Understanding High-Functioning Individuals
- Oberdan Marianetti
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Over the coming weeks, I’d like to invite you into a conversation about a group of people I work with very frequently: high-functioning individuals.
Before we explore what this really means, it’s important to clarify the term itself. High functioning is not an official diagnostic label in psychology or psychiatry, even though it is commonly used alongside more formal language.
You may have heard expressions such as high-functioning autism, high-functioning depression, or high-functioning alcoholism. While familiar, these phrases do not appear in diagnostic manuals.
And yet, the term persists, because it captures something deeply recognisable.
Defining the Internal vs. External Experience
In everyday language, high-functioning points to a particular inner experience: a gap between how someone appears to function externally and how they feel internally. From the outside, life looks competent, organised, successful, and well-managed. On the inside, however, there may be self-doubt, exhaustion, fear of being exposed, or a persistent sense of not being enough.
A common example many of my clients recognise is what we often call impostor syndrome. Someone holds a role, a title, or a level of responsibility they have clearly earned, yet internally feels undeserving, living with a quiet terror that they will eventually be “found out”.
While this example is well-documented, the experience itself is far broader. It can show up at work, at home, in relationships, in parenting, and even in friendships, across all ages and stages of life.
In essence, a high-functioning individual is someone whose external world appears stronger, more capable, or more resilient than they internally feel equipped to sustain. The label exists because the outside seems to cope better than the inside feels it can.
Why this topic matter
Because this experience is far more common than we tend to acknowledge. I see it repeatedly in my clinical work, taking many forms and shapes. And because it maps closely onto a framework some of you may already be familiar with in my work - the Essence Principle: the idea that many of our struggles arise from a gradual disconnection from our innate core, from who we were designed to be, before adaptation, expectation, and survival took over.
Over the coming weeks, we will begin to unpack this gently and thoughtfully, not to label or pathologise, but to understand. To bring language, compassion, and awareness to an experience many people carry silently.
If any part of this resonates, I invite you to stay curious. This is not about fixing yourself but about coming back into closer alignment with yourself.
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