overresponsible.

from female legacies: intergenerational themes and their treatment for womyn in alcoholic families by claudia bepko from the book a guide to feminist family therapy 

"drinking will reinforce a womyn's already ascribed one-down status."

"one function of alcohol is to make tolerable the constricting and paradoxical demands of the female role - on the one hand drinking relieves the pressure of being a caretaker and on the other it permits a forbidden sense of power.  ultimately it provides punishment for both."

"commonly each overresponsible womyn began to take 'pride' in her overfunctioning and became perfectionistic, controlling, or giving as an attempt to salvage self-esteem, to cover feelings of inadequacy, and indeed to maintain a pseudo sense of self in a family environment in which all healthy self focus and growth is sacrificed to an obsessive preoccupation with alcohol and the alcoholic.  emotional expressiveness is significantly absent in all family relationships.  none of the womyn in the family are capable of expressing anger openly or directly.  they all suffer from chronic depression, underlying guilt, and low self-esteem.  they choose partners with whom they have clear one up or one down complementary.  if they operate in the one-up position with their partner, it is in the interest of having what is experienced as a valid target on whom to externalize anger."

"this drama occurs in a larger context in which it is assumed that males are entitled to power and to having needs met without having to make those needs known explicitly, in which the 'appropriate' hierarchical arrangement is one in which the male is one up, and in which all womyn inherit a legacy of intense guilt if they do not overfunction or, conversely, if they do directly acknowledge their anger or their own desires and feelings."

"her major goal was to develop a sense that she had a right to assert her needs, views, and strengths for her own benefit rather than everyone else's.  she continually fought the feeling that such behavior was disloyal and would result in her being unloved and abandoned."

"as M attempted to reverse her role in the family, she met with much anger and hostility.  she went from being in the 'hero' role to being in the 'scapegoat' role. . . M needed to have validated and to grieve the emotional realities of life in an alcoholic family: the very real emotional deprivation, and the inappropriate demands made on her as a child to be an adult rather than to experience acceptance of and response to her dependency."

"M gradually realized that the 'strengths' she took pride in, competence, intellectual understanding, and focus on achievement, were survival skills that now sometimes blocked her emotional development.  they sometimes became overstated attempts to gain a sense of self in a family in which there was little or no validation of her value as a person or as a womyn."