Are You Over-caring?
- Dr Tshidi M Wyllie,PhD.
- Nov 27
- 5 min read
Based on Don Colbert(MD)’s “Deadly Emotions”
I haven't read in a long time. But today, I want to be reading my favourite book for the month;“Deadly Emotions” by Don Colbert(MD). As I read the book, I'll go on to give examples and try to elaborate on what my understanding is telling me. I'm on page 99 of the book; sub-heading:
“Anxiety, Over-care and Fear”’.
He says, I read, is it possible to care too much? Yes, overcare describes a condition in which a person overidentifies with or becomes overattached to what he cares or she cares about. It's at that point that care becomes overcare.
The person who is the recipient of over-care activity is under a great deal of stress. So is the person who does the over caring. When care turns into overcare, its recipients begin to feel worried, anxious, guilty, threatened, fearful, and even angry.
Overcare actually makes a person feel as if he's just eaten five pounds of chocolate. He feels smoothed and seeks to escape. Doug Childre has written; “most of the time when people get anxious, angry, overreactive, or manipulative, they are caring about something. But in a draining and unusually ineffective way, the mind turns our genuinely caring intention into a mental and emotional drain”. Our grandparents' generation, used to calm themselves by saying, “live and let live”.
In our generation, however, we tend to do just the opposite. Like the tiny child who loved her pet chick so much that she squeezed it to death. We hold everything too tightly in this era we live in.
One of my patients seems to be a professional when it comes to over caring. Brandy was a pretty woman, tall, thin, with long black curly hair and personality that lit up whatever room she entered. Everyone loved to be around Brandy.
She could turn even the most mundane event into a party. So why did Brandy, who was nearly 50 years old when I met her, have no prospects for marriage and a long list of past heart breaks and painful relationships? The main reason was her over caring behaviour.
She had so much passion and zest for life, and she wanted a relationship so desperately that when she finally landed a guy, she sent him running for the nearest exit with her over care. She began every relationship with a premature assault of calls, gifts, letters, notes, and other tokens of her affection. She took it upon herself to meet all his relatives, call all his friends, and make connections with all of his connections.
If his head wasn't already spinning, she would change anything about herself that she thought he didn't like. Once while dating a particular man who liked country music, she began to wear denim and cowboy boots and even patches the horse. Imagine that.
She had never sat on a saddle or horse in her life, and she didn't really enjoy things western. But she felt she needed to change because she cared. Men in Brandy's lives experienced tremendous anxiety in the wake of her overcare, and they all backed off as quickly as possible.
Brandy was left with exact opposite of what she truly desired. As a consequence of her overcare, she was miserable. In many ways, we have become a society infected with many people who over care.
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How does overcare relate to fear? It is rooted in fear of some type of loss, perhaps loss of control, loss of one-sidedity, loss of not achieving what a person truly feels he needs or she needs in order to live. Brandy had a fear that if she didn't find a guy to marry, she would not have the life she deeply desired.
Always at the root of overcare is a long-term and abiding fear of abandonment, rejection, and loss. When we respond to these fear-generating emotions in our lives, we set ourselves up for a pattern of behaviour that not only makes us psychologically unhealthy but can make us physically unhealthy. Remember, we are talking about deadly emotions.
Holding too tight and Clinginess
Holding too tight to a relationship squeezes the life out of the relationship. It scares off the person that you claim to love. You can reflect back to your childhood and say:
Where is this clinginess coming from?
Where is this over caring behaviour coming from?
As a child, did I feel rejected?
Did I feel abandoned?
Did I feel unheard?
Did I feel unnoticed?
Where is this tendency to hold too tight in a relationship coming from?
For example, when you start texting so many times, calling so many times sending WhatsApp texts so many times and holding on too tight, the other person may feel :
claustrophobic,
crowded,
they can't breathe,
they need space
They may stop taking your calls ; limit or avoid taking your calls,
they may not respond to your text messages, distance themselves as a way of sending a message that , they need to breathe; You are squeezing too tight.
They need alone time to re-energise; find themselves
Over-identifying in a relationship can create problems rather than enhance the relationship.
Notice when you have tendencies to over care, because over caring may cause you to want to cling too tight to the relationship, leading o tendencies to monitor your partner’s whereabouts and activities.
When you call and somebody missed your call, they're going to see that you had called, and return your call. But in a situation where you end up calling 50 times, 30 times, 25 times, 15 times, and the person finding so many “missed calls” “calls, that on its own is saying something is wrong, is unhealthy, and they will run for dear life. Over caring could be a symptom of :
fear of abandonment,
fear of rejection
Insecure attachment
Pause and ask yourself:
how did this behaviour develop?
Does what you're experiencing now take you back to an incident in the past in your life when something triggered such an emotion that made you want to hold too tight?
what was that?
Could it be something from your previous relationship(s)?
Could it be that you were previously in a relationship where there were trust issues?
Or could it have been that in your childhood, there were issues of abandonment?
When your overacting behavior cause your partner to feel they can’t breathe, it may not necessarily mean that they are avoidant or disorganized attachment. They may just simply be feeling suffocated by your over caring.
Take time to reflect. Take time to process. Take time to pause and ask yourself, if I go to the extent of over identifying and changing everything about me with the hope of pleasing another person is it healthy?
It may feel healthy for you because you are using it to self-soothe your insecurities, to self-soothe your fear.
But switch positions and put yourself in your partner’s position and ask yourself, how the other person could be feeling?
Swap positions and ask yourself, if you're constantly over-attaching, constantly over-caring as a way of trying to express yourself and to show that you care, so you are over-caring and over-caring can even chase away the person that you want to be part of your life and over-caring enables you to over-identify with the person.
Reference
Botshelo, T.(2014). Itsose: Life Kills for the African Youth.
Colbert, D. (2003 ). Deadly Emotions
I got my copy of “Deadly Emotions” from Exclusive Books” store, I recommend you get yourself a copy; the book will help you avoid emotional diseases, improve your mental wellbeing and physical health.
The book is also available on Amazon in kindle($8.99), Paperback ($14.23), Hardcover ($18.89) and audio https://a.co/d/fzvUTQT
Wyllie, T.M.(2025,November17). Are You Over-caring?https://youtu.be/006tmwpxCu0
From New Beginnings CounsellingBW: Are You Over-Caring?, 16 Nov 2025
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