What to do if you feel like you can’t depend on other people
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you are juggling a mountain of responsibilities, all while thinking, "Why doesn’t anyone else just step up?"
Who are we kidding, how many times have you found yourself in this situation over and over?
It’s like you’re stuck in this exhausting role where you always have to handle everything or it doesn’t get done. You see videos of social media where the woman is surprised by the man having done some miscellaneous house task without having to be reminded or the friends showing up for their new mom friend with house cleaning or cooking to help take the weight off her and all that’s running through your head is “wouldn’t that be nice.”
Not to mention, you know that if you were to ever just stop spinning all the plates you were spinning, how many people would point the finger at you because some work task or home task or friendship task would fall through the cracks. You don’t want to have to do it all but it doesn’t seem like there’s any other option.
This experience is so common for eldest daughters (or the eldest daughter type, even if you’re technically a different birth order) so as the home base for all things eldest daughter experience, we had to dive into this pattern today and give you some ways to break this pattern. Let’s dive in!
Why you feel like you can’t rely on others
Always being the “doer” can lead to feelings of frustration, distrust and burnout. Without being able to rest and always carrying the burden - logistical and mental - drains us over time. But even beyond the weight of what has to get done, the bigger pain, in our opinion, is that feeling of not being able to trust others.
For many of us eldest daughters, this is exacerbated by something called hyper-independence. Here’s what it sounds like:
“Oh I’m fine, I can handle it on my own”
“I don’t want to burden them”
“It’ll just be easier if I do it myself”
“I don’t need help with that”
Sounding familiar? For our founder, Samantha, there were full decades of her life that she prided herself on how independent she was, how little she needed other people. But behind the scenes, she’d be liking the social media videos about “princess treatment” and devouring Romantasy books where a guy finally notices the girl and she doesn’t have to do things all alone anymore (hello ACOTAR fans, anybody?).
Underneath this pattern is usually, and let’s be clear we’re not psychologists around here just experienced eldest daughters, some time in our life where we learned it was safer not to trust others. If you’ve been let down in painful ways, it’s safer not to open yourself up to the disappointment and being let down, so you just stop trying.
The problem is that then you build a life for yourself where you don’t get the help. Hyper-independence is like walls of the castle - you’re still the same girl living inside but you look real hard and protected from the outside. Yes, you’re keeping villains and robbers out but you might also be keeping out the best friend you could ever have or the prince charming you’ve been dreaming of.
You don’t have to have been abandoned by a parent or your house broken into as a child to develop the patterns of hyper-independence. The eldest daughters who are the “easy kid,” the “capable one” or “mommy’s little helper” can slowly develop this pattern as they’re asked to manage their own feelings and lives without the developmental support that most kids need growing up.
We’re not here to say your parents didn’t love you or didn’t try their best. People are human and there’s a million different ways that our households can influence who we become. But if you’re here reading this article, tired of the loneliness of always having to do it on your own, we might invite you to take a deep breath and consider the possibility that by being the “responsible one” you didn’t get to be the kid who just got to count on others.
Hyper-independence cultivates over time an independence where we count on ourselves but the “hyper” part of it (a.k.a too much) means that we take on more independence than is healthy. Humans are social creatures - we crave connection and support, which might be why those fictional stories pull on your heartstrings so much. It’s normal to want to depend on somebody else, to wan to trust them. The goal here isn’t to be a helpless waif, floating around expecting everybody else to do things for you - it’s just to right the ship from hyper-independence to healthy dependence. “You can count on me, I can count on you.” So let’s explore what we can do if this pattern is present to dig ourselves out of always having to do it all yourself.
The problem with overfunctioning
You are used to being an eldest daughter or a “doer.” You step up consistently because, let’s face it, you can do it faster and often with better results. Because it comes naturally to you, you’re going to do it faster and more often. Over time, you get more repetitions in this role, so you get better and better, faster and faster. When it comes to a moment of who will step up to schedule the meeting, order the food, buy mom’s presents, or whatever it is, you’re quick to do it because you’re good at it and because you always have.
But if we want to change the pattern, we need to recognize the problem in this pattern. When we do this, we’re not just “doing what we’re supposed to do,” we’re over-functioning.
