The Cost of Overfunctioning: When Competence Becomes a Disguise

I keep returning to the old tale of the fisherman and the flounder. It turns up in supervision and in my own thinking at moments when effort feels endless and strangely unquestioned.

In the story, a poor fisherman casts his net into grey, restless water and pulls up not an ordinary fish but a talking flounder. Flounders are creatures of the seabed, almost invisible against the sand until they are disturbed. This one is enchanted and pleads to be set free. The fisherman lets it go.

When he tells his wife what has happened, she does not linger with wonder. She sees possibility. She sends him back to the sea with a wish. And with that, something from the very bottom of the water begins to organise the entire surface world.

At first, the wish is small. A better hut. The sea darkens slightly but grants it. Then the hut becomes a house. The house becomes a palace. Each time the fisherman hesitates longer at the shoreline, sensing the water turning heavier beneath his feet, yet he goes anyway. He does not seem to want what is being asked for, but he is already carrying another’s hunger across the shore. With every return, the sea roughens. Kingdom. Empire. Godhood. And finally, the wave breaks. Everything is swept away. They are returned to where they started, with only the knowledge of what the sea revealed.

It is often read as a story about greed. Lately, I have been reading it as a story about boundaries, and about how uncontained wanting quietly migrates into someone else’s hands. It is also a story about how generosity slides into obligation without anyone quite noticing the moment it changes.

In contemporary clinical work, I think the fisherman is often the practitioner.

In theory, our work is held by frames that protect thinking and regulate emotional flow. Time, task, role, limit. They are meant to be the shoreline that lets us approach intense human suffering without being swallowed by it. Yet in stretched systems those edges fray. Gaps widen. Containment thins. And when the system falters, clinicians step forward. Availability expands. Risk is absorbed. Emotional labour thickens. What should have been held collectively becomes privately carried.

At first, this still feels like choice. “Just this once” is a very tempting phrase. One late email. One missed lunch. One extra session squeezed into the day. The sea still feels shallow enough to stand in. But over time, the water changes. Overfunctioning creeps in quietly and rarely announces itself as trouble. It arrives dressed as competence. It looks like reliability, initiative, emotional capacity, maturity. It sounds like “I’ve got this”. It feels like being useful.

Overfunctioning is disturbance hidden in competence. It is what happens when pressure on the boundary is converted into personal effort rather than collective concern. Instead of asking what has failed upstream, we compensate downstream. Instead of naming a breach in containment, we stretch ourselves to fill it. The system, like the wife at the hearth, learns very quickly what the sea will tolerate.

“You always cope so well.”“How did you manage that?”“Could you just hold one more?”“I know it’s a lot, but there isn’t anyone else who knows how.”

Each question sounds like praise. Each one carries another wish to the water.

In the fairy tale, the fisherman never quite rebels. He does not rage or refuse outright. He walks back and forth between the hut and the sea, carrying desire that is not wholly his. What gathers in him is not only fatigue but dread. Dread of refusal. Dread of what might happen if he stops. Care that has slipped into compliance so slowly it is almost invisible.

When I listen to clinicians who are overfunctioning, I hear echoes of that same quiet ledger. The hours that drift far beyond what was agreed. Ethical edges softened by constant pressure. Reflection replaced by triage. “No” becoming harder to locate in the body. Empathy once offered to others now turned back on the self as proof of worth. The sea in the story does not punish the fisherman. It simply reveals what one pair of hands cannot contain.

When supervision becomes procedural, when thinking is compressed into output, when dynamic administration falters, the fisherman is sent back to the tide with nowhere on the shore to stand and breathe. I think of a newly qualified therapist who once described working from her car as evidence that she was coping. I think of assistant psychologists holding after-hours crises alone and wearing independence like armour. I think of senior clinicians quietly funding the team away day from their own salary. Their competence was real. So was their depletion. What looked like compassion and hard work was often the system’s anxiety migrating into someone’s nervous system.

This is how devotion gets mistaken for containment.

In the original tale, the collapse feels inevitable. But I find myself imagining a different moment. The fisherman standing at the water’s edge while the tide surges, feeling the familiar pull of responsibility, the old script that ties value to capacity. And instead of stepping in automatically, he pauses. Not in rebellion, but in recognition. The sea, and the wife beside it, do not need another messenger. They need boundaries.

It matters to say that the wife is no villain. She is a carrier of unheld hunger. When the fisherman does not immediately comply, something else becomes possible. The hunger has to be named. The relation has to shift. The wish has to return to its proper owner. Even the flounder changes function. Instead of granting endless expansion, it becomes a mirror. What you are asking for cannot be built on one person’s back.

And then the question becomes harder. What do we do when the sea still rages.

Because sometimes the boundary is not only symbolic. Sometimes it has to become physical. The fisherman does not just think differently. He stays on the shore. He lets the tide rise without entering it. He allows the storm to exist without proving his devotion by being soaked in it. There are moments in clinical work when the only ethical move is to stop stepping into the water, even when the water is loud, even when the hunger is desperate, even when the guilt is sharp.

The pause at the shoreline is where reality, limits, and risk are allowed back in.

Containment, here, is not heroic solitude. It is shared fire. It is what emerges when systems begin to hold themselves again, when supervision digests pressure rather than redistributes it, when teams notice strain instead of admiring endurance, when emotional labour is recognised as labour rather than temperament. Overfunctioning loosens its grip when the system learns to feel its own hunger instead of exporting it into individual bodies.

At the end of the fairy tale, the return to the hut is usually told as punishment. I have started to hear it as truth. It is the scale at which life can actually be lived. Life on life’s terms. So often, we imagine the answer to our distress is to become bigger and better. We start to believe we are here to heal the sick, to turn back time, to undo the injuries of the past. To become, in some quiet way, godlike. But boundaries do not shrink the work. They right-size us. They make us real. They keep us human. Perhaps it is in understanding how it is in our small, practical acts of care that the work becomes inhabitable again.

And so the real question is rarely how much more you can carry. It is whether the sea you keep returning to is being allowed to be the sea, rather than a place of mastery.

If the fisherman’s path feels uncomfortably close to your own, it might be worth pausing at the shoreline before the next wish is spoken. Not to harden, but to reclaim. The boundary is not the barrier. It is the condition for shared life. The shore is still there. The fire can still be built. The work need not be drowned to prove that it matters.

Friday Fairytale Group

If you’re interested in exploring group psychology through the symbolic richness of traditional tales, you’re very welcome to join my Friday Fairytale Group. This is a monthly online space where we think together about the psychological depth of classic stories and what they illuminate about contemporary clinical life.

Upcoming sessions:

• The Fisherman and His Wife Friday, 23 January 2026 — 2:00pm to 3:30pm (UK)

• Bearskin Friday, 27 February 2026 — 2:00pm to 3:30pm (UK)

• The Girl with No Hands Friday, 20 March 2026 — 2:00pm to 3:30pm (UK)

You can find more details or book on any of them here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/828562130637?aff=oddtdtcreator