For years, the word “empath” felt like a relief to one writer. It explained why other people exhausted her. She saw herself as someone who could read others instantly and was always helping, listening, or supporting people in crisis. Now, she no longer believes that definition applies to her.
She found a different understanding that helped her stop feeling stuck. She learned she could change her responses to other people’s emotions. Instead of managing her life around them, she focused on herself.
At first, she followed common advice for empaths. This advice told her to avoid “toxic” people and “emotional blood suckers.” But that felt like another cage. Even when she tried to protect herself, she still felt overwhelmed by the emotions of her relatives, children, husband, and close friends.
She discovered a different word that changed her life: appeasing. Appeasing is a survival response. It activates when emotions or situations feel too much. Like fight, flight, or freeze, it is a response to a sense of unsafety. She learned at an early age that if she anticipated and supported the feelings of those around her, she would feel safest.
Her survival reaction was to be hypersensitive to others’ emotions. She learned that safety came from suppressing her own feelings to help others. As an adult, she kept that pattern. She felt safest when her emotions were ignored, but other people’s were attended to. She drew a sense of belonging from being the supporter, the listener, and the helper.
She realized that being helpful was not driven by genuine desire. It was driven by a need for safety, belonging, acceptance, and love. Unraveling this response has been a challenge. She had to learn to attend to her own emotions and build a sense of safety in her nervous system.
She learned that other people’s emotions can feel scary and even dangerous. It did not come naturally to share what she felt because of patterns laid down in childhood. With awareness and the right tools, she learned to walk toward authenticity. She can now be surrounded by other people’s emotions without being overtaken by them.
She also learned that her way of supporting people—by fixing, smoothing things over, and endlessly listening—was not the kind of support that helps them change. True emotional support does not come at the emotional cost of another person. Her support should never risk her own energy or sense of safety.
Being an empath felt like a lifelong sentence. She now knows it is a learned response that can be unlearned. She offers a few tips to help others.
Awareness
Creating awareness is the first step. We cannot change what we do not notice. Start by noticing what it feels like to be around people when they are emotional. What happens to your body? What emotions activate in you when you hear another person’s emotional activation? Turn your attention away from others and toward yourself. If you feel a sense of urgency to help or fix, it is a sign that your survival responses have turned on. Your brain is sending signals that there is a threat. When you feel that urgency, the next step is to bring a feeling of safety to your body.
Creating a Sense of Felt Safety in the Body
One way to offer your nervous system a cue of safety is an orienting exercise. Start by gently and slowly looking around the room. Let your gaze drift slowly. Turn your neck gently. Take in all of your surroundings. Stop on objects that catch your interest, not as objects but as collections of colors and shapes. Slowly look above you, below you, and behind you. If you have a window, look outside to the horizon line. The horizon line is soothing for the nervous system. Knowing what is around you and that there is no threat brings a sense of safety. Do this for a minute or two. Allow ten seconds for any changes to be soaked up by your nervous system. This exercise can be used a few times a day.
Creating a Pause
The final tip is to create a pause. When people ask for things, it can be hard to remember what you need to do. A pause allows you to check in with yourself before reacting. It gives you time to choose a response that is not driven by survival. This simple act can help break the cycle of feeling exhausted by other people’s needs.