Let’s look at how this might play out: dinner is finished and the dishes need to get done. All the kids sitting around the table don’t want to do it but you’re the oldest or the most responsible and you know that mom’s going to get irritated if you try to leave the table to go play so you just go ahead and get started at it. Your siblings are off the hook and they go play. The one time you encourage them to do it, they load the dishwasher all messy and you end up redoing it so after a while, you just always step up to do the dishes. But your younger brother who loaded it wrong, never learns how to load it correctly. Your youngest sister never even tries because you always start to do it. Over time, they just get up from the table without even offering to help because you always do the dishes. You’re frustrated that it always falls on you. But they aren’t objectively poorer at doing dishes, or even if they were, they never got the chance to learn. You perceive them as underfunctioning and you’re overfunctioning but it’s not because of they’re capability. You played a role in making them this way!
Over-functioning and under-functioning are not to be confused with capability. Under-functioners are often very capable people who haven’t been given the opportunity to show it. Before you point out the times they let it slip or didn’t do it right or never did it at all, if you tried to do something and had somebody breathing down your neck telling you that you were doing it wrong, would you want to do it?
Us “doers” aren’t the villains in this story. But we also aren’t the victims of being let down by everybody around us. The pattern we are trying to break here requires us to be honest about how we were part of the pattern forming and how we can be part of the solution.
Why is it so hard to break the pattern of over-functioning
As the person who naturally takes charge, we probably don’t even realize how much we feel the burden of solving everyone’s problems. We’ve tried to break this pattern by figuring out how to fix them - whether that’s partners or coworkers or family members. We ask questions like “how can I motivate them to do it on their own?” or “how can I get him to remember to take the trash out?”
I’m going to hold your hand while I say this: that’s just over-functioning in a different form. The task is never just about doing the task. It’s about noticing the task is necessary, figuring out the right time to do it, executing it and learning from mistakes.
If we want to break the pattern of overfunctioning, continuing to manage their motivation, planning and timing and hoping that they’ll one day take over the execution of the task misses the larger point.
The deeper goal in this pattern isn’t to have somebody do the dishes, it’s to not have to carry everything on our own.
We want to be able to count on other people and not need to be constantly running through our next couple days figuring out where the next ball might get dropped. In order to do that, we’re going to need to let other people take responsibility. With responsibility comes the potential for failure and the consequences of that failure.
We cannot depend on other people without allowing them the potential to fail. Part of why it’s so hard to break this pattern is because to trust other people, we need to let them learn (including letting them fail) without swooping into save them and we need to learn to be okay when things don’t go the way you want them to.
This comes back to the roots of the hyper-independence in the first place - sometime in your younger years, you needed somebody to support you and they didn’t show up. It hurt, A LOT. So to protect yourself, you decided it was better to learn to support yourself than to feel that pain again.
But you’re grown now and you can see how to be happy and trusting and rested, you have to have other people who support you. But this overfunctioning pattern is everywhere and it’s hard to get out of it.
There is a sneaky piece here that we, the over-functioner, needs to take care of in ourselves: that little part within us that doesn’t want to feel let down and reminded of all those accumulated memories that we didn’t get the support we wanted.
Samantha spent her young years with a recently divorced single mom navigating getting back into dating. She made herself “easy” which often meant going to a bathroom when she was sad or disappointed. She felt feelings alone and never learned how to ask for help or even really to need help. In her twenties when she started feeling like she couldn’t count on others, she realized that she didn’t want to trigger that wound of feeling alone again and so she was unintentionally over-functioning so she didn’t have to risk triggering it.
She wanted to count on a partner, on friends, on coworkers, so she was going to have to learn how to trust and depend on others. And she had to start somewhere.
The in-between period of depending on others
As historically overfunctioning types, there are two very important ingredients to breaking this pattern. They are two sides of the same coin and nothing will change if you don’t have both. One half is the part of this change that we are responsible for and, like we discussed above with not over-functioning as a way to try to fix under-functioning and accidentally perpetuating the cycle, allowing the pieces that we’re not responsible for to be somebody else.
Ingredient #1: Setting people up for success
This one will be the easier of the two for you because it’s the piece that you can do something about. That is to set the people who you want to support you up for success. If we’re hoping for a dynamic where they are fully accountable and take things off our plate, we won’t get the opportunity to tweak and guide throughout the process.
