People fundamentally misunderstand the nature of relationships. As an initial point, the fact that most of you reading this, when you came across the term “relationship,” immediately thought I was referring to a romantic one. To be “in a relationship” is so often short-hand for romantic intimacy; it obscures, if not completely makes opaque, the reality that at no time in our lives are we ever not in a relationship of some kind. Rather than being individuals who engage in relationships, we are relational beings who engage in perspective-making, or what we simplistically refer to as individuality.
There are many avenues of inquiry this framing can go down, but as this was inspired by a particular concept called “overfunctioning” that I was introduced to by a client, I’m going to bring the focus to what seeing us as relational beings first can help with.
To start, we are biological creatures. That should come as no shock to anyone. Further, we are biological creatures in every way, from the very top of our heads to the soles of our feet. Contrary to how many people, including most mental health professionals, believe, biological evolution didn’t begin at the neck and go down; it is how our brains and nervous systems evolved as well. Our biological nature is about resource management, which includes everything that involves the expenditure of energy, including behaviors, and that increasingly sought-after resource of attention.
Our brain/body system(s) work by taking from the past to frame our present in preparation for the future. That means we are constantly working at predicting what is likely to be needed for an imagined future. Relationships, with every person we encounter and every object we engage with, are the interactional spaces through which we act on those predictions. We do this through the perspective-making tool we call consciousness, and we cannot mind-read others. This is why dialogue is so important, and humility is such a powerful value.
With that set up, a claim about a relationship, made by one person in it and never checked with the other, is a prediction. It is a perspective. It is not a carefully constructed assessment. Which brings us to “overfunctioning,” as most popular writing misses the difference, and the miss tells us something about how therapy has come to think about people.
The Sign That Isn’t One
Roxy Zarrabi’s Psychology Today piece, 7 Signs of Overfunctioning in a Relationship, seeks to explain the concept, but does so through a common mistake in mental health therapy. Overfunctioning, she writes, is a dynamic in which one partner carries most of the daily responsibilities, starts the hard conversations, and tries to fix whatever goes wrong. To determine whether this is happening, a person only has to consider the signs. The first? You assume that if you take a break, everything at home will fall apart.
Look at what kind of statement that is. It is a forecast. A prediction. It concerns a future that has not happened. Further, it concerns a partner who has not been consulted, and a household whose resilience has not been tested. Zarrabi reads it as evidence of an unequal mental load. It may be. Perhaps. It may also be nothing of the kind, and nothing in the internal sign lets anyone tell.
A cognitive therapist would call the thought catastrophizing and set about helping the client challenge, if not outright dispute, the unhelpful simplicity of it. That is a start, but disputation treats the thought as a reasoning error, a glitch to be corrected. This thought is not a glitch. It is doing specific, functional work.
A Prediction Protected From Its Own Test
Andy Clark and Karl Friston, among others, describe the brain as a prediction engine. We do not take in the present and then decide what to do about it. We draw on the past to interpret the present and prepare for the future, with the body’s resources as the budget being managed. Predictions get revised when the world contradicts them.
There is a second way to keep a prediction intact, though, and it is the one that matters here. You can act so that the contradiction never arrives.
The person who believes everything will collapse without them does not take a break. Without a break, nothing collapses. Every ordinary day of holding it all together counts as one more confirmation. The belief is sealed off from the only evidence that could change it, and it is sealed by the behavior it produces.
Let’s consider the thinking from a different perspective, one more aligned with biology. Steven Hayes and his colleagues built Acceptance and Commitment Therapy on a simple question: not whether a thought is true, but what it serves. Function, in that tradition, is read from consequences. So consider what the catastrophizing prediction, held and acted on, keeps in place:
One person stays indispensable.
Decisions keep routing through that person.
The partner’s contributions are discounted before they are made.
None of this is an accusation about the person holding this belief. The person holding the belief may want none of these outcomes and may be exhausted by all of them. Function describes what a pattern maintains, not what anyone intends. People, including therapists, spend entirely too much time projecting the fantasy of their mind-reading skills to create the intent they don’t actually have access to from other people. The functional question never gets asked until it becomes something to bully people with.
The pattern that emerges has two authors. The partner who steps back, who waits to be asked, who does a task poorly once and is relieved of it forever, is also behaving in a way that has consequences. Murray Bowen saw this decades ago. In his family systems theory, overfunctioning and underfunctioning are reciprocal positions, each one sustaining the other, and the overfunctioner’s activity is in large part a way of managing anxiety. Doing the thing yourself is quicker than sitting with the feeling of it not being done, or, as is often the case, not being done in the way personally desired.
The Auditor Self
Zarrabi does acknowledge that it “takes two people to create this dynamic.” Then the article proceeds as though it takes one. All seven signs she declares as evidence for “overfunctioning” are internal states of a single partner. Every reflective question is addressed to that partner. The remedy is to weigh what the role costs against what it provides, state your boundaries, and renegotiate the tasks.
However, each of those steps assumes an individual self standing outside the relationship with a clipboard, checking agreed-upon boxes. That self does not exist. Nor, likely, do the boxes.
Brian Lowery argues in Selfless that the self is made in relationships. It sits, like a spider permanently attached to a web, at the intersection of them. We are individuals within a collective, not free agents who inspect the available groups and choose which to join. If Lowery is right, there is no outside position from which to audit. The person tallying costs and benefits was formed by this relationship, by the household they grew up in, and by a long cultural education in who is supposed to notice that the fridge is empty. The article nods at this when it mentions caregivers. Then it hands the reader a ledger for an individual to fill out.
