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Empathy Fatigue & Overload
Empathy is a powerful and beautiful trait that allows us to connect deeply with others, understanding and sharing their feelings. As highly sensitive people, we possess an exceptional ability to sense and feel the emotions of those around us. However, this heightened sensitivity can also lead to emotional fatigue and overwhelm, particularly when we struggle to set boundaries and take on the responsibility of managing others’ emotions.
I’m going to share several recent personal experiences I went through and how they culminated in my own bout of empathy fatigue. My experiences were messy, miserable, and felt like absolute mayhem but they led to some incredible insight and deeper awareness. Ultimately, my purpose is to show you that even when you have the knowledge, tools, and understanding, you may not always be up to the task of management but you can be up to the task of learning to release judgment. I aim to provide you with some strategies for navigating your sensitivities and celebrating our progress as empaths and highly sensitive people.
What is the Difference Between Being Empathic and Empathetic?
How Can Empathy Lead to Emotional Overwhelm?
What Are the Pitfalls of Taking on Other People’s Emotions?
How Can Highly Sensitive People Navigate Emotional Challenges?
- How Can I Set Boundaries Without Feeling Guilty?
- How Do I Manage My Emotions Without Absorbing Others’ Feelings?
- How Do I Stop Feeling Responsible for Other People’s Emotions?
Personal Reflection and Progress
- Why Do I Judge Myself for My Emotional Reactions?
- How Can I Celebrate My Progress as a Highly Sensitive Person?
- Why is it Important to Balance Empathy with Boundaries?
What is the Difference Between Being Empathic and Empathetic?
First, we need to make some important distinctions between what it means to be empathic vs empathetic and define or understand what emotional projection is:
Empathic
This refers to the ability to intuitively sense and deeply feel the emotions of others. Empaths can pick up on emotional cues and energies, often absorbing them as if they were their own. This can happen with other humans, animals, plants, or even the collective state of the world and the overall environment.
Empathetic
Being empathetic involves understanding and relating to the emotions of another person without necessarily feeling those emotions yourself or at least feeling them less intensely like they are at a distance and not absorbed by your HSP energy. It’s more about cognitive and emotional understanding than direct emotional experience.
Emotional Projection
This occurs when unresolved emotional wounds cause individuals to project their feelings onto others. Instead of recognizing our own emotional wounds or triggers, we attribute our feelings to someone else making assumptions of what they may be feeling and doing from our own tinted lens.
Understanding the differences between these three will help you better identify where your triggers are that lead to overwhelm.
How Can Empathy Lead to Emotional Overwhelm?
Can Empathy Cause Anxiety and Fatigue?
Empathy can indeed lead to anxiety and fatigue, especially when empaths absorb others’ emotions and energies without having set adequate boundaries either within themselves or with others. This emotional overload can manifest in various ways, such as difficulty sleeping, heightened stress, and an inability to communicate effectively.
How Do I Recognize Empathy Fatigue?
Empathy fatigue often presents as a sense of emotional exhaustion, difficulty managing your own emotions or internal states, and feeling overwhelmed by minor changes or stressors.
Personal Experience:
Recently, my husband and I decided to change our last names to share a family name, a plan we’d had since getting married over a decade ago. I avoided telling my parents about this decision, anticipating their strong reactions. This issue came to a head just before we left for a weekend getaway, adding to my existing anxiety about the trip. The getaway involved staying in a house with many people, including young children, which I knew would be loud and chaotic.
Already sleep-deprived from the previous week, I continued to sleep poorly during the trip. When we returned home, our roommate, trying to be helpful, had made some changes in the backyard. In my heightened emotional state, these minor changes felt overwhelming, and I found myself unable to speak. My boundaries had been crossed, leaving me unable to communicate and reaffirm boundaries for a couple of hours.
After practicing self-care and emotional processing techniques from the My Sensitive Self course, I finally managed to talk to my roommate. In addition to being unregulated myself, had been avoiding this conversation because I didn’t want them to have a negative reaction. When I could speak again, I politely asked him to restore the yard to its previous state, acknowledging his efforts to reduce our stress. I explained the situations that had heightened my emotional state, and he understood that coming home to unexpected changes could be overwhelming for me. We both apologized.
As I was telling you my story, did you pick up on the triggers that result in empathy fatigue? In my situation, there was a good mix of being empathic, being empathetic, AND emotional projection going on. All culminating in my undoing or rather my dysregulated and overwhelmed state resulting in empathy fatigue.
Let’s take a closer look at what the pitfalls are of taking on the responsibility of others’ emotions and emotional reactions.
What Are the Pitfalls of Taking on Other People’s Emotions?
One of the major pitfalls of taking on the responsibility of other people’s emotions results in us playing small or hiding. When we’re so worried about what other people think and feel, we start living our lives from their perspective which is not fulfilling or fitting to who we are and what we’re here to do in this life.
Why Do I Avoid Confrontation as an Empath?
Avoidance of confrontation is a common pitfall for highly sensitive people. Fear of managing others’ strong emotions can lead to delaying important conversations, ultimately increasing anxiety and emotional burden.
Personal Experience:
A few days later, I visited my parents to work on taxes and have dinner. I wanted to discuss the name change and reassure them that our intention was not to distance ourselves from the family or run away from my past. The conversation was rough, and although it was mostly handled well, there were times when I didn’t show up my best—I got frustrated, angry, sad, and discouraged.
Reflecting on these experiences, I realized the thoughts that were taking place:
- I shouldn’t have avoided talking to my parents
- I’m a coach who ‘knows better,’ it should be like this
- Our friends should have found a sitter for their kids – this is supposed to be an adult getaway
- Changes shouldn’t bother me so much.
