Driven to Do: ADHD, OCD, and Over-Functioning in Relationships

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Hi, and welcome to Dopamine in Doubt.
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I'm your host, Rachel, a licensed clinical social worker specializing in ADHD and OCD.
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On this show, I will be speaking from both my clinical and lived experience as we explore the surprisingly common crossover of ADHD and OCD.
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Because when we understand which is in the driver's seat, we are better able to know what we need in that moment.
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Whether you're living right at the intersection of both, or navigate life with one of these neurotypes, you're welcome here.
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As always, please take what is helpful and leave what isn't.
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Neurodivergence shows up differently for everyone, and there is no one size fits all approach.
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Okay, let's dive in.
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You know when the appointment is.
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You know what needs to be bought.
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You know what your partner needs before they even ask.
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You're basically the project manager of your entire relationship.
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And you're exhausted.
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And somehow you're still the one who feels like you're failing.
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What if your ADHD doesn't make you underfunction in your relationship?
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What if it is making you overfunction?
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When we have ADHD, there can be shame related and the belief I have to compensate.
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We might have a history of forgetting, dropping balls, being called unreliable, disappointing people, feeling like we're not good enough.
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So we may have developed a compensation strategy.
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If I just stay on top of everything, I can't screw up.
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So we have ADHD plus a history of consequences and shame that leads to possible compensating through overfunctioning.
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Then we might have OCD, which often involves hyper-responsibility and the belief if something goes wrong, I should have prevented it.
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A core feature of OCD is an inflated sense of responsibility.
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We can unconsciously believe that if I don't manage everything perfectly, the relationship will fail.
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My partner will suffer, and it'll be all my fault.
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This can create a compulsive drive to analyze, improve, and manage the partnership.
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And if you're familiar with OCD, you might have heard about what's called relationship OCD or ROCD.
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And you might be hearing some overlap here.
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ROCD can involve persistent doubt and uncertainty about a relationship.
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Your partner, your feelings, or whether the relationship is quote, right.
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For some people, that uncertainty can fuel a lot of checking, analyzing, comparing, reassurance seeking, or trying to make sure the relationship feels certain.
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Sometimes overfunctioning becomes part of that cycle.
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If I just work harder, communicate better, anticipate their needs, fix the problem, or make this relationship perfect, maybe I'll finally feel certain that we're okay.
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The problem is that certainty isn't something you can manufacture by managing a relationship perfectly.
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So overfunctioning itself is not necessarily our OCD.
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And not everyone who overfunctions has OCD.
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But when relationship doubt and hyper responsibility are driving the behavior, it can become part of an OCD cycle.
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You cannot manage a relationship so perfectly that you never have to feel uncertain about it.
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And this is where ADHD and OCD can really team up.
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The ADHD shame plus OCD hyper responsibility equals overfunctioning.
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ADHD might say, I don't trust myself to remember this, so I need a system.
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OCD might say, I need to make sure nothing goes wrong.
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And together, those can create a person who is extraordinarily good at managing things and extraordinarily bad at letting things be unmanaged.
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Because if you don't do it, who will?
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And more importantly, what if something goes wrong because you didn't?
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And to my husband, yes, I do hear myself right now.
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Well, let's talk about cognitive load.
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There's also a cognitive load that comes with being the person who's always thinking three steps ahead.
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Who needs what?
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What needs to happen tomorrow?
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Did we schedule that?
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Are we running out of that?
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Did I remind them?
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What happens if I don't remember?
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And when you're carrying all of that internally, it can become really hard to understand why your partner doesn't seem to notice how much you're doing.
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Because you can see everything you're carrying.
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They can only see the things you actually do.
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That's why the cognitive load is such a difficult topic in any relationship.
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I will link a few books in show notes and on the link tree about this topic specifically, because these books talk about the fact that sometimes couples then fall into an over-functioner, under functioner dynamic.
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One person starts doing more because they don't trust that something will get done.
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The other person starts doing less because, well, something always just gets done.
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And then the first person thinks, see, if I don't do it, nothing happens.
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While the second person might be thinking, why are you always taking over?
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And now both people have evidence that they are right.
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For someone with ADHD and OCD, this dynamic can be particularly sticky.
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The cycle.
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The overfunctioner steps in.
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The underfunctioner gets less opportunity to practice carrying their share.
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The cycle reinforces itself.
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And this is where I want to be really careful with the word underfunctioner.
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I am not using that word to mean that one person is lazy, doesn't care, or objectively does less than they should.
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Sometimes one partner genuinely has more capacity in a particular area.
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Sometimes one person prefers doing certain things.
