If you’ve ever looked around and realized that you are, somehow, always the one holding everything together, you may have wondered how to stop people pleasing in relationships, and why it’s so hard to actually do it. What you might be living is something that goes deeper than just saying yes too much. It’s called overfunctioning: the one who remembers what everyone needs, who smooths things over before they become conflicts, who says yes before checking whether you actually have anything left to give.

You’re the one who remembers what everyone needs. Who smooths things over before they become conflicts. Who says yes before checking whether you actually have anything left to give. And when you finally do slow down, there’s usually a quiet, uncomfortable thought underneath it all: if I stop, something falls apart. If you recognize i=this, you’re probably tired of it in a way that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived it.

It’s not a bad habit. It’s a pattern with a history.

Overfunctioning in relationships rarely comes from nowhere. For most people I work with, and in my own life too, it developed in a context where it made sense. Maybe you grew up in a family where you were needed in ways children shouldn’t have to be needed. Maybe the message, spoken or unspoken, was that love had to be earned through being useful. Maybe you learned early that staying small and managing everything was safer than asking for help.

I grew up as “the strong one.” The capable one. The one who handled things. And for a long time I didn’t fully understand the dynamic I was living inside. I call it now “the victim game”, though that name needs careful unpacking, because it has nothing to do with blame.

It’s about a pattern. An unconscious one, usually. In some family systems there is an unspoken question always in the air: who is the most vulnerable right now? Who needs the most? Whoever fills that role gets the attention, the care, the rallying around. The strong one never qualifies. So you push through. You don’t ask for help, not because you’re fine, but because asking would wobble the whole system, and the help you’d get might not actually be for you.

I say this gently and carefully, because if you recognize yourself here, I want to be clear: the feelings are real. The exhaustion is real. The need is real. The pattern is just the water you’ve been swimming in so long that it stopped looking like water.

The film that showed me what I couldn’t explain

I watched CODA recently, and it stayed with me in that quiet way some stories do.

CODA is about Ruby, the only hearing member of her deaf family. She can sing, really sing, but she is also the one who translates, mediates, keeps the family business running. She is the one who can. So she does.

There is a scene near the middle of the film that stopped me completely. Ruby has just performed at a school concert. Afterward, her dad, who has never heard music and has no frame of reference for what his daughter’s voice actually does, asks her to sing for him. Just the two of them. And as she sings, he reaches out and places his hand gently on her throat. To feel it. Because that is the only way in that he has.

I cried. Not because it was sad, but because it showed something I rarely see: someone trying, in the only way available to them, to truly understand what matters to another person. He couldn’t hear her. But he wanted to know her.

That contrast stayed with me, because it is not always what happens in families, or in close relationships.

Later in the film, Ruby’s brother finds out she’s considering giving up her audition to stay and help the family. He signs to her something like: you’re always afraid people will think we can’t manage. But let them adjust. Let me handle it.

I wish I had seen that kind of agency modelled for me earlier. Not the bravado kind. The grounded kind. The kind that says: I know who I am, I know what I need, and I don’t need you to shrink yourself to protect me from the world. That is a very different relationship. And it is possible.

What people-pleasing and overfunctioning actually cost you

The exhaustion of overfunctioning in relationships isn’t just physical…. It’s the cost of constantly monitoring other people’s emotional states while losing track of your own. Of editing yourself before you’ve even spoken. Of being so attuned to what everyone else needs that your own needs become genuinely difficult to locate.

Over time, this can start to feel like personality. Like just who you are.

It isn’t. It’s a coping pattern that became so familiar it looks like identity. And the first step toward changing it is being able to see it clearly, without self-blame, and without making yourself wrong for having survived in the way you did.

A different way to relate to yourself in relationships

What I’ve found, in my own life and in working with people who carry this particular kind of tired, is that stopping overfunctioning isn’t primarily about learning to say no. It’s not about communication scripts or setting firmer limits.

It starts earlier than that. It starts with coming back to yourself, again and again, so that you are responding from a full place rather than a depleted one. It starts with a practice I call tuning in: a few minutes of genuine inner stillness, not to solve anything, but to notice what is actually happening inside you before you respond to what’s happening around you.

Over time, something gradually shifts. Not just what you do in relationships. What you believe about what you deserve in them.

That is what I mean by selfgentleness: radically accepting yourself as the most important person to consistently deserve your own gentleness. No exceptions. Not when things are easy, and especially not when they aren’t.

It doesn’t fix the pattern overnight. But it changes the ground underneath it.

If this resonates

If you’ve recognized your own pattern of people-pleasing or overfunctioning in relationships, and you’re wondering how to stop people pleasing for good, you’re in the right place. We are working this April in Selfgentleness Academy with relationships. Not through communication scripts or advice-column tips, but by starting where it actually starts: recognizing the patterns you’ve been living inside, the ones so familiar they feel like personality.

Because before you can do anything differently, you have to be able to see it.

If you’re curious whether this is the kind of support you’ve been looking for, you can start with the quiz at drfemkebakker.com/take-the-quiz. It takes a few minutes and it’s a good first step.