Cheryl's Clinical Reflection: For the One Who Holds it All Together

I have made it a habit to write (with AI's help in polishing my language). To write about the moments in therapy that move me, that remind me why I do the work I do, and how change is often subtle before it becomes visible. 

This is one such story — of a man who spent fifty years carrying the weight of a world since he was eight. Let's call him Sherlock. 

When he first came to therapy 3 years ago, he was trapped in a painful marriage to a partner struggling with substance addiction. For decades he tried what he could — support, couple’s therapy, individual therapy. But nothing was received. Instead, the relationship quietly drained him. Bills piled up. Guilt became his constant companion. The thought of divorce felt unthinkable, not because he still had hope, but because it felt like betrayal. To leave was to fail. To stay was to drown.

Eventually, he did leave. The divorce was excruciating — not because it was contentious, but because it forced him to face himself, a different self. When his ex-wife later passed away in a car accident two years after the divorce, he carried a new layer of guilt: Could he have saved her if he hadn't left? Did she commit suicide? He sat with those questions before we even began to unpack what they were protecting.

The Shape of Overfunctioning

This client embodied what I often see in overfunctioners: the capable, reliable, endlessly giving person who sustains everyone but themselves. From the outside, they look strong, competent, admirable. Inside, they are often exhausted, unseen, and deeply lonely.

For him, this pattern began early — at eight years old — when he learned to mediate between two extremely unhappy parents whose marriage was laced with disconnection, anger, resentment and shame. He became the peacekeeper, the performer, the one who absorbed tension so that others could breathe. It made him useful. It also made him invisible.

He brought that same role into adulthood. At work, he was the dependable leader; among friends, the therapist; in his marriage, the rescuer. Everyone recognized what he did, but few knew who he was, including himself. Beneath the competence was a quiet, terrified boy who believed that if he stopped holding everyone together, everything would fall apart — and it would be his fault.

When we began exploring his history, he couldn’t initially name what he was afraid of. But the body spoke where words could not. Each time we touched on the topic of expressing his needs, his feelings to his parents, his body would curl inward. He described building “a huge fence with multiple CCTV cameras and electric wires.” His system had learned to protect at all costs. This fence stays in almost all his interpersonal relationships. 

Our goal in therapy became not to dismantle that fence all at once, but to gently disarm it — to make space for connection without recreating danger by being attracted to chaos and threat. 

The Moment of Lightness: Release from Prison

Many things happened in the therapy room were significant but this particularly moved me. It was a breakthrough, an accumulative result of our long term therapeutic journey. 

One day, he sat with his mother — a woman who herself had overfunctioned for most of her life, harboring resentment toward his father for decades. She told him, once again, the same old story she’d told countless times: how his father never apologized for nearly causing an accident that almost killed his older brother. Usually, he would absorb her anger or disconnect.

But this time, something was different.

He listened as an adult, not as the frightened child. The story was still the same, but he heard it differently this time. He noticed he wasn’t shrinking or disconnecting or even rescueing.

“I don’t know why,” he told me later, "I just feel lighter.”

When he shared that in session, I reflected, “It sounds like, for decades, you carried the story believing that your arrival to this world (the second child) caused your parents’ marital dysfunction — that you were the reason the family was unhappy. But what you’ve just described is that your mother’s pain began with fear of losing your elder brother, it was even before you were born.”

He went quiet. Then a long breath. "I didn't think of that"

Then tears. He said it finally felt like being released from a prison sentence for a crime he never committed. 

This kind of liberation doesn’t come from intellectual insight alone. It comes when the nervous system — the body itself — feels the difference between being connected and not rescuing.

There has been a high tendency of adults cutting their parents off. It is very concerning for me to see how individual therapy sometimes encourages that in the name of setting healthy boundaries. In this case, if he has cut off from his mother, he will never get to experience the same narration in a different truth about himself.

The Therapy of Reclaiming Self

Overfunctioners often confuse love with usefulness. They think being indispensable is safety. What they rarely realize is how much it costs to hold that position — the chronic anxiety, the inability to rest, the loneliness of being everyone’s support but never their equal.

When this client began to reclaim his right to have needs, he also discovered something else: that space doesn’t collapse when he steps back. Others adapt. Relationships shift. The world doesn’t fall apart.

In multigenerational therapy, we look at how patterns like overfunctioning are passed down through families — often with love but also with fear. Each generation protects the next according to what they learned about survival. Sometimes, healing looks like simply putting down what isn’t yours to carry.

For him, that meant recognizing that his mother’s overfunctioning wasn’t just behavior, but a legacy of trauma and loss from her own family of origin too. His own rescuing impulse was the same pattern, modernized. The moment he saw that clearly, compassion replaced resentment — both for his parents and for himself.

Cheryl’s Reflections

Working with overfunctioners means working with people who are exceptional at surviving. They thrive in crisis, hold everyone else’s emotions, and earn recognition through service. Yet behind that competence lies an immense longing: to be cared for and loved without performing.

This story is a reminder that beneath overfunctioning there is often a quiet tragedy — a child who learned too early that love had to be earned through being useful.

The work of therapy, then, is not to teach them to do less, but to help them build a system where they can finally feel safe when they stop.

If you find yourself always holding, mediating, fixing — if you are the one everyone turns to but you no longer know where you end and others begin — it might be time to explore what keeps you in that role. Freedom begins when you let yourself be seen, not for what you do, but for who you truly are.

p/s: This content is written with the permission of the client to share. All identifiable information has been altered to protect his identity.

Written by, 

Cheryl Chin Yi Fen

Individual, Couple & Family Therapist Certified Multigenerational Family Therapist Certified Clinical Supervisor

#therapy #individualtherapy #multigenerational #trauma #grief #maritalconflict