Do you sometimes feel like your feelings need to stay on the back burner while you attend to everyone else’s, or find yourself saying “Don’t worry about me!” far too often?
This, BACP member therapist Joanne Strong said, could be a sign of “emotional over-functioning”.
Emotional over-functioning is “is where one person takes on responsibility for
another person’s feelings, emotional processing and regulation,” she explained.
“This is usually a habit rooted in childhood and isn’t usually a conscious decision, more a way of being that the individual has learnt to inhabit.”
Here, HuffPost UK asked Strong how to spot the signs of emotional over-functioning, as well as how it can affect your relationship and what to do if you notice it.
What are the signs of emotional over-functioning?
“If one person is emotionally over-functioning in a relationship, they will be attempting to process the feelings of the other person, or to keep the other person emotionally regulated,” the therapist said.
That can take a lot of differe...
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