The Compensatory Tax

A Note on Scope

This essay reflects educational observations drawn from clinical practice and executive coaching work. It is not psychotherapy, mental health treatment, or clinical advice. Reading it does not establish a therapist–client, counsellor–client, or coach–client relationship. Executive coaching at AshleyKreze.com is distinct from regulated psychotherapy services. Any clinical examples described are composites drawn from common patterns and do not represent any specific individual. Full notice appears at the end.

The Pattern

What I have come to call it

I have come to think of it as a compensatory tax. A quiet, ongoing extraction from internal resources that pays for the appearance of being functional at a level the person can no longer authentically sustain. The performance everyone admires is being paid for in ways the performance itself is designed to obscure.

The tax accumulates in small, ordinary ways. Imagine a composite picture: a senior executive who can hold a board meeting with measured calm but finds her daughter’s bedtime questions strangely intolerable, because the smallness of them feels like a final demand on a depleted system. A senior partner who can deliver a flawless client presentation but has noticed he has stopped feeling pleasure when his children laugh. A founder who has handled four years of compounding pressure and has not cried in any of them, and is no longer sure whether that is strength or something else.

None of these composites describes a failing person. Most of them describe someone excelling, by every external metric the world uses to evaluate them. Their organizations are succeeding because of how they show up. And yet what often surfaces in the quiet of a session, when the performance has temporarily been set down, is a quality of internal experience that has become progressively hollow. The cost has been accumulating. The person, often, has been the last to notice.

“The performance everyone admires is being paid for in ways the performance itself is designed to obscure.”

On the Conversation Underway

A clarification, before I go further

This is not the first essay on this pattern. Others have circled it from their own vantage points, and any reader looking carefully will find a small but growing literature on the hidden cost of being capable.

Phil Jesse (2026), in his recent writing on what he calls the competence tax, has named a related organizational phenomenon — the way workplaces reward their most reliable people with progressively heavier cognitive load, until the person eventually leaves in silence. Julie Hook (2025), a clinical neuropsychologist, has written about the hidden cognitive cost of being high-functioning — the bill that comes due quietly even on calm days, the way ordinary life requires continuous reconstruction of stability for people whose nervous systems are already over-recruited. The academic literature has used the term compensatory control for nearly thirty years to describe what happens neurally when the brain protects performance by recruiting additional resources at proportionally increasing internal cost (Hockey, 1997).

What I am adding to this conversation is a particular integration — clinical observation drawn from seventeen years of psychotherapy practice, woven through attachment theory, contemporary stress neuroscience, and the realities of executive coaching with senior leaders. The pattern, as I see it, is not just cognitive overload. It is not only an organizational design flaw. It is also — and this is what years of clinical practice has clarified for me — a deep attachment phenomenon, a nervous system phenomenon, and ultimately a phenomenon of identity. The compensatory tax, in this framing, is the cost paid by the part of the person that learned, very early, that being loved or safe required producing something. That part has often been so successful, for so long, that it has begun to consume the person it was originally trying to protect.

The Mechanism — Body

What the research suggests is happening

The body keeps a running account of what is being asked of it. The autonomic nervous system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and the slow churn of cortisol and adrenaline are not separate systems from the leader’s experience of leadership. They are the infrastructure underneath it. When a senior leader maintains composure through a difficult quarter, an interpersonal conflict, or an ambiguous strategic decision, the appearance of composure is being produced by measurable internal labour (Sapolsky, 2004).

McEwen’s (1998, 2007) research on allostatic load — the cumulative wear and tear from chronic stress responses — describes what accumulates in the body when this internal labour is sustained without adequate recovery. The system compensates by recruiting additional regulatory resources, but the resources themselves can begin to degrade. Research has documented that chronic stress is associated with changes in sleep architecture (Buckley & Schatzberg, 2005), elevated inflammatory markers (Cohen et al., 2012), and impairments in cognitive function and emotional regulation (Lupien et al., 2009; Arnsten, 2009). Hockey’s (1997) compensatory control framework describes how performance can be protected under stress through additional effort recruitment — but only at proportional behavioural and physiological cost.

What is critical to understand — and what some behaviour-focused approaches under-address — is that this depletion is not a failure of will. It is not a discipline problem. It is not a time management problem. It is, in part, a physiological consequence of an operating mode that has been sustained beyond what the system was designed to sustain. When a senior executive’s evening requires several glasses of wine to come down from the day, that is not most usefully framed as a habit issue. The nervous system is over-recruited and seeking downregulation. That the chosen downregulation strategy is also corrosive is a separate problem the person will eventually need to face — but the underlying need is biologically real.

The Mechanism — Self

Why this particular pattern, in this particular person

If you sit with enough high-functioning leaders, a particular developmental signature begins to emerge. The story varies, but the underlying pattern is consistent. Somewhere early, this person learned — through caregiver dynamics, family-of-origin pressures, cultural expectations, sometimes the quiet brutality of being identified as the capable child — that their place in the world was secured by what they could produce, manage, or carry. Approval was often contingent. Safety was often contingent. And the contingency was usually attached to being the one who could be counted on.

