Why Might Empaths Seem The Least Empathic When Someone Else Is In Pain?

The Shadow Side Of Feeling What Others Feel

I’ve been thinking a lot about empathy as I’ve been writing the book proposal for a book I’m co-writing with my partner Jeffrey Rediger, author of CURED. We’re writing about the health consequences of “fawning” narcissists- and the seemingly miraculous radical remissions that can sometimes happen when people get themselves out of abusive relationships, start setting firm, clear boundaries, do the YOU-Turn to start offering empathy to their own hurt inner child parts, and unburden all those protector and exile parts using Internal Family Systems (IFS). Jeff and I will be co-teaching a weekend workshop on Zoom October 7-8 called The Mysteries of Spontaneous Healing, and we’ll be previewing some of what we’re writing about, in case any of you are health care providers, therapists, or people in recovery from wounded boundaries with chronic health issues. (You can register here.)

It’s one thing to have empathy for other people, and it’s an altogether different animal to extend empathy to your own traumatized parts. A lot of people who identify as “empaths” feel deeply what other people feel, but they don’t necessarily pay much attention to what their own parts are feeling, much less tune into and communicate what those parts might need- for your wise mature adult Self- or from other people. When we do all the giving in relationships, it tends to impact our physical bodies in damaging ways. Health requires us to have empathy for ourselves and others- with very good boundaries.

Empathy is a beautiful, pro-social quality that breeds compassion, tolerance, sensitivity, and community. But when someone feels empathy for others while being numb to the need for empathy for ourselves and our own hurt inner children, empathy that’s only directed outwards can make us vulnerable to narcissistic abuse, boundary issues, enabling, and chronic illness. It can also make us confused about what is our responsibility- and what is someone else’s responsibility.

Let’s say someone you care about wound up gambling on cryptocurrency, and after chasing the rush of all that heady Bitcoin, they lost their shirt. Now they come crying to you and wanting to borrow money. Or let’s say your partner cheated on you with someone who wound up dumping her, and now she’s heartbroken and coming to you, wanting a shoulder to cry on and begging you not to tell the kids what Mommy has done.

If you are a sensitive, nurturing, compassionate, caring empath who feels the pain of others because your boundary injuries made you overdevelop these parts and underdevelop your self-protective instincts, self-directed empathy, anger, and assertiveness, you may find it very hard to just let the crypto gambler reckon with their financial issues or let the cheating partner work out their heartbreak in therapy, allowing yourself to just sit in the stew of someone else’s painful reaction to the consequences of their own choices.

You might even find it intolerable to just be with these people when they’re in distress, without jumping to try to fix the problem so you don’t feel what they feel. You might empathically feel their pain in yourself, due to your overdeveloped empathy, and this might cause you to try to take responsibility for what is not actually yours to handle.

Caring Versus Enabling

It’s wonderful to care for others, while also caring for ourselves. But caring can cross over into codependent enabling if the boundaries are confused or weak. If you look at it from the right lens, you might see that your caregiving instincts are not only caring about the other person; they’re also self-interested. Without good empathic boundaries, you might not want the other person to feel emotional pain because then you feel their emotional pain as your own. If you can’t tolerate feeling someone else’s painful feelings, you may be motivated to violate your own or someone else’s boundaries as a way to try to make the other person’s painful feeling go away.

But their painful feeling does not need to be your painful feeling. You can put a boundary between their feeling and your feeling. This is your responsibility- to find a way to be with your own emotions and let them have their emotions separately, behind a good emotional and psychic boundary. Your emotions are your emotions. Their emotions are their emotions. If need be while you’re healng your boundary wounding, find a way to protect yourself, even if it means physically separating yourself so you don’t have to get infected with the dark cloud of someone else’s tantrums, pouting, crying spells, anger, violence, screaming, or manipulative guilting.