The Woman Who Shut Down Like an Engine Out of Fuel Whenever Her Husband Traveled

A patient of Walter Riso’s stopped eating, getting dressed, and even getting out of bed every time her husband went on a trip. Not out of sadness or longing, by her own account, but something closer to simply running out of energy.

In ¿Amar o depender? (1999), psychologist Walter Riso describes a phenomenon he carefully distinguishes from ordinary longing or sadness over an absence: the loss of self-efficacy, meaning confidence in your own ability to function without outside help.

A case described almost like a mechanical breakdown

Riso tells the case of a woman who, literally, “shuts down” whenever her husband is traveling. Her metabolism, in the author’s own words, “goes into recess.”

There are days she doesn’t even get out of bed. She doesn’t go out, doesn’t watch television, doesn’t visit her mother, doesn’t receive anyone, and completely neglects her diet and her appearance.

Riso reads this not as longing for the absent husband but as an absence of energy, like a car out of gas. He also rules out depression, though that judgment deserves a cautious reading: not getting up, neglecting meals, and withdrawing from everything are also symptoms of depression, and only a professional assessment can tell one case from the other.

When the patient herself tried to explain it, she’d say something like this: without her husband present, the things she did stopped making sense; she could solve a problem, but she’d rather wait for him to call or handle it when he got back.

Why this isn’t simply “loving him a lot”

Riso carefully separates two things that often get confused: missing someone and losing the capacity to function without that person.

The first is a common emotional experience in any close bond. The second is, in his framework, a symptom that a good part of one’s personal self-efficacy has, over time, been transferred to the other person.

The mechanism he describes works like a self-feeding loop:

• The more you delegate the running of daily life to your partner, the less confidence remains in your own ability to handle it.
• That lower confidence pushes you to delegate even more, until taking charge of almost anything feels impossible without supervision.
• Simple tasks (taking the car to the shop, calling an electrician, booking a ticket) start to feel like serious obstacles, not because of their real difficulty, but from lack of practice solving them without help.

Socrates in the marketplace, two thousand four hundred years earlier

To offer an alternative to this pattern, Riso draws on an anecdote much older than clinical psychology itself.

According to Diogenes Laërtius in his Lives of the Philosophers, Socrates used to look at the many goods on display in the marketplace and say to himself a line Riso recovers as an example of personal freedom:

“How many things I have no need of!”

Socrates, according to Diogenes Laërtius

The idea Riso draws from that anecdote is clear: the fewer essential needs a person has (material or affective), the freer they are, not because they stop enjoying what they have, but because nothing they have becomes a condition for being able to live normally.

Autonomy isn’t the opposite of love

Riso is careful on a point worth underlining: autonomy, as he frames it, isn’t about no longer needing affection or isolating yourself from your partner. It’s about something more specific:

• Being able to handle everyday life (work, errands, small decisions) without depending on the other person being available for it.
• Maintaining interests, activities, and bonds of your own that don’t depend entirely on the other person’s presence.
• Being able to be alone without that meaning you stop functioning, something close to what Erich Fromm describes, from another theoretical tradition, in his idea that learning to be alone is a condition for loving well.

None of these three things, Riso points out, conflicts with loving someone deeply. What does conflict with love, in his framework, is depending so much on the other person’s presence that your own life literally stops in their absence. Between “needing someone a lot” and “not being able to function without that person” there is, as this case shows, a fundamental difference.

What Riso proposes and what research on self-efficacy says

What Riso proposes is that self-efficacy isn’t recovered with a single decision, but through the accumulation of small proofs that you yourself can handle things: taking on errands that used to be fully delegated, keeping up an activity or a friendship of your own, and tolerating the initial discomfort of an absence without immediately filling it with a call.

The idea matches the theory the concept comes from. Albert Bandura (1977) described four sources of self-efficacy expectations: performance accomplishments (having done something yourself), vicarious experience (seeing others do it), verbal persuasion, and physiological state. Of the four, he singled out one’s own accomplishments as the most powerful, because they rest on the direct experience of mastery.

Read from there, the patient’s case describes the reverse process: every delegated errand is a performance accomplishment that never happens, and the underlying belief (“I’m not capable of taking care of myself”) is left without evidence against it. None of this solves the problem all at once, and in cases like this, support from a professional makes the difference.

Sources

• Riso, W. (1999). ¿Amar o depender?. Norma.
• Diogenes Laërtius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, II, 25.
• Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191-215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191