This is attachment theory in one of its most practical adult applications. The internal model the person built — what Bowlby (1969/1982) called an internal working model — was organized around producing safety through performance rather than receiving safety through connection. Subsequent research has extended this developmental framework into adult relational patterns (Hazan & Shaver, 1987; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007). Within Emotionally Focused Therapy, Johnson (2008, 2019) has described how these early templates shape adult attachment strategies, including the strategies people use to manage emotional needs in professional and personal life. The compensatory tax, in this framing, is the ongoing cost of operating from an attachment template that was adaptive in childhood and is now slowly hollowing out the adult who has built an entire life on its foundation.

This is part of why behaviour-focused interventions can produce short-term change without durable transformation for this population. The frameworks often address the visible system — performance, communication, strategic thinking, executive presence — without engaging the underlying attachment dynamic that is driving the over-performance in the first place. The leader does not need a better way to perform. They need a way to feel safe enough to stop having to. And that work tends to be relational, somatic, and slow.

Many of the leaders I work with have not been given this framing. They have often been told they need better systems, more disciplined delegation, clearer boundaries, more recovery practices. All of which can be useful — and none of which address the underlying organizing principle that makes those interventions hard to implement. The reason a person who knows they need to delegate often cannot is rarely a skills problem. It is more often that delegation requires tolerating the discomfort of not being the indispensable one, and the indispensability is what their attachment system has organized around for decades.

“The leader does not need a better way to perform. They need a way to feel safe enough to stop having to.”

The Clinical Layer

A quiet kind of disconnection

There is one more piece worth naming, because without it the rest of this essay risks describing the problem without naming the thing that makes it persist. Many high-functioning adults are not consciously aware that they have, over time, organized their internal life around being functionally present without being emotionally present. They have learned to perform groundedness rather than feel it. They have learned to deliver warmth without fully accessing it. They have learned to respond to their children, partners, and colleagues from a distance that is small enough to go unnoticed but large enough that connection does not fully land.

In the clinical literature, related phenomena have been described under several frames — chronic functional disconnection (Schore, 2003), structural dissociation in its mildest forms (van der Hart, Nijenhuis, & Steele, 2006), and the depleting effects of sustained emotional labour, particularly what Hochschild (1983) called surface acting and what subsequent research has linked to depletion and burnout (Grandey, 2003; Maslach & Leiter, 2016). What these accounts share is the observation that operating in a state of low-grade emotional disconnection over years has measurable cost — to relational depth, to access to one’s own inner experience, and to the systems that would otherwise be sources of replenishment.

The compensatory tax often shows up most heavily here. The internal cost of maintaining performance under chronic depletion is, eventually, that access to one’s own inner experience narrows. Joy, surprise, intimacy, creative play, awe — these are not luxuries. They are part of what refills the well. When access to them narrows, the well does not refill at the same rate. And the person, often without quite realizing it, comes to operate from a chronically low-grade state of depletion that has become so familiar it no longer feels like a problem in need of solving.

What It Tends to Cost

What I have observed accumulating

In the people I have worked with, the compensatory tax has often shown up in these forms:

• Relationships that quietly thin out — partners who report feeling managed rather than met; children who learn not to bring their full selves to the parent who looks too tired to receive them
• A narrowing of internal experience — fewer authentic moments of pleasure, less capacity to be moved, less access to what used to feel like aliveness
• Confusion about what they actually want — leaders who have spent decades being effective at delivering what is needed sometimes lose familiarity with what they themselves desire
• Physical effects that accumulate — changes in sleep, energy, recovery, and resilience that the person often rationalizes as the cost of doing business
• A distance from themselves — often the last to register, because by then the person has forgotten what closeness to themselves felt like

None of this tends to happen dramatically. It tends to happen through ordinary days, repeated for years, in lives that look from the outside like exactly the lives the person worked hard to build.

Why It Persists

Why familiar interventions sometimes don’t hold

By the time a senior leader recognizes some version of this pattern in themselves, many have already tried the obvious interventions — the retreat, the new exercise routine, the executive coach with a strategic framework, the vacation that helped briefly and then evaporated within ten days of returning, the mindfulness app, the book on burnout, the promise to themselves to set better boundaries this quarter. Often, none of it produces durable change, because the deeper mechanism has not been addressed.

The compensatory tax is generally not paid because the leader lacks knowledge of what they should do differently. Most senior leaders have abundant knowledge. The tax is paid because the deeper system that organizes behaviour — the attachment template, the nervous system patterning, the identity that has been built on being the capable one — does not typically change through behaviour modification alone (Schore, 2003; Porges, 2011). It tends to change through experiences that allow a different organizing principle to come online. And those experiences require time, repetition, and a kind of relational scaffolding that does not collude with the person’s performance.

