Why you can be brilliant at work but less so at relationships

Many people who have experienced adversity grow up to be exceptionally capable.

They are organised. Reliable. Emotionally intelligent in professional settings. They anticipate needs, manage complexity, hold responsibility, and perform under pressure. From the outside, they look confident, successful, composed.

And yet, in relationships, they may feel confused, overwhelmed, unsure of themselves, or perpetually disappointed.

This contrast can be deeply unsettling. It often carries shame: Why am I so competent here, but not there?

The answer is not a lack of insight, effort, or emotional maturity. It is usually the result of containment and compartmentalisation.

Containment is the ability to hold emotion in order to function.

Compartmentalisation is the ability to separate parts of experience so life remains manageable.

Both are sophisticated survival skills.

In environments where emotional safety was inconsistent or absent, these skills were not optional - they were essential. Feelings had to be managed internally.

Needs had to be muted. Attention had to be directed toward what was predictable and controllable.

Work, achievement, and responsibility often provided exactly that.

Professional environments reward clarity, structure, boundaries, and competence. They offer roles, rules, feedback, and a sense of worth that is externally defined.

For a nervous system that learned to stay safe through performance and self-containment, this can feel grounding.

Relationships, by contrast, are far less contained.

They require vulnerability without scripts. Emotional presence without certainty.

Boundaries that must be felt rather than enforced by role or hierarchy. For someone whose system learned safety through control and self-reliance, this can feel disorienting.

Not because they lack the capacity for intimacy, but because intimacy asks different things of the nervous system.

This is why someone can be deeply attuned to others at work, yet struggle to stay connected to themselves in close relationships. Why they can negotiate, lead, and problem-solve with ease, but feel unsure of what they want, need, or feel with a partner.

There is no emotional deficit and no evidence that you are “bad at relationships.”

What you are seeing is a nervous system using the tools it learned early, tools that worked extremely well in certain contexts.

Healing does not require dismantling these skills. They are strengths.

It involves gently expanding capacity so that the same system that knows how to function under pressure can also tolerate closeness, uncertainty, and emotional reciprocity.

Over time, containment can soften into presence. Compartmentalisation can give way to integration. Competence can coexist with tenderness.

Nothing needs to be forced. Nothing needs to be judged.

You are not broken in one area of life and brilliant in another.

You adapted, intelligently, to the environments you were in.

And with safety, new ways of relating can emerge, at their own pace.

Rebecca xo