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And sometimes one person's pace is simply slower than the other person's anxiety.
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The dynamic becomes a problem when the pattern itself starts reinforcing both people's behavior.
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If one person becomes increasingly responsible for everything, the other person gets less opportunity or sometimes less willingness to step in.
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And the more this happens, the more each person experiences their own behavior as justified.
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The overfunctioner thinks I have to do everything because otherwise nothing gets done.
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The other person thinks I don't even know how to help without being corrected or taken over.
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And the cycle gets stronger.
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The overfunctioning isn't coming from a place of superiority, anger, or bossiness.
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It's coming from a place of fear.
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It's a scared child trying to do things perfectly so that they never get yelled at or abandoned.
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And I have to acknowledge too, it's difficult to live with someone in an ADHD, OCD, overfunctioning loop.
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It's got to be discouraging when your partner does try to help, but your OCD steps in, redoes, or critiques the task because it wasn't done perfectly.
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Sometimes our hypervigilance is moving so fast, your partner literally doesn't have the space to step in.
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Living with someone in a constant state of hypervigilance is stressful.
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Your partner isn't withdrawing out of malice.
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They're often withdrawing to avoid stepping on a landmine of your anxiety.
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What's fascinating and heartbreaking about this dynamic is how perfectly the jigsaw pieces fit together.
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And steps back to give me space or avoid conflict.
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That stepping back proves to my OCD that I'm all alone.
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So I double down.
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Neither of us are trying to hurt the other.
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We're just both reacting to the anxiety in the room.
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So this can really affect relationship dynamics.
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If my ADHD glitch happens and OCD interprets it as a catastrophic threat, the system gets locked up because I move at an anxious pace.
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I carry this historical ADHD shame from long before this relationship even started.
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So while I might be overfunctioning out of fear, it's creating a complex and confusing dynamic for our partner.
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The partner might see someone who's highly organized, rigid, and intensely driven.
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They may have no idea that underneath that armor, the person is drowning in anxiety and feeling like a failure because the ADHD OCD partner is moving at such a frantic pace to manage everything in an attempt to soothe our anxiety.
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The other partner is often pushed out of tasks.
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They might think, well, they want it done a very specific way.
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I'll just stay out of it.
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Again, reinforcing the cycle.
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And then resentment can be born from their fear.
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The overfunctioning partner will eventually burn out and might feel deeply resentful that they have to do everything, in that they forget that their own OCD compulsion is what is preventing them from letting go or trusting their partner to help.
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This is where good intentions can get really confusing in relationships.
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The behavior can be loving in intention and still be experienced as control and impact.
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Two people are teamed up against a pair of overwhelming diagnoses.
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So to break that down further, the person doing the overfunctioning may experience this as love and care.
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But the person receiving it might experience the behavior as pressure, criticism, micromanagement, or control.
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And then you have this heartbreaking mismatch.
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I'm doing all of this because I care about you, versus why are you always correcting me?
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Neither person necessarily experiences themselves as the problem.
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But there's a huge distinction between my partner asked me to do this and I decided this needed to be done.
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And now I'm hurt that you don't appreciate that I did it.
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That doesn't mean the person's contribution isn't valuable.
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It means anxiety can turn an unspoken expectation into a task the other person never asked to be done.
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The tasks they perform are often what their anxiety is demanding, not necessarily what their partner asked for.
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And honestly, as I'm recording this, I'm realizing this isn't an interesting clinical concept for me.
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I'm really seeing some of my own patterns here.
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And that is incredibly uncomfortable.
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It's really hard to admit I have a part in the pattern.
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You don't have to decide who's the problem.
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You can get curious about what your behavior accomplishes, what it protects you from feeling, and what it may unintentionally make harder for the other person.
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So I do want to share a personal example after this realization.
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What can this look like in real life, even if that's vulnerable and hard to share?
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Growing up, my best friends in school called me half, and in case there's kids listening, ASS, um, out of love.
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And if you're listening, it still makes me laugh because I have a history of forgetting things or losing them or starting and then not wanting to finish.
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Then I use checking behaviors and OCD for years to make up for this before I actually created external systems that support me instead.
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This can still really show up in OCD for me.
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So, for example, one of my OCD themes is environmental contamination.
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And this week we have a bizarre smell in our house.
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So my OCD has been screaming, fix it now.
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Any person moving at a normal human pace looks like they are under functioning in comparison.
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I have been trying to step back, but still found myself researching how to find the source of this mold.
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Even with this awareness and really stepping back on reassurance compulsions and researching compulsions around the mold itself, I still manage to over-research and be moving at an incredibly fast pace.
