There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being the one. You know, the one who is responsible, the one who gets sh*t done, the one who remembers dates and always shows up and seems to be the person everyone else leans on in a crisis. You didn't volunteer to be that person; it happened because, at some point, you proved you could handle whatever was thrown your way.
Now, everyone expects that of you. They just assume you’ll handle it, meaning a lot of stuff inevitably falls on your shoulders. Women online (especially moms in midlife) have started talking about this phenomenon and the accompanying exhaustion it brings, dubbing it “competence fatigue.”
And if that phrase alone feels like an ah-ha moment, congrats, you’re probably the reliable one, too.
But does that mean you’re doomed to this fate forever? How do you break out of that box and get some greatly needed support? We turned to psychologists and therapists for advice about this problematic paradigm and what you can do about it.
What is “competence fatigue”?
Well, it’s not a clinical diagnosis, so you won’t exactly find it in any reference book. However, experts say the underlying mechanism is something they often see in practice.
“When I hear the term ‘competence fatigue,’ I immediately think of a concept we frequently discuss in DBT (dialectical behavior therapy): apparent competence,” says Jeanette Lorandini, LCSW, founder and director of Suffolk DBT.
She explains that many of her clients grew up learning that they needed to be "the strong one" to receive support or acceptance. The easy, self-sufficient one. "While this strategy can be effective for a time, it often leads to a cycle where the more competent someone appears, the more responsibility is placed upon them," she adds.
It's a catch-22 because the performance works so well that it inadvertently masks your actual needs. "Apparent competence can unintentionally prevent others from seeing when they are struggling," Lorandini says.
Why does competence get "rewarded" with more work?
When you’re the reliable one for everyone else, it can feel as though you’re being punished for that reliability. The more capable you are, the more gets piled on. And that’s sort of the maddening math of it all: Struggle generates support, while reliability tends to generate reliance.
Estepha Francisque, LCSW, a licensed psychotherapist and co-founder of Forward Ethos, says it all boils down to the way people tend to seek the shortest path between a problem and a solution.
"This leads to managers, coworkers, parents, and partners taking the 'easy way out' by immediately turning to the reliable person in the system," he says. "They often think 'just this one time,' but after 100 times of making that decision, their neural pathways quickly go in that direction."
Hmm, that sounds familiar. Oh, yes, it’s because I’m an eldest daughter, and Francisque points out that this is precisely how the eldest-daughter paradigm is born. The whole dynamic lands disproportionately on women, particularly women of color. In fact, in his practice, Black women have sought out help for it most of all.
Of course, it doesn’t help that women are socialized to absorb the ask without friction, so the loop reinforces itself.
“Being helpful, low maintenance, and easy is how a lot of us learned to stay safe and stay loved," says Chloë Bean, LMFT, a somatic trauma therapist in Los Angeles. "So when the reward for finishing your work is just more work, you don't push back because pushing back threatens the identity that's been keeping you valued.”
Yet at what cost?
Anyone who fits the description here would likely tell you the actual workload isn't the hardest part; it's the seclusion hiding inside of competence fatigue that sucks the most.
“The toll is a specific kind of loneliness," says Dr. Annia Raja, PhD, a licensed clinical psychologist and founder of Helm Psychology Group. "Not being alone, exactly, but being surrounded by people who never think to ask if you're OK, because you've never given them a reason to wonder."
Over time, that isolation can start to curdle, becoming something corrosive: "You start to resent people you love for not noticing that you're struggling or exhausted, even though you may have inadvertently trained them not to check in."
Bean says that this resentment can surface in all kinds of ways, from physical to mental. It might look like crying in the car before you go inside, suffering from insomnia, constantly clenching your jaw, getting sick anytime you have downtime, or grief over “the sense that you could fall apart and no one would notice, because you’ve become a master at hiding your inner suffering.”
OK, how do you break the cycle?
Rest easy; no one here is going to pretend a bubble bath is the answer to all your problems. Rather, the experts were unanimous in insisting self-care isn’t necessarily the fix. Sure, it might help you along the way, but what’s really going to make a difference is redistribution. It’s time to get comfortable with delegation, boundaries, and just flat-out saying no.
Try a "handback." Rod Mitchell, a registered psychologist and founder of Emotions Therapy Calgary, recommends identifying one thing that typically defaults to you and handing it over with a prepared script: "I'm unable to handle this one item; do you want to take care of it, or shall we decide who will?"
Then comes the incredibly hard part. "Let someone else mess it up, or possibly not do it at all; don't step in to correct them," Mitchell says (gasp, I know). "Once another person realizes how large the load is, then the load begins to shift."
Be clear about your bandwidth. Francisque has a simple hack you can roll out whenever someone brings you a new task: Ask them if they'd prefer to prioritize it over an existing one. It's a way to gently remind people that, you know, you're a human being with finite bandwidth. You're not a fulfillment center. Francisque also strongly encourages taking sick days (at work and at home) so others feel the gap your competence usually fills.
Two words: baby steps. The thing is, if your nervous system equates being needed with being safe, it's not like you can unlearn that in a weekend. There's no such thing as snapping your fingers and boundary-ing your way out of this one! So, while it's going to feel unnatural, probably even uncomfortably so at first, Bean says you have to train yourself to pause before reflexively volunteering for or agreeing to things. Learn to let the silence sit for a bit ("someone else will fill it").
Then work your way up to letting one little thing be visibly imperfect. Maybe you don't reply to a text right away. Or maybe you bring a store-bought dish to the PTA meeting instead of making something from scratch. The whole gist is just to let something be imperfect and "notice how nothing collapses," says Bean. "That's evidence your system needs."
At the end of the day, Lorandini says it all adds up to "reliable" women remembering one core tenet: "You can be incredibly capable and still need support. Asking for help is not a sign of weakness; it's a sign of wisdom. Real resilience is not carrying everything alone, but knowing that you don’t have to.”
In other words, the most competent thing you can do this week might just be handing off some responsibility to someone else… and letting them figure it out for themselves.
source https://www.scarymommy.com/lifestyle/what-is-competence-fatigue
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