Michelle Wollaston On The Cost of Overgiving: Why Smart Women Struggle with Toxic People

When overgiving becomes the price of belonging

I was prompted to write this after reading a post on social media by a woman describing her recent diagnosis of reactive depression. What struck me was not the diagnosis itself, but what she named as the breaking point. Her story was not one of a life untouched by hardship. She had survived childhood sexual abuse, removal from her biological family, and years of rebuilding after experiences that would flatten many. She had gone on to create meaningful work supporting others through ethical practice and lived experience. Yet it was a recent relational rupture, a dynamic of overgiving and betrayal, that brought her to collapse.

In my work, I often see this contrast: people who have lived through immense difficulty, and who appear outwardly strong, can still be brought to their knees by a relational dynamic that slowly erodes them from the inside. Not because they are fragile, but because the deepest struggles are rarely about what is happening on the surface. They are about belonging, worth, and the quiet cost of staying connected to something that no longer honours you.

As someone who moved into early childhood education after becoming a mother myself, and later spent decades working across both early years and adult education, I have long been aware that human behaviour does not emerge in isolation. We are patterned in relationships first. Long before we have language for it, our nervous systems learn what connection costs. Developmental theory has always understood this: when safety and belonging are inconsistent early on, the child adapts in order to maintain attachment. What looks like “overgiving” in adulthood often begins as survival in childhood.

Psychologist Abraham Maslow spoke of belonging as a foundational human need, sitting just above physiological safety. When belonging feels uncertain, people will do extraordinary things to preserve it. Much of this wiring is laid down early. The first years of life are not just a backdrop; they are where the nervous system learns whether connection is safe, consistent, and dependable. Many women shaped by early trauma become outwardly capable and resilient. They build careers, families, and identities. But beneath that competence can sit an old relational blueprint: approval must be earned, harmony must be maintained, and love must be secured through usefulness.

This is also why public judgment is so often misplaced. In high-profile stories of exploitation and coercion, the public reflex is to reach for a simple question that sounds logical on the surface: why did she go along with it, why didn’t she stop it sooner, or why was she there at all? The same reflex shows up in everyday relational dynamics too, just dressed in softer language: why did you tolerate that friend, why did you keep giving, or why didn’t you pull back emotionally before it got so damaging? But trauma-informed practice has long understood that human behaviour is rarely that simple. When early attachment needs, power imbalances, grooming, or long-standing patterns of earning belonging are active, people do not experience their choices as clean or straightforward. There is often an internal knowing that something feels off, but it is bound up with fear of loss, fear of abandonment, and the nervous system’s drive to preserve connection at all costs. Judgment collapses complexity into a sentence. Understanding restores the full human story.

This is why toxic dynamics are rarely entered knowingly. Exploitation does not announce itself with cruelty. It often begins with familiarity, charm, neediness, flattery, or even an invitation to rescue. The other person may present as wounded or misunderstood, and the woman’s capacity to hold, smooth over, and provide becomes a source of emotional supply. For someone conditioned early to earn connection through caretaking, this can feel like purpose. It can even feel like love. The imbalance deepens slowly until it becomes normalised.

The shift often comes when boundaries appear. The first clear limit, the first refusal to overextend, can be the breaking point. What was tolerated becomes punishable. The woman who has carried the weight is suddenly recast as harsh, selfish, or disloyal. This is one of the clearest markers of relationships built on access rather than mutual respect. When someone benefits from your lack of boundaries, your healing becomes their inconvenience.

Betrayal in these contexts often lands more deeply than earlier trauma. Many women report that they survived extraordinary events, yet fell apart after relational harm. From a psychological standpoint, this makes sense. Betrayal is not simply disappointment; it reactivates the original wound of not being safe with those you let close. The body registers relational threat as danger. Chronic stress becomes exhaustion, and exhaustion can become illness, depression, and collapse. This is not fragility. It is cumulative load.

Women do not remain in toxic dynamics because they enjoy being mistreated. They remain because the emotional blueprint was written early: love must be earned, approval must be maintained, and leaving means abandonment. This internal logic keeps people tied to draining friendships, coercive workplaces, unequal emotional labour, and relational arrangements that slowly erode wellbeing. It is not a weakness. It is misdirected survival.

For the woman reading this and recognising herself, the first shift is not shame. It is clarity. Many women have spent years believing their overgiving is simply kindness, their tolerance simply loyalty, and their endurance simply strength. Seeing the pattern for what it is can be confronting, but also relieving. It names something that has often lived under the surface: the unconscious belief that being loved requires being useful, forgiving, accommodating, and always available. Awareness is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of choice.

From a life direction perspective, this is where the path turns. Not through dramatic reinvention, but through honest recalibration. Empowerment does not mean becoming hardened or suspicious. It means learning to notice what your life is asking for now. It means recognising the early signals: the tightening in the body, the quiet resentment, and the sense of performing for belonging. It means understanding that a boundary is not cruelty; it is information. It reveals whether a relationship is built on mutual respect or on access.

And for the woman reading from the outside, watching someone stay too long and wanting to say, “Why don’t you just stop?”, this is an invitation to widen the lens. Most people are not choosing harm because they cannot see it. They are navigating old wiring, deep needs, and nervous-system survival responses that do not respond to logic alone. Compassion is not excusing poor behaviour from others. It is understanding why disengaging from dynamics that once felt like belonging can be so complex.

The work, then, is twofold: to help women come home to themselves, and to create a culture where we replace reflexive judgment with informed understanding. Healing begins when a woman realises she does not have to earn safety through overextending, and that love which requires self-erasure is not love worth keeping.

The work is not to shame women for staying too long. The work is to understand the pattern and recalibrate what love is allowed to cost. Healing often looks like learning that care does not require self-erasure, that generosity does not require tolerance, and that love is not proven through endurance. Support, therapy, medication, rest, boundaries, and recovery — these are not signs of breaking. They are signs of return. For many women, the most radical act is not resilience. It is receiving, and no longer bleeding love into places that cannot hold it.