If we want them to support us, or even just manage their fair share, we have to recognize that we’re not starting from a clean slate. If you want things to feel 50-50, stepping away from the process and seeing if somebody will take on their 50 would be one thing if it was a completely fresh scenario. But you’ve been operating at 80-20 for years and then all the sudden, without warning, dropping down to 50 and expecting them to take on a whole extra 30 percent they’re not used to.
This is probably what’s led to a lot of frustration in your life because you want them to manage their part, but you might not have fully empathized with the experience of going from the way things have been and then out of the blue, getting criticized for not doing xyz things.
If we want to shift the pattern to 50-50 or even better, to a world where your partner handles some tasks 100-0 and you don’t even have to think about it, and you have your own that you take 100%, then we need to acknowledge our current starting point and work from there.
Here’s how to gut check if you might not have been setting people up for success like you wanted to:
Are they clear on what would make you happy?
Are they clear why it’s important and the impact when it doesn’t get one
Are they clear on what a successful outcome is?
Do they have the tools and information on how to do that?
Have they had a reasonable runway to learn and tweak according to their experience?
Do they feel responsible and in control of the process?
That last one is especially important because nobody wants to feel like a child. Getting homework isn’t fun, so we’ll always resist situations where we feel like we’re being graded. Being in charge of something has a whole different feeling. That first car you bought with your own money gets treated very differently than a hand me down you got for free because your parents needed you to be able to get to school. We want people in our life to feel in charge of things, not assigned a task that we’re going to evaluate their performance on.
We’re going to dive into what this can look like in practice, but let’s understand both ingredients first.
Ingredient #2: Managing your own feelings about not being in control
The second and harder ingredient is dealing with what happens when you stop over-functioning. If you jump in and save the day when things just start to go awry, people never learn. If you lose your mind when somebody forgets to do the new thing they asked you to do, it’s very likely that they’re going to try their absolute best to take the task off their plate to not get the criticism again.
Your job, as the overfunctioner, is to manage your own feelings while other people learn to step up. Think about it like the parent watching the kid ride the bike without training wheels. If the parent was yelling “you’re pedaling wrong! be careful! you’re going to hurt yourself!” that kid probably isn’t going to feel super confident. It’s the parent’s job in the dynamic is to teach as best they can, to reinforce the kid’s capability and then to shut their mouth and freak out only on the inside while they watch their kid try.
If you truly wish to break the cycle of over-functioning, it’s essential to step back sometimes and let things go - yes, things might not work out the way you envisioned, and that’s okay. It’s often messy and uncomfortable, but remember the truth: if you want to feel taken care, you cannot always be the caretaker. You have to let yourself be taken care of. Breaking this pattern will bring up uncomfortable feelings that led you to form this pattern in the first place. You have to practice tolerating them so that other people have a chance to get the practice on tasks that you have been monopolizing for years.
What it looks like to set people up for success in real life
One of the simplest ways you can begin shifting this pattern is to stop expecting other people to read your mind. You might feel like you’re always thinking and anticipating for others and that they should do that for you but that over-responsibility for other’s feelings is a part of the pattern we’re trying to break. A healthy pattern of dependence requires communication and expectation setting.
Try explaining what it is that would help you and make sure to explain the positive and negative impacts associated. This might sound like:
“Susan, the monthly report is due next week. I know that I’ve typically handled it in the past, but I’m realizing I’m becoming a bottleneck in the process and it’s getting in the way of our team operating as efficiently as it could. I’d love for you to handle it moving forward - I’d love for you to get that visibility with leadership for taking this responsibility and I’ll be able to spend more time getting our analytics done, which’ll make George happy. But I’m not just dumping it on you - I know you don’t have any experience pulling that data or outlining the key points, so I figure I can set 2-3 check-ins this week for you to have the opportunity to ask questions as you’re doing it. I figure we can do that again next month and then by the following month, you will be fully ready to handle it on your own. Personally, it’d also be such a relief and it’d be so great to know I can trust you with it.”