Both psychotherapy and executive coaching can offer parts of this work in different ways. Psychotherapy is well-suited to deeper relational and developmental work; coaching is well-suited to the pace and relevance of senior professional life. For some leaders, what supports lasting change is an integration — clinical understanding of the underlying patterns combined with the forward-oriented structure of coaching. My practice is organized around this kind of integration, for the population it tends to fit.

Recovery

What the work tends to require

Working with the compensatory tax is generally not a matter of paying it off and resuming life as before. The life as before is what required the tax in the first place. The work tends to be closer to a slow restructuring of the underlying operating model — paced to fit the realities of senior responsibility, grounded in a clinical understanding of why this particular person became this particular way, and gentle enough to be sustainable.

In practical terms, this often involves several layers of work happening in parallel. The nervous system tends to need repeated experiences of downregulation that do not require performance — something the body may not have known for years (Porges, 2011). The attachment patterning often benefits from being made visible, so the person can recognize the difference between their adult self and the part of them still organizing around earlier contingencies (Johnson, 2008; Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007). The identity that has been built on being the capable one usually needs to be expanded rather than dismantled — because the capability itself is real and valuable. What changes, when the work goes well, is the cost at which the capability operates.

Perhaps most importantly, the person tends to need experiences of being met in a way that does not require them to be functional. This is not a luxury. It is often the central intervention. Without it, behaviour-level strategies tend to revert to performance. With it, something quieter often becomes possible — a way of operating that does not require the same constant internal labour and does not extract the same daily tax.

This work is slow. In my clinical and coaching experience, it tends to be durable. Leaders who undertake it often come out the other side not less effective but differently effective — with capability that no longer operates at the same internal cost.

If This Resonates

A next step

If you recognized something of yourself in this essay, two paths exist for what might come next. The first is to take the Capacity Audit — a brief self-assessment that helps you see, with some specificity, what you have been carrying. The second is to have a conversation. There is no expectation of either.

A Note on Method

How these observations were arrived at

The clinical observations in this essay are drawn from pattern recognition across approximately seventeen years of psychotherapy practice with adult clients across a range of industries, roles, and presenting concerns. They do not constitute formal research findings, and they are not generalizable claims about populations. Every person’s situation is different, and the pattern described here will not fit everyone — even those who recognize parts of themselves in it.

All examples are composites assembled to illustrate common patterns. No example represents any individual client, and no identifying information has been used. Where claims are made about underlying mechanisms (neuroscience, attachment, stress physiology), they are supported by peer-reviewed research cited below.

References

Cited works (APA)

Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2648

Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books. (Original work published 1969)

Buckley, T. M., & Schatzberg, A. F. (2005). On the interactions of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis and sleep: Normal HPA axis activity and circadian rhythm, exemplary sleep disorders. The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, 90(5), 3106–3114. https://doi.org/10.1210/jc.2004-1056

Cohen, S., Janicki-Deverts, D., Doyle, W. J., Miller, G. E., Frank, E., Rabin, B. S., & Turner, R. B. (2012). Chronic stress, glucocorticoid receptor resistance, inflammation, and disease risk. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(16), 5995–5999. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1118355109

Grandey, A. A. (2003). When “the show must go on”: Surface acting and deep acting as determinants of emotional exhaustion and peer-rated service delivery. Academy of Management Journal, 46(1), 86–96. https://doi.org/10.5465/30040678

Hazan, C., & Shaver, P. (1987). Romantic love conceptualized as an attachment process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(3), 511–524. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.52.3.511

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling. University of California Press.

Hockey, G. R. J. (1997). Compensatory control in the regulation of human performance under stress and high workload: A cognitive-energetical framework. Biological Psychology, 45(1–3), 73–93. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0301-0511(96)05223-4

Hook, J. (2025, December). The hidden cognitive cost of being high-functioning. Medium.

Jesse, P. (2026, March). The competence tax: Why high performers leave in silence. philjesse.com.

Johnson, S. M. (2008). Hold me tight: Seven conversations for a lifetime of love. Little, Brown Spark.

Johnson, S. M. (2019). Attachment theory in practice: Emotionally focused therapy (EFT) with individuals, couples, and families. Guilford Press.

Lupien, S. J., McEwen, B. S., Gunnar, M. R., & Heim, C. (2009). Effects of stress throughout the lifespan on the brain, behaviour and cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 434–445. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2639

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience: Recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20311

McEwen, B. S. (1998). Stress, adaptation, and disease: Allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 840(1), 33–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1998.tb09546.x

McEwen, B. S. (2007). Physiology and neurobiology of stress and adaptation: Central role of the brain. Physiological Reviews, 87(3), 873–904. https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00041.2006

Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P. R. (2007). Attachment in adulthood: Structure, dynamics, and change. Guilford Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton.

Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why zebras don’t get ulcers: The acclaimed guide to stress, stress-related diseases, and coping (3rd ed.). Holt Paperbacks.

Schore, A. N. (2003). Affect dysregulation and disorders of the self. W. W. Norton.

van der Hart, O., Nijenhuis, E. R. S., & Steele, K. (2006). The haunted self: Structural dissociation and the treatment of chronic traumatization. W. W. Norton.