My parents met in a small Seventh-day Adventist hospital in Benghazi around 1960. They got married about a year later. Dad had promised Mom that they’d go back to Lebanon to visit annually. But this didn’t happen due to the increasing fighting, which eventually led to the civil war around 1975. What my parents were able to do was bring together the American culture of independence with the Lebanese culture of community. That lived tension later helped me notice something larger about the culture I grew up in.

In my home country of the USA, I notice that independence is a hypertrophied muscle. It pulls hard toward self-sufficiency, spontaneous free will action, and one’s personal choices; it has crippled us.  Like a spinal torsion that develops after nerve injury, we are lopsided and hurting. When a muscle overdevelops without balance, it no longer strengthens—it distorts. Independence grew, and its growth spanned roughly 200 years of our American history, with major acceleration after WWII and cultural saturation by the late 20th century. It began as survival independence, but became ideological independence, then moralized independence, and finally identity-level autonomy. In this progression, something essential quietly slipped away. And now, with our great gain, we have great loss.

Our human condition is one that inherently wants to believe that we are powerful in our own selves. This is a spiritual condition as well, where we believe, even though often unsaid to our own inner selves, that we are our own gods. Not explicitly, but functionally, this is what we come to believe. That we have power apart from. We begin to trust our own capacity more than our need. We confuse autonomy with safety. We believe that power lives primarily within us.

This is where independence feeds into human weakness. Not because independence itself is wrong, but because the human heart is quick to translate capability into self-sufficiency. And self-sufficiency easily becomes self-dependence. We begin to live as though we are the source rather than the recipient.

Over time, this posture shapes our inner narrative:

And eventually, without realizing it, we crown ourselves as our own small gods. And we lose. We lose in this false belief. We lose the immense benefits that come from considering the collective, from nurturing it, and from feeding into it intentionally.

This isn’t arrogance in the obvious sense. It often looks responsible. Functional. Even admirable. But it is costly. Because when power is located primarily in the self, we turn into a façade. Trust becomes conditional. Surrender feels inefficient. When this posture becomes widespread, it no longer remains personal—it becomes cultural. And we practice life as a transactional culture.

The great loss of independence is not community or guidance—it is dependence itself.

Because this distortion is learned internally, it must also be undone internally. Self-care includes an intentional redirection, a turning toward the opposite direction of our cultural instincts. Strength is found in weakness. Life is found in surrender. Freedom is found not in autonomy, but in relationship. And real maturity is not the absence of need. It is the willingness to acknowledge it.

I’ve watched my parents do this when they brought fourteen of my Lebanese cousins out of the war to live with us. They didn’t think, “My private space is being infringed on! We can’t cohabitate in such a small space. My freedom is seriously being suffocated.” I’ve seen my patients do this too in the way they are willing to attend groups for mental health, such as NAMI. Some even run peer-to-peer groups. I’ve seen this when my patients come to clinic, belly side up, willing to learn, in a condition of vulnerability.

The invitation is not to reject independence, but to hold it humbly. To recognize that competence does not negate dependence, and agency does not replace grace. We were never meant to be self-sustaining systems. We were meant to be upheld.

Perhaps the truest form of freedom is not becoming our own gods, but remembering that we never were.

Self-Care Tip: Practice dependence this week—join a group, share a meal, ask for help. Get you community!