- I disappointed my parents…again
- I shouldn’t have to even deal with this
- Why is it always my responsibility to deal with how everyone else feels?
That last one makes me giggle a little because now I can totally see that it is NEVER my responsibility to deal with everyone else’s emotions – I’m just so damn good at it with my job as a coach, it’s easy to forget that I don’t need to do this with everyone I’m in contact with – and shouldn’t be so I can allow my own humanness and growth.
So how can we as highly sensitive people navigate other people’s emotions? First, we need to recognize where we were being empathetic AND emotionally projecting like I was. I had past experiences with my parents and roommate where I had an empathic experience feeling their disappointment and discomfort of being put on the spot. This informed my being empathetic where I cognitively understood the potential of how they would feel if I addressed things directly which also plays into my emotional projection of how I would feel if they reacted the way I anticipated.
From these experiences, I learned that the key to managing empathy fatigue is recognizing where we are being empathetic, empathic, and projecting emotionally.
How Can Highly Sensitive People Navigate Emotional Challenges?
How Can I Set Boundaries Without Feeling Guilty?
Setting boundaries is crucial for emotional health and well-being, yet many highly sensitive people struggle with guilt. It’s important to recognize that setting boundaries is not selfish but a necessary step to prevent emotional overload and maintain healthy relationships.
A good way to know when you need to set or reinforce a boundary is if you feel resentment—either towards yourself or another person. You may also feel guilt because you were like me and recognized where I should have talked to my parents before I did, or feel guilt for having to reaffirm the boundary with my roommate about making changes to the house and yard without talking with me first. And then that guilt triggered the resentment towards myself for not doing it.
What I want to offer you is that what if the feeling of guilt wasn’t a problem in the first place? But rather a signal to help remind you that you are fully capable of handling those conversations and all the emotions that come with them. And this is where it goes into learning how to navigate emotional challenges as they relate to other people’s emotions.
How Do I Manage My Emotions Without Absorbing Others’ Feelings?
Managing your own emotions without absorbing others’ requires intentional practices like self-care, emotional processing techniques, and clear communication. All things I teach and coach you on inside the My Sensitive Self program.
In my case, practicing self-care and emotional processing helped me regain my ability to communicate and set boundaries effectively with my roommate, which resulted in a mutual understanding and appreciation.
How Do I Stop Feeling Responsible for Other People’s Emotions?
It’s essential to understand that while you can empathize with others, you are not responsible for their emotions. Recognizing this distinction helps in setting boundaries and managing your emotional health. In my situation with my parents, I had to let them have their own opinions and emotions and own my own emotions to their reaction. Doing so allowed me to be okay with handing their disappointment and hurt back to them with a recognition that their opinions of the name change stemmed from their own emotional projections and were not even within my power to heal or address.
It’s when we can recognize our own personal projections clearly, that we can then start to see others’ emotional projections. When we see them, it’s so much easier to make that separation and give them and ourselves the autonomy to be our own persons.
Personal Reflection and Progress
Why Do I Judge Myself for My Emotional Reactions?
Self-judgment often arises from internalized expectations and societal pressures as I’ve talked about on previous podcast episodes. Reflecting on your emotional responses and recognizing them as part of your human experience can alleviate some of this judgment.
Again, it’s when we judge our emotions as good/bad, positive/negative, or right/wrong that we start to get into trouble. What would it be like to recognize the specific emotion, do what we need to to feel it and process it through, and then move on with our lives? Some emotions are easier than others, but just like with learning a musical instrument, we learn the foundations, and then we practice different songs to get better and better. It’s no different with how we handle our emotions.
How Can I Celebrate My Progress as a Highly Sensitive Person?
Celebrating progress involves acknowledging the small victories in managing your sensitivities. Handling situations to the best of your ability in that moment is a significant step forward. Recognize and appreciate your growth and resilience. One thing I love about coaching my clients is pointing out their wins when they don’t recognize them themselves. They’ll say something and gloss right over it and I’m like “hold up, backup, you did what?! That’s a HUGE deal because that wasn’t your baseline before.” They always have the best faces when I point these out and we get to pull out the proverbial glitter cannons and celebrate the hell out of something that seems so small but is really a major step forward.
Learning how to celebrate is a skill and I beg you to start practicing it every day, every hour, even. It will most likely become one of your favorite mindfulness practices because who doesn’t love a good celebration moment, am I right?
Why is it Important to Balance Empathy with Boundaries?
Balancing empathy with boundaries is crucial to preventing emotional fatigue and maintaining healthy relationships with yourself and others. By understanding the nuances of empathy and setting clear boundaries, you can navigate your sensitivities more effectively and celebrate your progress along the way.
The day after I had dinner with my parents where we talked for like three hours about our feelings, I felt so empowered. I truly had my own back with my decision about the name change and trusting them to handle their emotions. We cannot live the kind of life we yearn for without learning how to be okay with letting others have their own thoughts and feelings about us. I’m not pretending to be perfect at it by any means, but I’m so proud of how far I’ve come in my own journey. And I’m proud of the incredible work my clients do in their own journeys. And I’ll go as far as to say that I’m proud of my parents for how far they have come in their journeys – the colors I paint with are not always the colors they have on their own pallet.
Empathy is a gift, but it requires careful management to avoid emotional overwhelm and fatigue. Remember, it’s okay to handle situations as best you can in the moment and to celebrate your progress on this journey of emotional self-awareness and growth, including whether it’s just having the awareness afterward as I experienced in a few of my experiences. Each step is a step forward.
Discover Your SECRET STRENGTH as a Sensitive Soul!
Take the ‘Elemental Energy Type’ quiz.
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