Empathy is a wonderful thing to have, but it needs to come in limited doses. Too much empathy often turns into enabling, which is essentially supporting someone in their own self-destruction. There comes a point where you just need to say enough is enough, and draw hard boundaries so that hopefully the other person will make the choice to help themselves.
Of course, striking that balance is difficult because they’re usually going through some bad times for it to get this serious. But, still, you need to be aware of the times when your empathy is crossing that line. Times like these:
1. When you shoulder the burden of the consequences for their actions.
As Talkspace shares, it’s rarely a good idea to try to save someone from themselves. By doing that, you’re not only expending valuable emotional energy and stress of your own, but you’re preventing them from healing. There are some people who just have to learn the hard way. They need to experience the full consequences of their choices before they can finally decide they want to do better.
Is it okay to help out? Sure. But you shouldn’t be making excuses for them or trying to minimize the harm they are causing to other people. That’s not your responsibility, and you’re setting back their progress by denying them those important lessons. After all, the only real way to gain wisdom is to earn it through suffering. Ease their suffering too much, and they won’t learn anything.
2. When you silence your own needs to keep the peace and reduce stress.
There’s a big difference between being a caretaker and a supporter, as addiction experts at Fellowship Hall inform us. A caretaker is someone who is sacrificing their own needs to help prop someone else up. Sometimes that’s necessary, like if you’re caring for an elderly parent, for example. In that situation, it’s a reasonable expectation that you’re going to be putting your parent first.
However, when it comes to other matters, like in a romantic relationship, that may be a different thing. Support can easily turn into caretaking, and then it feels like you’re more of a parent than a partner. I experienced this myself with a severely mentally ill ex-girlfriend. Over the course of the year we were together, and the years we were friends, I was more her personal therapist than anything.
I jumped through a lot of hoops to make her feel safe and secure. But, unfortunately, she absolutely refused to get help. She refused to try to be sober, even though she would get messily, black-out drunk regularly. Eventually, I realized she wasn’t going to try to change, so I had to distance myself from her because I was enabling her, not helping her.
3. When your compassion replaces their responsibility for their own problems.
You can’t carry someone else’s load for them for long. Yes, it’s okay to do it in small doses when someone is really struggling, and if they’re trying. However, if your compassion is allowing them to avoid taking responsibility, then they aren’t learning anything. And if they’re not suffering the negative repercussions of their actions, they’re just going to keep doing them.
In the case of my ex, she would get sloppy drunk, aggressive, and act badly to other people around her, whether she knew them or not. That involved a lot of embarrassing apologies and feeling embarrassed at her behavior, mixed with pity. Pity that she felt that was the only way she could conduct her life. It’s hard to tell how many relationships and opportunities she ended up destroying in her alcoholism.
4. When empathy starts delaying the hard conversations you need to have.
Every relationship requires hard conversations, sooner or later. Even the most compatible of people will have fundamental differences that need to be addressed. That’s also one of the ways that relationships evolve and get stronger. You meet at a hard point, talk it out, find a solution or compromise, and then continue on together in the relationship.
However, it becomes problematic when that other person starts using their problems to avoid those hard conversations. Again, going back to my ex, she avoided a lot of hard conversations because she had some severe trauma that she used as a crutch. She would get upset, start crying, and because I wanted to be empathetic, I would say, “It’s no big deal. We can talk about it later.” Except never later came, and the cycle continued.
5. When you tolerate disrespect because your empathy is borne of knowing where they are coming from.
I’ve had my own fair share of problems with mental illness and substance abuse. My ex’s struggles weren’t unfamiliar to me at all. I went through similar things, so I accepted much more abuse and tolerated bad behavior than I should have. I allowed her to disrespect me on multiple occasions because I knew she was going through a hard time, and I wanted to give her a safe space to heal.
But she never cared about how her actions affected me. She didn’t care how her words cut or her behavior disrupted friendships and relationships. She didn’t care that a number of people didn’t feel safe around her while she drank. And she didn’t care when she was abusive, because I’m a man, and I was apparently supposed to take it if I were a “real man”.
6. When you find that your patience is not matching their effort.
It’s an unfortunately common pattern for someone who doesn’t really want to change to talk a big game about how they are going to be different. And you’re left wondering, are they being honest? Do they genuinely want to change? Did they finally hit a point where they can see how much they’re hurting you? You’re left wondering if you’re making the right decision.
One strategy that they will use is to change just enough to placate you and make you feel like they are serious. However, someone who is genuinely ready and willing to change will be making so many different efforts to do that. They won’t be making excuses about why they can’t. They won’t just be trying to drag out time. They will make an active choice and do it. If they’re not, well, then they’re probably not being honest about their willingness.
7. When your empathy encourages dependence.
Only in hindsight can I see that my empathy encouraged my ex’s dependence. I was too kind, too understanding, too accepting of her behavior because she had been dealt such a bad hand in life. I thought I was doing the right thing, being compassionate to her, to try to be with her through her struggles. But, in hindsight, it made her dependent because she would hide behind me when her actions would catch up with her.
We cannot carry the emotional and mental load of another person. We all have our own problems, too. It’s good to try to be supportive and helpful, but you have to find a balance with it. People need to be as independent as they can be, and they need to want to be better for themselves, not anyone else. Changing is a lot of work, and a person will not commit to it until they are ready.
In closing…
Five years after I parted ways with my ex, she decided to take her own life. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had stronger boundaries with her, if I didn’t enable her in the time we spent together. I know I was capable of setting firmer boundaries, but I chose not to because I thought that’s what being compassionate was. I never gave her the opportunity to learn and realize that she couldn’t keep living life the way she did.
But it’s a balance, because there were times I should have been hard, and other times I should have been soft. I wish I had understood that then, but I didn’t. If you find it hard to find the balance, I highly recommend using a therapist to help find the sweet spot.
