Each need you experience not fully resolved continues to compete for your attention. Compared to your more pressing concerns, most of these partially eased needs sit on the backburner of your conscious awareness. They remain in a queue, until evoked into full focal awareness.

Meanwhile, your cognitive bandwidth shrinks. You find you cannot focus as fully and clearly on some things. Your persisting needs pull you for relief. They prioritize your thinking. They bias you. They compel you to do something for their relief, sometimes negatively impacting others outside of your awareness.

“You’re being stupid!” they insist. Because it’s easy to conflate this cognitive contraction with lack of intellect, or lack of rational thinking, or with poor choices. They likely suffer this symfunctional strain too. When continually enduring unmet needs as a norm, it’s next to impossible to respect the needs of others. Symfunctional strain can slip into dysfunction, into projecting pain onto others, and other defunctions.