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And then bringing this research to my husband as fact without it being a collaborative discussion.
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In the moment, my OCD was running at a level 10 panic.
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And my husband was sitting at a completely normal level two.
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But because the gap between a 10 and a two is pretty large, my brain falsely interpreted his calm as he's not taking this seriously enough.
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But the reality was I was overfunctioning so hard because I was trying to convince him to buy a whole new HVAC system in one afternoon.
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When I walked into the room with dozens of examples of HVAC replacement plans, I wasn't really asking for his input.
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I was presenting a closed case.
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And when you do that to a partner, you accidentally strip away their agency.
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They're underfunctioning because you haven't actually left a door open for them to walk through and help.
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Your OCD is treating this as an emergency that needs to be solved with a hundred percent certainty in an immediate way.
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The work is me stepping back and slowing down my nervous system and realizing that a collaborative marriage means moving at a speed where both people can actually breathe.
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My recovery is learning to match his speed rather than forcing him to match my panic.
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And this is honestly a part of why I love him and we picked each other.
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He's extremely grounded and a steady person that I rely on when my own nervous system needs to take a beat.
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He doesn't make decisions from a place of frantic problem solving.
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His pace is the steady anchor.
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This doesn't mean that we have to lose our problem-solving superpower, but it does mean we can slow down and practice working through the urgency that OCD creates.
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We can still look into a problem while leaving space for our partner to have an opinion and help solve it with us rather than our OCD demanding they agree with the exact same level of fear we are operating from.
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When we do that, it allows space for us to feel seen and heard.
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It lets us show the love that is often hidden underneath these behaviors instead of the protective armor that can appear.
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We can also work with the ADHD shame, the history and the belief that making a mistake means we are a failure or bad.
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We can let that history just be there without it meaning anything about who we are today.
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We can let the benefits of managed ADHD and OCD show up without paying the continued costs.
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We don't have to prove we are worthy by never making a mistake.
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We don't have to be responsible for every problem that exists.
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And we are not responsible for keeping everyone safe and happy all of the time.
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Most of the time, they aren't even asking us to do that.
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We can work on shifting our own behaviors while they work on shifting theirs so that we can finally meet in the middle.
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And that's true partnership.
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How do we practice this slowing down and stepping back?
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What happens if I stop doing the things that anxiety is telling me I have to do?
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Here's the relationship overfunctioning experiment for the week.
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Pick one thing that your partner has not actually asked you to manage, isn't genuinely urgent, or you're doing primarily because you feel responsible for preventing a problem, then don't fix it immediately.
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Pause and notice.
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What does my brain predict will happen?
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What am I afraid that this says about me as a partner?
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Do I feel irresponsible?
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Am I noticing the urge to remind, check, correct, or take over?
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And then can I let my partner be responsible for their part of the relationship?
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Breaking the cycle requires untangling the ADHD shame from the OCD compulsions, noticing and recognizing that our overfunctioning isn't helpfulness.
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It's an OCD ritual designed to avoid ADHD shame, or it can be.
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When you feel the urge to double check something or take over a task, pause and ask, Am I doing this because it needs to be done?
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Or because I'm scared of being perceived as careless.
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We can practice separating mistake from identity.
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An ADHD mistake is just a mistake.
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It's not a moral failing.
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You are allowed to make human errors without it meaning you're a bad partner.
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We can practice radical delegation, intentionally giving responsibility to our partner.
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And if our OCD screams that they won't do it correctly, we sit with the anxiety instead of stepping in.
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Being a caring partner doesn't mean eliminating every problem before your partner experiences it.
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It doesn't mean anticipating every need.
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It doesn't mean making sure nothing ever goes wrong.
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And it definitely doesn't mean carrying the entire relationship so that your partner never has to drop a ball.
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Sometimes being a good partner means letting another adult have their own responsibilities, their own discomfort, and even their own mistakes.
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And if that feels really uncomfortable, it might be worth paying attention to.
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Because if you learned early that other people's moods were unpredictable, or that mistakes had big consequences, or keeping everyone happy was how you stayed safe, OCD overfunctioning can become more than just an OCD strategy.
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I will do a whole episode on that piece because there's a lot to unpack there, and trauma can affect everything we've been talking about.
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Thanks for listening today.
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If you love the show, hit subscribe now and get every new episode five days early.
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The link is in the show notes.
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If you are struggling, please reach out to a qualified mental health provider who can work with you directly.
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What I share here comes from my clinical experience and my own journey, but your situation is unique to you.
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If you are in crisis, please contact 988 or go to your nearest emergency room.
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Thanks for being here.