Compulsive caregiving is an attachment pattern where a person experiences a strong drive to take care of others, while prioritising their needs over their own. It often develops as a response to childhood pressures within relationships where love, safety and approval were conditional on being “helpful,” “good”, “well-behaved” and “not being selfish” for the benefit of self-absorbed parents, leading to a learned association between caregiving and security. A deeply rooted pattern of prioritising the needs of others develops from early childhood experiences of ‘parentification’ in which the child adopts the role of a parent, due to the actual adult care-givers failing to perform the care functions associated with competent parenting. This may have been experienced as a role reversal, in which the child felt the need to take on adult roles and responsibilities to support the parent in order to maintain a secure environment. This support may have been practical and/or emotional, depending on the deficits in the family situation and the parent’s capacity for emotional regulation. If there were fears of abandonment or emotional exclusion by the parent, the resulting anxiety may leave a trauma response which manifests as escalating investment in retaining bonds through attentive care-giving behaviours. This form of attachment style develops as both an unconscious survival strategy and a persistent behavioural mechanism in response to inconsistent, needy, distressed, neglectful, aggressive or unresponsive parents, in which the child becomes hyper-attuned to the parental needs to ensure their own safety.
As adults, the person may continue to over-invest in relationships, while neglecting their own well-being through poor self-care. The individual may attract and remain in relationships with demanding, dependent, emotionally unavailable or dysregulated, non-committal or disrespectful partners. They may select companions who are needy or cross boundaries while failing to recognise potential relationships which offer the possibility of reciprocal care. In some cases, receiving care, comfort and support from others may feel uncomfortable, even to the point of rejection of possible assistance and a struggle to develop truly reciprocal intimacy. The outcome over time may be hidden or overt resentment, exhaustion and possible burnout or depression which may develop into longer term mental or physical health problems.
Key features are over-focusing on the needs of others, while ignoring or minimising one’s own emotional distress and needs, hyper-responsibility, overcompliance and people-pleasing, ‘rescuing’ behaviours (without accurately assessing to what extent the other person can manage the situation themselves), self-worth being tied to being needed and helpful and feelings of guilt, anxiety and low self-esteem on withholding care from distressed others. The person may be hypervigilant and highly attuned to the changing moods and needs of others, in order to meet those needs to avoid conflict or distress. If the other person pulls away, the fearful attachment style may lead to ever increasing efforts to secure the bond, ultimately to the detriment of the individual’s well-being.The care-giving may serve to distract from and soothe the person’s own unmet care needs temporarily and promote a sense of security through effortful connection.
The drawbacks of this attachment style are that the individual remains in non-reciprocal relationships due to the familiar pattern of attempting to ‘buy a sense of security’ through offering care and constant adaptation to being what the other person requires, leading to a lack of relationship satisfaction, emotional and physical exhaustion, underlying resentment and feeling stuck, with limited agency. The person may experience themselves as a ‘victim’ or ‘martyr’ within the demanding relationship.
The starting point to move forward from this compulsive pattern is to acknowledge the dynamic of relational interactions which are playing out, with a compassionate view of the automatic coping strategy which developed as a childhood adaptation to specific pressures from parental figures who struggled to fulfil their roles.
Further work could include:
- Processing of old and recent trauma wounds
- Compassionate work addressing the needs of the devalued and vulnerable ‘inner child’
- Cognitive Behaviour Therapy to explore and challenge beliefs around not being ‘enough’ or ‘loveable’ and fears of rejection or abandonment
- Learning to recognise and apply boundaries around responsibilities, offer appropriate assistance and find ways to say ‘no’, while managing the habitually associated feelings of guilt or anxiety
- Exercises in assertively asking for and receiving care from others will encourage new ways of relating
- Practising physical, mental and emotional self-care can build a stronger sense of self-worth. It may be necessary to reframe what a person believes to be ‘selfish’ in terms of the necessary maintenance of a fully functioning human! Scheduling time for essential self-care, to allow active promotion of health and well-being, can be helpful in prioritising the self over other demands
- Journaling, mindful practices, self compassion and guided affirmations may help focus on one’s own needs and emotions
- Progress may be dependent on recognising and distancing oneself from non-reciprocal relationships and these life changes may take time, courage and patience to work through
Giving up the habitual behaviours of care, adaptation, compliance and prioritising others in exchange for a sense of securing a bond which feels significant, but does not provide reciprocal care of one’s well-being, can be difficult and raise anxiety. The in-depth work to let these ingrained responses go may require a period of support of a professional to overcome the pattern.
Locus of Solace 