The Hidden Dynamic In Over-functioning: When Childhood Survival Becomes Adult Power Imbalance

Emotional Sovereignty and Dissolving Contempt for Our Own Needs

Over-functioning is a survival strategy many women developed while growing up with emotionally immature, unavailable, or overwhelmed mothers. For parentified daughters healing the Mother Wound, this pattern becomes deeply ingrained because it once ensured belonging, safety, or emotional survival. It is also deeply reinforced in society that women are both idealized for their resilience yet simultaneously dismissed for it.

Over-functioning can be one of the most deeply entrenched patterns we face in the healing process. There can be resistance internally within us (through misplaced guilt and shame) for advocating for ourselves in relationships as well as resistance from the people around us, who may misperceive our healthy lack of over-functioning as emotional abandonment of them, because it asks them to be more sovereign and responsible as well.

Over-functioning is multi-layered. We don’t heal it all at once. It evolves over time, from early awareness to more advanced stages of emotional sovereignty.

What Over-Functioning Looks Like

Over-functioning often shows up as automatically assuming the lead in the relationship in various ways (including emotionally, practically, or relationally) without consciously choosing to do so.

After more than a decade of coaching women, I see two primary sources of this pattern:

1. Nervous system conditioning
   Control feels like safety in the body. Taking responsibility, managing people or situations, and anticipating others’ needs becomes regulating. It feels familiar, even calming.
2. Unconscious childhood beliefs
   Beliefs such as:

• If I don’t manage this, everything will fall apart.
• If I don’t give more, I’ll be invisible.
• I’m a good person when I put others first.
• I don’t need that much; they need more than I do.

These beliefs are not truths but rather they are distortions formed in childhood based on real lived experiences. And they hold somatic memories of when NOT over-functioning was actually dangerous.

How the Pattern Begins

A mother who is depressed, emotionally immature or unavailable cannot reliably attune to her daughter’s emotional needs. For some mothers, a child’s needs can be deeply triggering, especially if their own needs were met with contempt in childhood. The mother does not have a template for others meeting her own needs with warmth and love. In response to the trigger, she will project the same hostility she feels towards herself, towards her daughter as well. For some mothers who are more severely dysfunctional, they may unconsciously take some pleasure in seeing her daughter’s needs go unmet in a distorted sense of justice for what she went through in her own childhood. This keeps the mother’s own grief and rage about her childhood at a distance as she displaces it onto the daughter through a process called projective identification.

Unmet emotional needs often include:

• Unconditional positive regard
• Reassurance when scared, sad, or confused
• Being corrected with kindness rather than shame
• Encouragement and affirmation without strings attached

Instead, the child may experience:

• Harsh or cruel dismissal when bringing attention to themselves
• Shaming, mocking, or humiliation when asking for help or when in distress
• Being perceived as manipulative or demanding for having developmentally-appropriate emotional needs

Emotionally immature parents often see children as miniature adults, projecting adult motives or even misreading manipulative mendacity from innocent childhood behavior. This creates impossible expectations, profound confusion and emotional despair in the child.

“Relied Upon Yet Resented”

Emotionally immature parents rely on their children yet resent them at the same time. They benefit from the child’s built-in deference and attachment to them. They feel bolstered by the power dynamic of being the parent and having power over someone else. Yet they resent the child’s needs as a source of irritation and inconvenience to them. They tend to see the child as a competitor rather than as an innocent being naturally entitled and reliant on their support.

As parentified children, we may feel special or important for being relied upon. That role offers crumbs of affirmation. But it is conditional: we are valued for what we give, not for who we are. Being seen as an extension of the parent means we are more like an object than a person to them. We see our value based upon what we do for them, how tightly we comply, and through how well we regulate their emotions based on our obedient behaviors. This is a brilliant and effective survival mechanism in an otherwise bleak and dehumanizing emotional landscape, yet it sets us up for this asymetrical relational style in adulthood.

When we were children and felt sad, needy, confused, angry, or overwhelmed, we were rejected or punished. So we learn to hide our needs and focus on others instead. Self-erasure leads to regulation and safety because the parent could not be relied upon for support in those areas. The despair and desperation of the cumulative years of emotional abandonment get suppressed, and over-functioning functions like a “cap” that keeps those painful feelings at bay.

This creates an impossible double bind: the child must suppress their humanity to preserve attachment which they need for survival. Once we’re adults, there’s a reservoir of pain in deep storage that at some point needs retrieval and empathic processing, ideally with a mental health professional. This processing can happen slowly and gradually, ideally in conjunction with new experiences of receiving and relating from our growing sense of self-respect and sovereignty that we could not successfully develop in childhood.

