By, Naina
The people who are best at functioning under pressure are often the last ones to recognize what they're bringing home. It isn't them. It's a version of them running on fumes, operating on beliefs they've never examined, treating the people closest to them like another system to manage.
Dr. Eric Williams is a licensed clinical mental health counselor supervisor, marriage and family therapist, and associate professor at Walden University's School of Counseling. He's also an 82nd Airborne veteran and the father of twin sons with autism, nonverbal, with sensory processing disorder and intellectual disability. Nervous system regulation is not theoretical for him. It is a daily practice he built in real time.
He came to this conversation with a framework — and a name for the thing most high performers never think to examine.
Adopted Truths: The Beliefs Running in the Background
Dr. Williams uses the term "adopted truths" for the beliefs that quietly drive behavior, especially under stress. Things like: my worth is my output. Slowing down means falling behind. If I show her how hard this is, I'm failing as a provider.
These didn't start at work. For most high performers, they started much earlier — in families where attention came through achievement, in communities where producing something visible was the way to be seen. The job didn't create the belief. It just gave it the perfect environment to run unchecked.
What this looks like in a relationship: someone who excels at getting attention through output, but hasn't developed the skill of giving it. The partner who works 60 or 80 hours and wonders why the people at home feel like strangers. The person who's been told they're a great communicator at work and genuinely cannot understand why their spouse disagrees.
"People at work almost have a certain code," Dr. Williams said. "But communication can't be a one-size-fits-all approach. You have to have different shades of communication."
The hammer that works at the office is not a paintbrush. And most high performers, he said, don't realize they've been carrying only a hammer.
What the Military Taught Him — and What He Had to Unlearn
Dr. Williams was in basic training at Fort Benning when 9/11 happened. Overnight, the stakes changed. Training wasn't preparation anymore — it was preparation for war. And in that environment, the operating principle was clear: if they wanted you to have feelings, they would have issued them to you.
He learned that not having emotions was how you stayed alive. You showed up, accomplished the mission, took care of the person next to you. That was the whole job.
What he brought out of that experience: if you can jump out of an airplane and trust the process, you can trust the process anywhere. That filter still runs. But what he spent years unlearning was the version that said emotions are a liability. That things have a right way and a wrong way. That success is the measure of a person.
In relationships, he said, that right-versus-wrong rigidity is one of the most common places high performers get stuck. The shift he works to make with couples: from "is this right?" to "is this working for us?" Those are different questions. The first one has a winner. The second one has a direction.
The Four Rs: From the Last Slack Message to the Front Door
Dr. Williams developed a four-step framework — retreat, regulate, reflect, reconnect — specifically for the transition from work mode to home mode. For someone who goes from the last notification to the front door in about 30 seconds, this is the gap where everything breaks down.
Retreat means stepping back from the work role. Not physically leaving — mentally disengaging. Getting work off your mind and emotions before it attaches to the next environment you enter.
Regulate means bringing your nervous system down before you interact with anyone else. No road rage. No short fuse the moment someone asks something. Just getting back to yourself.
Reflect is only possible after you've regulated. It's the moment where you can actually diagnose what happened today — whether you're hungry, tired, in pain, or carrying something that has nothing to do with the person about to ask you how your day was.
Reconnect is returning to the people around you — as yourself, not as a depleted version still running on the fumes of the last meeting.
Without those steps, he said, partners and kids pick up on the state you brought home. They start asking what they did wrong. And you're hurting people without meaning to — not because you're a bad partner, but because you skipped the work that makes showing up possible.
When Capacity Runs Out
Dr. Williams shared the story of a Black founder in his mid-30s — three years into a startup, still fighting for funding, carrying everything alone. His wife came to therapy feeling like she'd lost him. Not dramatically, just slowly. His adopted truth: if I show her how hard this is, I'm failing as a provider.
Then he lost his brother. And the relationship couldn't hold what was left.
Dr. Williams was direct about what that story points to — the particular weight carried by Black men navigating both the pressures of building a company in an environment that makes funding harder to access, and the cultural expectations around what performing strength is supposed to look like. The man in that story wanted to make it work. He just didn't have the capacity to do it and the career at the same time, and he didn't have the individual work done to change that.
"For some guys, if I commit to being fully present in my relationship, I feel like I'm going to lose everything else that defines who I am as a man," Dr. Williams said. "It's not that they don't want to. They just don't have the skill set."
Capacity, he said, isn't fixed. And for high achievers who've built their identity entirely around a role, losing that role — through a layoff, a transition, aging — can leave them with no idea who they are when the output stops. The work of building an identity that doesn't collapse when the title disappears is something most high performers never get around to until something forces the question.
Listen to the full episode
To learn more about Dr. Eric Williams's work, take the free "Why We Fight" relationship quiz and join his community at coastalfamilymedia.com.
If burnout is following you home and you're looking for support, I work with clients one-on-one at Peakworks Counseling. Learn more at peakworkscounseling.com/services.
I'm Naina. This has been Systems Check. Please take care of your system.