Let’s be clear about where this comes from. It is not one author’s lapse. Therapy is organized around the individual: the individual client, the individual diagnosis, the individual hour. A field built that way will keep describing relationships as something a self has, rather than something a self is made of. The seven-signs checklist is simply what that assumption looks like in public. There are numerous other examples of this, from the way diagnoses work, to the victimization mentality so many therapists perpetuate. If the individual self is a separate entity from the systems, then the false dichotomy of oppressor/oppressed is easy to fall into.
Comfortably Uncomfortable
I use a phrase with clients: comfortably uncomfortable.
Looking for a life of ease, of an absence in disomfort, is a fantasy along the lines of the concept of infinity. The human mind doesn’t actually comprehend it, but it’s a useful tool for promoting certain behaviors, and it’s based on the idea that with enough repetition of a certain thing (numbers for infinity, or a removal of “triggers” for ease), the iteration reaches a perfect state. I’m not a mathematician so the analogy is likely breaking down at some point here, but the idea that we must simply remove what makes us uncomfortable as a recipe for a mentally healthy life is as old as the mythologies of Eden and the slithery quality of knowledge ruining a good day of blessed ignorance. Within a cause/effect existence, with brains built on predictive processing and associations, the idea that “triggers” will ever go away has as much weight as the fig leaves hiding genitals from an omnipresent deity.
The phrase points to willingness, which is not the same as resignation. In ACT, willingness means staying open to discomfort because something you care about is on the other side of it. That gives two questions to ask in place of the ledger with its boxes to check, and both partners have to answer them:
What does this arrangement keep in place, and for whom?
What discomfort is each of us willing to carry, for the sake of what we care about?
The second question depends on a point people often miss. A value can stay constant while the behavior that serves it changes. Someone who cares about a home where people are looked after has usually expressed that by doing the looking after. With this particular partner, in this particular dynamic, the same value may be better served by letting dinner be made differently, later, and subjectively worse, and by feeling the anxiety of that without stepping in. The partner serves the same value by acting before being asked and by tolerating being bad at something for a while.
What comes out of that conversation is decided by the people in it. An uneven division of labor can be workable. An even one can be miserable. The measure is whether the arrangement serves what they both care about, and whether each can live inside it with eyes open. The need for dialogue that goes beyond vague declarations to concrete examples and actions should be an obvious requirement here, but I find that it needs to be brought up often.
When the Load Is Real
There is a strong objection to what has been said so far, and it deserves awareness.
Sometimes things do fall apart. Allison Daminger’s interviews with couples found that the cognitive side of household labor (anticipating needs, identifying options, deciding, and monitoring the results) falls disproportionately on women, with anticipation and monitoring the most lopsided. Her sample was small and mostly college-educated, but the finding matches a great deal of other work. For many people, the first sign is the boxes of frustration being checked, resulting in vague but meaningful declarations of catastrophizing.
There’s a worse example as well. “That’s just your perception” is exactly what a partner avoiding the work would say. An argument that treats the load as a story someone is telling themselves hands that partner a weapon.
With that in mind, I want to be as clear as possible. I am not saying the prediction, merely by its uterrance, is false. I am saying that a prediction held privately cannot tell the accurate case from the self-perpetuating one. Only exposure to the relationship can. Take a break. Say the forecast out loud to the person it concerns. If the house does fall apart, and the partner shrugs, that is real information, and it is information no list of internal signs could have supplied.
This is why, when I work with the, typically, male side of the relationship, we focus on taking the non-concrete declarations, and start asking for clarification. The encouragement is to move away from the social misogyny of “women are irrational” — which is also completely false anyway — and towards creating a mutual space of open, clear communication. One that is based on an acceptance of difference in perspective-taking, rather than the destructive quality that mind-reading typically entails.
Two limits should be noted here. Partners rarely have equal power to decide. Money, children, and expectation all bear on what someone is “willing” to live with, and willingness under constraint is not willingness. And the couple is not a closed system. By Lowery’s own account, the people deciding were shaped by relationships far beyond this one. Those examples, and the history of experience that created the past of which the present is being judged by in preparation for an imagined futgure, are all in the room too.
What the Checklist Costs
We need to move beyond checklists to a recognition of the embedded relational reality within which we are constantly moving within. None of us choose whether to be in relationship, only what boundaries are being established by our actions. When a relational pattern is handed to one person as a checklist, three things follow, and all of them are unhelpful: She leaves with a diagnosis of herself; Her partner leaves with nothing to do; And the prediction at the center of it all, that everything depends on her, goes on untested. This only prolongs needless suffering.
The loss is a recognition of a future that hasn’t been engaged in yet, and a present that is far more full of possibility than our stories would have us believe. A pattern two people make can only be changed by two people, and it can only be seen once it is put between them.
Ask questions. Listen with humility. Build something new.
Sources:
Zarrabi, R. (2024). 7 Signs of Overfunctioning in a Relationship. Psychology Today.
Lowery, B. (2023). Selfless: The Social Creation of “You.” Harper.
Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change (2nd ed.). Guilford.
Kerr, M. E., & Bowen, M. (1988). Family Evaluation. Norton.
Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press.
Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138.
Daminger, A. (2019). The cognitive dimension of household labor. American Sociological Review, 84(4), 609–633.
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