How the Adult Pattern Manifests

In adulthood, we often remain disconnected from our needs because that part of development was interrupted. As young women, in our early friendships and romantic relationships we still play out this dynamic with proficiency. As we get older we see it and realize the immense cost to overfunctioning on all levels: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Overall it’s a very exhausting and draining way to live. Some of us have watched our mothers, grandmothers, aunts play out this dynamic until their deaths. It seems normal and inevitable when we look around and see it everywhere, from popular culture to right there in our own households and communities.

In adulthood, giving feels powerful, regulating, and familiar. Female giving is also reinforced in the larger cultural atmosphere of patriarchy that sees female empathy as an entitled, invisible resource disconnected from our humanity.  Because of this, the act of receiving can trigger anxiety, shame, or an urgent need to reciprocate. We may not know how to receive calmly, joyfully, or without questioning our worth. Our identity has to shift to accommodate this new capacity. Like a new muscle it takes time to develop and strengthen, and it feels very uncomfortable and scary in the beginning as it touches on our survival template from the earliest days of our lives.

Symptoms of Chronic Over-Functioning

• Assuming the lead in situations and in relationships without being asked
• Assuming you know more than the other person and so give more than they do
• Feeling falsely obligated or compelled to intervene in other people’s struggles
• Self-silencing when disrespected, believing this is “taking the high road”
• Compassion collapsing into self-erasure, which dovetails into resentment
• Excessive deference that communicates availability to be used
• Equating love with self-sacrifice
• Avoidance of conflict or repair
• Disproportionate enthusiasm, gratitude, or empathy

Over-functioning often acts like a dog whistle to under-functioners, narcissistic, or exploitative people. It tells them that you are willing to be used, inconvenienced and give to your own detriment. Healthier people, by contrast, may feel subtly repelled by exaggerated eagerness or self-sacrifice because it signals a lack of self-esteem and self-containment. Healthy people sense that there’s a subtle unspoken agenda underlying the premature disproportionate eagerness to give and that receiving from you will come with a debt of resentment that will surface at a later time.

The Hidden Power Dynamic at the core of Over-functioning

Over-functioning is the unconscious projection of a parent-child dynamic onto adult relationships.

We were treated like adults as children, so we learned to inflate into a parental role. We also witnessed our parents’ pain and faults and so felt inflated empathy towards them, using that empathic narrative as a shield against facing our own pain of unmet needs. In adulthood, we may unconsciously perform as the parent we wished we had (generous, empathic, attentive, attentive) while expecting others to be less capable or less mature.

This is not love. It is conditioning.

Love was transactional in childhood if you grew up as a parentified daughter. Your psychological capacity was hijacked in service to emotionally immature adults in exchange for crumbs of support. You survived on emotional fumes of connection and had no choice but to be habituated to receiving very little and feeling hostile to your own needs as a matter of course. That is emotional deprivation.

You felt powerful when you were giving and powerless when needing. It was not safe to be direct about your needs so you had to internally disavow them and understandably get them met through maneuvering of some kind. Articulating your needs or pain directly would invite attack, humiliation or violence form the parent, so understandably it had to go underground.

In adulthood, healthy adults resist this power dynamic of over-giving in people who over-function because it subtly communicates a power imbalance; that we see them as less capable and ourselves as more responsible than them. The asymmetry is more felt than explicitly communicated. In this way, we end up repelling the more reciprocal relationships that we crave.

The Shadow Side

In childhood, over-functioning was adaptive and innocent. In adulthood, it can become a subtle form of manipulation because it’s an attempt to regulate one’s own safety by managing others’ emotional states. In other words, when you over-function you are attempting to maneuver the other person into a positive feeling-state that keeps you regulated and feeling in control.

Underneath, resentment often builds:

• When others don’t reciprocate the level of care and emotional labor you give
• When they become human, stuck, complex or unavailable
• When they push back or resist your leadership in their lives or in situations
• When your unspoken agenda for harmony isn’t met
• When others don’t reciprocate in the specific ways in which you’ve been too afraid to ask for explicitly and directly (“giving-to-get”)

This resentment is real and valid, but it doesn’t entirely belong to where we place it. It’s easy to think that the fault lies with the person who is under-functioning or failing to reciprocate, who doesn’t adequately appreciate you or see the value you offer them. But they are simply echoing back to you the deeper beliefs you embodied in the dynamic. This is not to blame ourselves for the pattern but to see that we actually hold a lot of power to interrupt this and to initiate new dynamics that do foster equality and reciprocity. The responsibility and power belongs in us, not in the other person. This is actually very good news.

In a nutshell: Those who under-function in our adult lives are often responding to the unconscious relational cues we learned how to give.