If she were to drop the ball, you might follow up with something like: “Hey Susan, I know you have a ton going on but because we didn’t get the Monthly Report done, I had to delay the delivery date for X project which is going to affect our metrics for the quarter. It probably wasn’t your intention but it also meant I had to stay late on Wednesday. Can we talk about what resources you didn’t feel like you had so it can get done on time next month?”
Some key pieces in these two conversations:
“I know that I’ve typically handled it in the past, but I’m realizing I’m becoming a bottleneck in the process” - acknowledge that this is a pattern change and explain why the change is necessary
“I’d love for you to get that visibility with leadership for taking this responsibility” - show them how it’s good for them
“I’ll be able to spend more time getting our analytics done, which’ll make George happy” - show them how you doing less is also actually good for them
“But I’m not just dumping it on you” - don’t make it feel like homework
“I figure I can set 2-3 check-ins this week” - offer support without taking responsibility, let them test and learn to figure out what they don’t know
“by the following month, you will be fully ready” - clear timing expectations for when they’ll be doing it solo
“it’d be so great to know I can trust you with it.” - appeal to their sense of responsibility
“I had to delay the delivery date for X project which is going to affect our metrics for the quarter” - connect their dropped ball with negative impacts for them
“It probably wasn’t your intention but it also meant I had to stay late on Wednesday” - assume innocence, this wasn’t about blame!
“Can we talk about what resources you didn’t feel like you had…” - put the onus on them to identify what they need so they cultivate agency!
As important to this process as the handoff is grace for letting people learn. If things don’t go right the first time or the next time, rather than writing off the whole process, the challenge is to come to the table not as the over-functioner right back in your old patterns, but from the goal of where you want to be. “Their way” might feel like only 70% as good as your way but if they did 100% of it, that’s still a big chunk off your plate.
Over time, when somebody takes pride in a task they’re way more likely to improve than from chiding and criticizing from somebody else.
So your challenge will aways be to treat them as if they are the hero and you are the beneficiary. “It was such a relief to know you were handling it - it seemed like the deadline felt tight this time but I can’t tell you how great it was to be able to get the analytics done and if there’s information you need at a different time, let me know!”
It feels uncomfortable to put the onus on them but it’s the way you get relief.
What it looks like to manage not being in control in real life
Now comes the harder part. People will let you down, they will screw it up, they will not get it done. If you use this a reason to jump back into over-functioning, things will never change.
Ultimately, the pattern was created by you always jumping in so the only way it’ll change is if you break that pattern. You and the other people will have to sit with the discomfort of what happens when you don’t overfunction.
In real life, the most important part about this is: don’t start breaking this pattern at the most important juncture!
If this year end report is super crucial for bonuses, don’t pick that as the time to have them take over. A kid’s birthday present is probably not the first task to expect a partner to manage solo. Giving way way way more runway than you think you need will make it easier for you to stay calm and collected through the bumps in the road.
In existing relationships, this means continuing to calmly reinforce how positive it is to be supported and letting them trial and error to figure something out on their own. Recognize that this is a pattern shift for them and that takes time.
In new relationships, like if you’re just dating somebody new, is the closest you get to starting from scratch. Remember that the little things create the pattern for big things: don’t make the dinner reservation and if the restaurant is full, let them problem solve where to go next. That builds their muscle of remembering to think ahead. Ask for help unpacking your car even if you could do it yourself and profusely thank them (even if it feels extra!). That builds the reward pathway to enjoy helping you again. And don’t hesitate to tell them what would make you happy. That gives them a clear path to getting those rewards of your happiness more often.
In the early months of Samantha’s relationship, she commented to her boyfriend: “Would you be the type of boyfriend who just randomly comes home with flowers some time? That would make me feel so special and cared for.” Notice how different that is from three months later randomly chirping: “you never get me flowers!”Afterward, she didn’t mention it again and a month or so later, he showed up with flowers on a random day. She was effusive with how good it made her feel (it did feel that good!) and as a result, he loved doing it because of that reinforcement and the pattern begun.
She didn’t follow up 5 days later and say “I told you I wanted flowers randomly and you didn’t do it!” which makes it feel like a homework assignment. She let him do it on his timeline and when the behavior was there, she gave him clear satisfaction that he had made her happy.
By allowing longer timelines, you are able to manage your own emotions without the timing ratcheting up the stakes. That gives more chance for other people to show to you who they can be.
