How I Stopped Feeling Exhausted by Other People’s Needs and Feelings
“An empath is a person highly attuned to the feelings and emotions of those around them. Empaths feel what another person is feeling at a deep emotional level.” ~Leah Campbell When I learned the word “empath” about ten years ago, it felt like the most amazing relief. I thought to myself, yes, that’s me! Finally, an explanation as to why people exhausted me so much. A reason why I had the ability to read people in an instant and was always in the throes of helping, listening, or supporting other people’s crises. But now I no longer believe that definition. I am no longer an empath. Have I been cured? Or was I not an empath in the first place? For me, I found a different understanding that unlocked the ability to not feel stuck in the empath-prison I found myself in. I discovered I could change my responses to people’s emotions so that I no longer managed my life according to them. When I discovered the concept of empathy, I saw so many of the challenges I faced: attracting people to me who were struggling and in need of my support like moths to a flame; my inability to get out of the stresses and emotions of other people’s lives and focus on my own; my exhaustion from spending time with people. I started following common advice for empaths, but that started to feel like another cage. I had to orientate my life around avoiding “toxic” people, around “emotional blood suckers.” But I found that even if I covered myself in white light or avoided certain people, it didn’t prevent me from feeling completely overtaken by the emotions of my relatives, my children, my husband, or my close friends on a regular basis. It felt like I was in permanent reaction mode, and it was highly disempowering. A few years later I discovered a different word that changed my life in a more significant way—appeasing. Appeasing is a survival response that gets activated when emotions or situations are too much for us. Just like the fight, flight, and freeze responses, appeasing is a response to a sense of physical or emotional unsafety. I discovered that I had learned, at an early age, as many of us do, that if I knew how to anticipate and support the feelings of those around me, I would feel the safest. My survival reaction, the one that helped me stay as connected as possible to the people around me, was to be hypersensitive to their emotions, and to help with them. When we learn young that a sense of safety comes from suppressing our own feelings in order to be of assistance to others—or to at the very least minimizing our emotional needs so we aren’t rocking the boat, causing a fuss, aggravating our parents, or calling attention to ourselves—we then spend our adult lives in that same habitual pattern. We feel the safest when our emotions are not being attended to, but other people’s are. We might draw a feeling of belonging, connection, and validation from being emotionally available to other people, from being the supporter, the listener, the helper, the fixer. We also might draw a feeling of ease, of safety, of continuity by not expressing our emotions or needs, by not showing our true authentic selves. I know so many times in my life I felt proud of how helpful I was. What a ‘good person’ I was. How nice and supportive I was. But really it wasn’t a response driven by genuine, authentic desire—it was a response driven by a need for safety, belonging, acceptance, and love. For me, unraveling my appease response has been a fascinating and challenging experience. It is so woven into my being, to be the person who shows up as a delightful, easygoing, a no-stress, no-drama person. Someone who doesn’t add to the emotional load of any group or person but helps take away the problems and challenges of others. Coming out of those responses has taken immense awareness. I’ve had to learn to attend to my emotions, building a sense of safeness in my nervous system and offering incredible gentleness toward myself. I’ve had to recognize that other people’s emotions can feel incredibly scary, uncomfortable, terrifying, and even dangerous to me. And that it doesn’t come naturally to me to share what I feel and need because of these habitual survival response patterns laid down in childhood. But with awareness and the right tools, I have learned to gently walk toward the path of authenticity, of safety in being myself out there in the world, surrounded by other people’s emotions but not overtaken by them as I used to be. I also learned that the way I had learned to support people—by fixing, smoothing things over, helping, taking over, endlessly listening—was actually not the kind of emotional support that helps to enact change in them. True emotional support only happens when we aren’t in our survival reactions, and it never comes at the emotional cost of another. My support should never be something that risks my energy, my time, or my feeling of safeness. To me, being an empath felt like a lifelong sentence that I could never escape from. But I now know that it’s a learned response that can be unlearned. When we have the awareness and the tools to gently support the nervous system activation that comes when we are aware of other people’s emotions. Here are some tips to assist. Awareness Creating awareness was, for me, the most powerful first step. We can’t change what we don’t notice. We can start by noticing: What does it feel like to be around people, or certain people, when they are being emotional? What happens to my body? What emotions activate within me when I am hearing or witnessing another person’s emotional activation? It’s learning to turn our attention away from other people and to ourselves. What is happening for us?…
