Empathy is one of humanity’s greatest gifts. It allows us to look at someone else who’s hurting and not only understand their distress, but connect to what they’re experiencing.
Connecting to another’s experience doesn’t mean that you’re responsible for making it better, however. That is emotional caretaking, not empathy.
Even though it’s noble to want to do so, emotional caretaking can be exhausting and can cause a person to neglect their own needs and emotions in favor of rescuing someone else from theirs. What’s more, it often doesn’t serve the other person in the long run either.
With that in mind, here’s how to stay on the right side of the line to protect yourself and others.
How to avoid your empathy from crossing into emotional caretaking:
1. Become aware of your immediate reaction when someone expresses a problem.
If you grew up in an environment where you were either parentified or became the peacemaker in stressful situations, you may have gotten used to being the problem solver in any given group that you’re part of.
As a result, you may default to being the “fixer” whenever someone is upset. You may not even realize that you’re doing this, because the response is as unconscious as breathing to you.
As such, try to be vigilant about your responses when someone expresses a difficulty to you. It’s normal to feel empathy for what they’re going through, but if you immediately feel like you’re obligated to fix this for them and can’t rest or be happy until you do so, make a point of drawing back from the situation.
You can express empathy towards others without being responsible for them and their well-being.
2. Determine whether you believe you need to earn people’s love by serving them.
A friend of mine has been an emotional caretaker for as long as she can remember. She was born to a young teenage mother, helped to raise her younger siblings, and then pursued nursing as a career.
Her entire life revolves around taking care of other people, and that includes taking on their difficulties as if they were her own.
She ended up so depleted from doing this for over 30 years that she developed severe burnout and two autoimmune conditions.
When asked why she did so much for so many people, to her own detriment, she admitted that she believes they’ll stop loving or caring about her if she did.
She was raised to believe that she was only valued as long as she was fixing things for others, and would be abandoned if she stopped.
If you’ve experienced something similar, you may feel that you need to keep earning other people’s love by taking on their struggles as your own, and not resting or feeling content until they’re okay again.
You don’t. Your value as a person goes far beyond just keeping other people happy. And anyone whose love is conditional on you serving them is not someone you should be spending your precious time and energy on.
3. Recognize that fixing others’ issues is preventing them from living their own human lives.
If someone you care about is telling you about something that’s going wrong in your life, that isn’t your cue to fix it.
You can be there for this person and offer them assistance if they ask for your help, but make sure it’s exactly that — assistance. Not fixing it for them because you’ll feel distressed alongside them until this issue is resolved.
Solving other people’s problems does them a great disservice because it deprives them of the opportunity to grow through experience.
Furthermore, taking on their problems as your own can deplete and harm you, especially if you’re already overwhelmed or stressed out with your own life obligations.
Let other people feel their emotions and face their problems themselves (with you available for moral support only).
Experiencing a wide range of feelings and situations is an integral part of being human, and that includes the challenging ones.
4. Examine whether you are trying to fix others to alleviate your own suffering rather than theirs.
When you feel the push to fix someone else’s problems, are you doing so out of a strong sense of altruism? Or because their issues are making you feel bad, angry, or anxious, and it’s only by taking action that you can alleviate those feelings?
For example, do you feel safer and more secure if everyone else around you is happy and free from conflict?
Many people who are deeply empathic and feel what those around them are feeling may want to alleviate those uncomfortable emotions any way they can. That’s understandable, but this desire is for their own benefit more than those of others.
For example, if you feel stressed out because your friend is having a problem, your desire to fix the problem may be to ensure that you stop feeling so stressed, rather than because you sincerely want to help them.
Similarly, if people around you are being quieter than usual, your hypervigilance for your own safety may cause you to want to find out what’s wrong with them. Then, when they tell you about it, you feel pushed to make it better to get back to baseline normal, because only then will you feel safe and okay.
This may be difficult to examine, but it’s worth doing. It doesn’t make you a bad person to want to reduce your own suffering, but in the long run it is worth learning to tolerate the discomfort that comes with simply holding space for someone.
5. Learn to pause and take a step back rather than automatically reacting.
A person who’s inclined towards emotional caretaking may feel someone else’s stress, panic, or anxiety like it’s their own.
If this happens to you, your heart might race, and you may feel sick when someone you care about is dealing with a problem. When this happens, take a pause and a big step back to determine whether this issue affects you directly.
If it doesn’t, then remind yourself: you are not obligated to leap into action. You may want to, and you may feel a pressing need to make things better as quickly as possible, but this is where you need to withdraw and reconsider.
Avoid the inclination to get involved immediately in order to alleviate tension, either your own or theirs. Instead, recognize that you can say “no” without guilt or obligation.
If this feels too difficult in the moment, you can say “I’ll need to think about it” to buy yourself some time and then follow up with a “no” later by text or phone.
If they try to guilt trip you into taking care of this problem because, well, you’re so much better at it than they are, encourage them to do it themselves, with full faith in their ability to do so.
6. Identify and focus on your own needs.
Whenever you feel the pressing need to help someone else with one of their issues, ask yourself what you need right here and now.
Are you tired? Do you have a headache? Are you hungry? Thirsty? Would you benefit from spending some time outside? How about a quick journaling session?
Most people who leap into emotional caretaking towards others deprioritize their own needs in favor of helping those around them instead, and end up suffering needlessly as a result.
Honoring your own needs also includes admitting when you don’t have the bandwidth to process or fix someone else’s problems at that time.
Although it may be scary to you, learn how to say things like: “I care about you deeply, and I want to help you, but I don’t have the resources to deal with this right now.”
7. Learn to accept people being upset with you for not doing what they want.
Many people are absolutely devastated if anyone thinks poorly of them. And if you fall into this category, you may default to people-pleasing instead of expressing things authentically, solely so that others don’t dislike you.
As such, should you find out that an individual has said something negative about you, or has decided that you aren’t a good person for some reason, you might panic and make it a personal mission to do all you can to get back into their good books.
But you know what? It’s okay to be the villain in someone else’s story.
We can’t control what other people think of us, and it only hurts us if we perpetually throw ourselves under the bus just so others don’t think or feel anything negative about us.
Get comfortable with allowing others to keep their perceptions of you, without rushing to improve or correct them. You don’t like everyone else on the planet, and not everyone will like you either.
And that’s okay.
Final thoughts…
Nobody becomes a chronic emotional caretaker overnight. It usually happens when someone spends a long time feeling obligated to fix and manage other people’s emotional states, usually at the expense of their wellbeing.
You may have gotten used to regulating your parents’ emotions as a child or peacekeeping a living space shared with volatile flatmates. Essentially, you became incredibly adept at seeing and alleviating everyone else’s pain, while neglecting your own.
But there’s no time like the present to take a big step back to focus on your own needs and allow others to handle theirs without interference or assistance.
