a life with no debts. Under it, the fear may be that your needs make you too much, and too much gets left. Needing no one may be a way of making sure nobody is ever given that reason.
Read about Burden →"Strong is the only version of me they know."
Relying on someone lets them see you at less than full strength. Under it, the fear may be that if they see you struggle, you lose the only standing you have. Independence may be how the standing is kept.
Read about Strong →Two candidates is a short list. Withdrawing is a close neighbor of this strategy, and that page includes another rule that can sit under pulling away.
04
What it buys and what it costs
It buys a great deal. Nobody can let you down. You can manage, people may admire it, and often no one worries about you.
That last part is also the cost. Under Strong, people may not be able to reach you, so the support that exists may never arrive. Under Burden, everyone may be kept at the distance where they are never needed, and that may be the same distance at which closeness would have to happen.
The people who love you may pay something too. It can be hard to feel that you matter to someone who needs nothing from you.
05
How to tell which rule is under it
If someone helped you and literally nobody would ever know, would you accept?
Think of a bad week you got through alone. Suppose one person had come through for you in it, and no one else would ever have known. If you would have taken it, that is the Strong answer, and what you were guarding was how you are seen. If it is still no, because the debt would exist whether or not anyone knew, that is the Burden answer.
If neither sounds like you, there is not enough to tell yet, and it may be a different rule.
Two things are not this strategy. Some people like their own company and their own way of doing things, feel fine about it, and can lean on someone when they need to. Independence is not the strategy. Being unable to do anything else is. And if people did let you down when you relied on them, the caution was learned from something real. It may only be running now in places where it is no longer called for.
A no is as useful as a yes here. Subtraction is the practice of removing the explanations that don't survive, and looking at what does.
The same thing at the level of tasks and favors is on Radical Self-Sufficiency.
Radical self-sufficiency
Radical self-sufficiency is doing everything yourself and never asking, even when asking would be easier, so that needing someone never comes up.