Relentlessly helping someone engaging in dysfunctional behavior (whether this behavior is diagnosable or not) is not helping - it is enabling. Paying the rent of your child who cannot hold a job is not helping, it is enabling. Constantly finishing your colleague’s reports is not helping, it’s enabling. Allowing your partner to avoid conflict is not helping the situation, it’s perpetuating the problem. Catch my drift here? This is one of the top reasons why excessive caregiving is dysfunctional.

In being an endless stream of “help,” you are essentially undermining the resilience of those you are trying to help. If you always come to the rescue, how will the other person access his/her own power? We all must be allowed to make our mistakes and hit rock bottom at times to learn, grow, and develop into healthy human beings. Being everyone’s safety net all the time and for the rest of life is quite unhelpful when you consider that people need to learn and experience new situations, thoughts, and emotions in order to gain important characteristics like grit and emotional regulation.

On the coattails of what I just said, in excessively giving “care” you will cause dependency in other people and they will not develop the skills necessary to excel. But not only that, you will be training them perfectly on how to mistreat, use, and abuse you. You will cause other people to depend on you in such a way that they will come to expect you to break your neck for them each and every time. Over time, they’ll be known to take advantage of you and you’ll be known to give in. Foreseeably, they become the under-functioner and you become the over-functioner. You will do more while they will do less. It’s guaranteed.

All of it is much more selfish than it is selfless, which is a hard realization for the caregiver to admit and swallow. “Selfish? Selfish! Are you frickin’ kidding me?!! I bust my ass for this person every day and you are calling me selfish?!” My response…, “yes!” The excessive caregiver is often relentlessly giving “care” because they need to feel needed…and feeling needed is how they feel worthy. It is through helping other people that the caregiver feels like he or she is a good mother or employee or partner etc. At the core of it all is often a faulty interpersonal belief that they are not good enough – they have an “I’m not good enough” core belief. Therefore, to feel “good enough,” the caregiver goes above and beyond the average helper in order to feel like a good enough human being. Heartbreaking.

Well, the first step is to admit that you might be in one or many codependent relationships and you must acknowledge your role as the over-functioning excessive caregiver. Take a bit of time to really observe your behavioral responses to other people and you will surely see how you unnecessarily go above and beyond for everyone else while leaving yourself in the cold. You must then begin to slowly start doing less, saying no, and establishing your own personal boundaries. To the average person, this might not sound difficult but, don’t be fooled, I know that for the excessive caretaker this is HUGE and will definitely require the help of a therapist…and part of the reason why it’s so hard is because the caregiver must start seeing their worth and value outside of their self-appointed "helping" role. This is not easy to do for someone who’s spent a lifetime "helping" other people to make themselves feel good. If this is you, I want you to remember that you matter, you are worthy, go get what’s yours.