But what happens when they don’t remember? When they let you down?
You have three options: revert back to the old pattern (keeps you stuck), explain to them the negative impact of their actions and see if they adjust, or stop trying to count on that person.
Clearly, the first one isn’t a viable option because we’re trying to break the pattern.
So let’s break down how to decide whether option two or three is right for you and what that looks like.
Shifting your approach to depending on others
If it’s the first time you’ve ever tried to depend on somebody and they didn’t follow through - this is not the time to cut somebody out of your life.
Ask yourself:
Have I had an explicit conversation with them explaining what you’d like to happen?
Have I given them a reasonable amount of time to step up? (Take whatever time you think is reasonable and double it - that’s probably reasonable)
Have I given them an open, accepting place to come with questions or troubleshooting, without shame or judgement?
Have I treated partial attempts as failures or successes? (Correct answer is to encourage the effort rather than critique the attempt. People want to succeed so we have to reinforce what they’re doing well)
If you haven’t done those things, they probably weren’t set up for success and I’d try to fill in the gaps and try again.
If they do have all that setup and it still isn’t happening, it’s time to have the more negative focused conversation. Ask yourself:
Are they clear on how this not getting done is negatively affecting me and more importantly, how that’s also bad for them?
Have I shared my feelings from a vulnerable open place, rather than a critiquing, accusing place?
Have I allowed them to witness and feel the consequences of when things don’t get done so they’re feeling it themselves?
Give them more information without trying to micromanage and this may help reorient the process.
For most dynamics, expect this to take at least a few rounds of trying and allowing them to figure out how to problem solve. Our job during this phase is to manage our own feelings about the process.
Don’t save them from the consequences because it’s hard to watch them suffer. Don’t make their actions about you and spiral. Don’t jump back into over-functioning because you’re uncomfortable with things done imperfectly. All these steps are how we got her in the first place so we have to break them to change the pattern.
How to know when it’s time to stop trying
Some people aren’t willing to put in the effort. Some people want to continue to under-function. Some people don’t want to change. This doesn’t mean you are doomed to a life of never having support. When you’ve really given them a fair shot, that is the moment to realize that there are people out there who will support you, who will make the effort and if somebody isn’t willing to, then it’s their decision. It’s also your decision to say goodbye and go find people who will.
Years spent with friends who only see you when you make the plans are years you waste energy and never meet people who will meet you half way. Years spent in situationships with guys giving half effort and never making you feel like a priority are years where your focus isn’t out looking for guys who make an effort.
It can feel painful to walk away from someone who isn’t showing up for you, but staying is signaling to yourself that this is all you deserve. No support, no trust, no help. Being brave enough to walk away from people who won’t step up for you sends a powerful signal of what you believe you’re worth and is more likely to attract in people who treat you that way.
This was a hard journey for Samantha in her late 20s, after she’d been spending months on men who weren’t “ready for a relationship” or would only text last minute. By continuing to give them attention, she was signaling to them that what they were giving her was enough. Like we talked about above, if there are no consequences to their low effort, they would never learn that the low effort was insufficient.
After the fourth situationship, she resolves to start only accepting behavior that fit how she wanted to be treated. This meant a lot of saying no to low effort and dealing with her feelings when she spent time alone instead of filling the space. This comes back to that second ingredient of managing our feelings of what’s out of our control. She couldn’t control when a “good guy” walked in to her life but she could control not giving low effort guys any more time just to avoid fears around being alone.
By learning to manage her feelings, she was able to have clear expectations conversations when she met new people and not make it about her when somebody wasn’t okay with that. She was weeding people out faster and over time, beginning to meet better more high-effort guys.
When she met her boyfriend (Mr. surprise flower man), he naturally took initiative and made the effort. In the ways that it wasn’t quite there, she was able to communicate about how she needed support and the fact that he was open and took responsibility was even more of a sign that he was a good fit.
Her job wasn’t to teach men how to be responsible. Her job was to say no to men who weren’t already responsible or willing to learn and manage her own feelings enough to stay patient for those who would.
Frequently asked questions
What if letting things fall apart will affect me negatively?
