When I think about relationships, what comes to mind is how paradoxical they can be. While connection gives us comfort, security, and meaning, those same relationships generate anxiety we often cannot bear. In our attempts to control our anxiety, we overstep boundaries, and jump in to manage the lives of others. This happens between parents and children, spouses, friends, or members of our nuclear family.
All human beings function on a spectrum that describes the extent to which we are a differentiated “self.” High differentiation is characterized by thoughtful response above emotional reaction, thinking for ourselves, and allowing others to live their lives free of unwanted intrusion. Low level of differentiation is characterized by emotional reactions to relationship stress, decisions based on feeling above thought, and managing our anxiety about others by jumping in when we are not invited, often thinking for others as if we know what’s best for them.
When anxiety dictates desire to fix someone’s life, we have assumed the role of anxious over-functioner. As relationships tend to be reciprocal, our repeated attempts to over-function in someone’s life inevitably encourages that person to under-function. Another consequence is lost sight of our own life as we have vacated it in order to take up residence in someone else’s. Think of a person in your life whose functioning level worries you to the extent you often become a fixer even if the person never requested repairs. Looking at yourself as objectively as possible, is your goal a reduction of your own anxiety?
Over-functioning creates relationship disharmony because if our anxious focus doesn’t see his “problem” the same way, and doesn’t react to our efforts the way hope, we are destined for disappointment. Dissimilar assessment of the situation causes our anxious focus to be unresponsive to our attempts to jump in and “fix”. Subsequent rejection of our efforts increases our anxiety and promotes relationship stress.
The best way for me to illustrate this is an example from my own life.
I have a younger brother about whom I worried because his life wasn’t headed in a direction I deemed comfortable. He was passive at jobs, showed no interest in college, and inexplicably lagged behind me and our youngest brother in terms of where he “should” have been in his life. At some point he took a restaurant job, learning to cook from one of the chefs. He was a natural in a kitchen, and over time, received more training from a restaurant owner and chef happy to mentor him. Before long my brother was running the kitchen. Because restaurant work is relentless, my brother worked longer hours than I was comfortable with, and I soon blamed his long hours on his lack of culinary arts education, and formal training. When my anxiety peaked, I charged in, and unbeknownst to him, took over his life.
I started by completing and submitting financial aid forms, and an application to a local culinary arts school. This involved hunting down transcripts, and writing an application essay. As all this was happening, my taking control of the situation eased my angst, and pride in my benevolence swelled. In retrospect, I borrowed from his life to increase my sense of “self”.
Before long, my brother received an acceptance letter from a school to which he had never applied, and in an instant, had control of his own life usurped by me. Assuming he saw his life as I did, I believed he was relieved, and I was overcome with relief as my brother was now an unwilling college student. After a couple of semesters, he left school because it created an untenable work/life balance. He continued on with his life while I felt rejected, scorned, and confused about why his education mattered more to me than him.
When he left school, he avoided me for a little while before finally apologizing for not appreciating my efforts. At the time, I perceived him as unappreciative and directionless, therefore reinforcing my original fears about his life. Meanwhile, his sense of self was diminished by self-perceived failure at an endeavor he never chose to pursue. As my anxiety about the next phase of his life increased, our relationship became strained, and I created some emotional distance as a means of controlling my feelings.
Today he works for a major transportation company where he began by collecting tickets, and worked his way to engineer, which pretty much means commuters put their lives in his hands. My pride in his self-driven accomplishment is more authentic, and he is set for his future.
Although my intentions were benevolent, they were guided by anxiety, and a tendency to be guided by feelings before thoughts. When I took over his life, I lost focus of my own, and I will never know what goals of my own I could have achieved during that time. Had I allowed my brother to tend to his own life while I tended to mine, I may have still felt some anxiety, but the joy of our relationship would have been maintained.
Over-functioninging in someone’s life is an attempt to manage our feelings and anxiety. The moment we jump in, we have surrendered our own thoughts, and deprived a persons right to think for himself, therefore simultaneously moving two people on the differentiation of self scale in an undesirable direction.
Think about a person about whom you have been so anxious you felt compelled to over do in his/her life.
Ask yourself if you did so to appease your own anxiety, and if your actions are desired or needed by your anxious focus.
Observe the results. Did your actions increase relationship tension because your “help” did not attain your desired result?
Contemplate the extent to which your need to over-function in someone else’s life has taken your focus away from your own thoughts, your own problems, or your own life. When you do this, you will have realized the undesirable results of misguided good intentions rooted in stress, influenced by anxiety, and guided not by thoughtful response, but by emotional reactivity.
