How to Stop Over-functioning in Your Relationships

Do you feel like you are constantly responsible for everyone? Your partner, family, friends, children? Do you feel like you are constantly managing and anticipating everyone’s needs to ensure they’re all happy? Are you always the one to try to resolve conflict first?

These are all examples of over-functioning in relationships. While some may think this is what love ‘should’ look like, it often causes exhaustion and burnout.

What Over-functioning Looks Like

Over-functioning is simultaneously trying to support other people while ignoring your own self-care. It means ignoring your needs by focusing solely on others. It often looks like:

• Feeling like you need to be responsible for everyone else's comfort

• Constantly feeling the need to apologize

• The need to over-explain your feelings

• Avoiding asking for help

• Becoming resentful when others do not reciprocate

• Gauging other people’s emotions before expressing yourself

• Fear of being seen as needy, selfish or difficult

There is a thin line between supporting your loved ones and over-exerting yourself. One side of the line is healthy empathy and attachment, the other is over-functioning.

Where Over-functioning Comes From

Over-functioning is a result of trying to please everyone around us. You likely have heard the term ‘people-pleaser’ before, which is where individuals go above and beyond the typical caring behavior in relationships. While caring for your loved ones is important, there is a very fine line between giving too much and appropriately supporting your loved ones.

In a sense, managing everyone’s emotions is a form of control as you are changing your responses and needs based on what you perceive will make them happy. It’s easy to think if you are constantly caring for others, there is no way they could resent or abandon you! It makes you feel like you can control other’s opinions of you. This control provides emotional safety.

This need for control likely comes from a fear of rejection or abandonment. Individuals feel the need to manage others emotions so they can avoid being left behind: if you are needed you won’t be abandoned. But this has a cost over time.

The Toll Over-functioning Can Take

You only have so much to give before you need to fill your own cup. Constantly catering to everyone else's needs leaves no time for you to focus on your own. With needs unmet, you become emotionally burnt out. When you reach this point of exhaustion, and your partner does not notice, the resentment that has been lingering continues to grow. Because you give so much, the bar for care is set unrealistically high. When others care for you, it may not feel like they are reciprocating as they are not over-functioning the same way you are. This builds resentment. Your needs are being ignored and constantly unmet. You over-function to make people love you, when in reality it is fostering resentment and not meeting your needs.

How to Stop Over-functioning

It is hard to stop over-functioning as ‘caring less’ feels like cold and detached behavior. Many of us fear it will make our partners feel unloved. But there is a way to provide care and be empathetic without over-exerting yourself.

1. Prevention versus Helping

When rescuing, fixing or anticipating other needs ask yourself: am I helping the situation or am I preventing discomfort. Remember that over-function serves a function: it is not some random behavior that we exert for no reason. Pausing to ask the purpose of our actions helps us understand why we are acting that way, and helps us take the most appropriate course of action.

2. Practice Small Acts of Authenticity

Try saying what you really want in small doses. For example, if a coffee shop messes up your order- politely ask them to make the changes you want instead of drinking a coffee you didn’t order. Small acts of meeting your needs builds confidence.

3. Allow Others to Carry Emotional Weight

You are not the only person responsible for bearing everyone’s emotional weight. Instead of over-explaining boundaries or trying to micromanage yours and others emotions, let others process and deal with emotions on their own. Others are capable of coping with emotions without your managing.

4. Learn to Receive

Your needs are just as important as others. Instead of minimizing your needs to focus on others, accept help when people offer. Furthermore, notice when you feel discomfort when others are helping. We often think others helping us makes us weak because it feels unsafe. But having needs does not make you a burden, it shows you are human. 

When you stop over-functioning, you foster a healthier relationship. Individuals who stop over-functioning find they:

• Do not have to ‘earn’ rest

• Can express disappointment honestly, and have productive conversation with their partner

• Silence feels less threatening

• Experience bidirectional care

• Can feel emotions in the present instead of intellectualizing or ignoring them

Over-functioning in an exhaustive behavior. If you need support breaking the cycle, contact us at 416-949-9878 or info@georgetowncouplestherapy.com.