Two pieces here: have you left suitable time for the learning process and are you managing your own feelings effectively? Learning takes time, so you have to pick the right time when they have lower pressure to get it right the first time; given opportunities to tweak and adjust before all the consequences will affect you both; and allow them to not quite get it right without feeling attacked.
But the feelings part matters too - if you are making the result of this task mean so much about how you get to feel, it’ll feel very hard to ever let it go. Sometimes we have to soften in our brain how much it’ll affect us negatively. If your presentations are A+ quality and your associate can only generate B- quality, the focus might need to be on learning. But if they can create A- quality, and you don’t have to handhold, yet you’re still anxious - the onus may be on you to process that you may be overplaying how negatively that will affect you (especially when you consider the positive impacts of not having to do it yourself). It really may be worth it to just tolerate that little gap in exchange for the long term of being supported.
And remember right now is their opportunity to learn, they may be able to get it up to an A+ over time but they’ll only get there if they have the opportunity to do it themselves.
How can I motivate them to show up for me?
You don’t. You don’t control other people and this is the over-functioning pattern at work. You can communicate about the positive and negative impacts of the task getting done and then your job is to sit back and observe. Have the conversation again, sit back and observe. If you’ve tried and tried and tried and they’re not willing then the task may be to manage your own feelings about the fact that this person can’t or isn’t willing to show up for you and that’s their decision, not yours. It may be time to grieve what you thought could have been and move on to prioritizing people in your life who show up. The consequences of losing you may be the wake up call they need to change but you won’t be there to see it.
How do I start trusting them when I have seen so many examples of failure?
Trust isn’t built without uncertainty. You have to sit with the uncertainty between the opportunity and seeing the outcome. The biggest thing I can recommend is to work on your own inner world throughout the process. Addressing the patterns that led to these fears around being let down can help trusting people feel less scary, which then allows more time for them to figure it out before it really starts bugging you.
It’s also important to treat people as if they’re going to succeed. It’s way less appealing to “regain someone’s trust” as it is to “impress them,” so any opportunity you have to show them that you want and believe they can succeed will make them more likely to prove you right.
The final and potentially most important piece of this is to recognize that you have to do what’s right for you. Don’t give people infinite chances. Don’t cut them off without having those conversations about setting them up for success either, but if someone is over and over again letting you down, it may be time to come up with a different approach.
What if I don’t have the option to walk away (like with a team member at work)?
This is a sticky one - you may not have full agency of who you are interacting with in certain contexts. On the practical level, any chance you can to let them personally experience consequences of their action is crucial. If this mean your whole team looks bad, it may be worth it happening once so they are aware how they’re affecting everybody rather than you just threatening it. It can also be useful, if your dynamics allow, to get people around you to back up allowing this person to fully own the responsibility. It might look like working with your manager to plan an unnecessary mid-month report that Susan can handle herself, that won’t affect the things that have to get done, but still give a chance for Susan to realize that she’s not as “on it” as she thinks and for other team-members to be there to witness it (it’s not about embarrassing Susan, but giving her real feedback in a low stakes situation about how her output is compared to the expectation.)
Outside of the practical zone, your other job is to manage your own feelings. Can you make it not about you? Can you hold boundaries about your hours or when you’ll handle tasks (and do your own communicating with people about why you’re setting these boundaries and what bumps might happen as everybody adjusts)? Can you deal with feeling like the output was only okay but at least you didn’t have to do it all yourself?
These mindset shifts can help you find the best you can in maybe a less than ideal scenario.
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We all want to be supported, but it starts with us. By recognizing our own patterns and managing our emotions, we can cultivate healthier dynamics with those around us. It’s okay to let others step up (or fall flat) while you take a breather. That’s how we build stronger relationships: by being open to growth instead of trying to do it all ourselves. Together, we can create a healthy balance that allows everyone to thrive.
Want to go deeper into why you get overfunction? This article is just the beginning. We have over 500+ journal prompts, refined over years of use for maximum insight. Time-tested by real eldest daughter, high achieving, overthinking types, we’ve got prompts for if you’re unsure about a relationship, considering a career pivot at work, crafting a vision for your dream life or want to unearth the deeper limiting beliefs that might be holding you back from true confidence (like when you’re struggling to depend on other people and need to change)!