Where the Resentment Actually Belongs

The original pain that is driving the over-functioning pattern and holds the key to healing it is the resentment toward parents who used us, saw us as an extension of themselves and denied our humanity. The key is to make a safe, empathic space in yourself to express the rage, grief and shock at how deeply you were neglected, how alone and emotionally abandoned you were, how it was a double-bind, a battle that was unwinnable, and the powerlessness of having to be strong way too soon. Your anger about what you endured is the huge key to getting out of this confining pattern. This may also require for some, viewing anger in a new light, especially if you had raging parents who taught you anger is always destructive. As adults we can embrace healthy anger as an essential ally in developing and embodying self-respect and self-worth.

Healing the Pattern

Healing requires grieving what actually happened to you in your childhood, without minimizing it or centering our parents’ trauma. The grief has layers to it and takes time to process. But with each layer you move through, you reclaim more of yourself, your dignity, your self-respect and a more reality-based sense of your worth and value. This is liberating. These micro-shifts are the cumulative building blocks needed to interrupt over-functioning bit by bit.

The healing includes things like:

• Feeling healthy rage on behalf of the child who was used, dehumanized, dismissed
• Grieving the contempt directed at your normal, natural needs as an innocent child
• Practicing receiving without rushing to reciprocate right away
• Managing the fearful somatic responses that arise in the body when you don’t over-function
• Taking in the fact that people WANT to give to you and that you are honoring them by receiving fully
• Filling that “mother gap” of empathy you needed from within yourself as the “inner mother”
• Letting others have their own challenges without fixing them or managing their issues
• Learning how to be direct about needs and limits without shame or guilt
• Re-defining what love means in a reciprocal, adult-to-adult paradigm (not a parental one)
• Grieving that you didn’t get to have an actual childhood in which you could be carefree, need without fear, receive without self-consciousness, and simply exist without background terror.

Loving someone is not only about being kind and generous, it is also being clear, honest, and self-respecting. The latter communicates that we love ourselves first and foremost and that is the imperative foundation for a mature, robust love for the other person.

The Fear Beneath the Pattern

Many women fear that if they stop over-functioning, they will be alone and that the structures of their life will collapse in a devastating fashion. That was true in childhood. You were coerced and burdened into being a supportive pillar of your family at too young an age. However, it is NOT true now. What you fear most has already happened. You are not a child anymore and you survived it.

In the healing process it is very liberating and deeply regulating to see that you are NOT necessarily what’s holding everything together. And that you have some degree of choice in the matter if you are. Our nervous systems need repeated experiences of pulling back into balance (not over-functioning) and seeing that the world does not end.

Emotional Sovereignty: Connected-Yet-Contained

Healing over-functioning is not withdrawal or coldness although it will FEEL like that in the beginning when your relational dynamics come back into proportion in the adult context of your present life. It is learning the skill of emotional containment, which is honoring your needs while staying appropriately engaged within the actual contours of an adult relationship.

This is how equal relationships form. You are no longer required to earn your place by disappearing.

Collectively, we are moving from a time of top-down authority to one of relational accountability.

Some relationships are dissolving under the pressure of this collective shift and some are strengthening. Either way, I encourage you to be radically courageous and use this time to deepen your relational integrity, capacity to be accountable and in alignment with your true self who is now emerging from the traumatic adaptations due to childhood trauma. Healing the Mother Wound is a sacred path that is doing deep restructuring work to our own identities, culture and consequently, how our communities and families organize and relate to one another. This is such a powerful time of upheaval and collective change to be a part of.

The spiritual opportunity in healing the pattern of over-functioning

At deeper levels, as we continue to advance on the path, we can realize on a somatic and existential level that we actually have very little control over how life unfolds, including little control over people, situations, outcomes. And rather than see this as cause for panic, this is can actually bring deep levels of peace and joy.

We are not as powerful as we thought and this is not an ego-blow but a profound relief. This realization can open us up to realize on a profound level that we are actually receiving all the time, in each moment in multiple ways. Life itself is what is supporting, directing, sustaining and benevolently honoring us in each moment.

Once our nervous system has enough margin to perceive this, it can physically feel like going to a new level in a video game, in which the landscape is new and so are your superpowers, one of which is finally having the direct experience of receiving, savoring and enjoying life, especially the most mundane and ordinary moments.

Tapping into this realization can be sobering, humbling and exhilarating. The “used, unseen child” within us finally gets to feel supported, deserving and deeply cherished, not as a fluke but more broadly as a way of life. As we do this inner work, our outer relationships slowly start to mirror this empowered balance back to us. It’s not euphoric or ecstatic, but a more quiet, gentle new way of being.

As we discover and embody our humanity by letting go of over-functioning and deepening our capacity to receive, we are reclaiming our place in the larger human family and within Life itself. Every tiny, unglamorous step we take in this direction matters greatly.

image credit: Unsplash

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