Don't let EMPATHY DESTROY YOU | Healthy vs Unhealthy Empathy
Can you care about somebody without drowning in it? Empathy is not something you are given, it is something you grow. And there is a version that eats you alive.
Can you care about somebody without drowning in it? Empathy is not something you are given, it is something you grow. And there is a version that eats you alive.
There are two ways this goes. Disconnection, where you decide not to take on their pain at all, and the other version where you sink into it with them. Neither one helps. There is no use going round in the same grieving, deeply caring state they are in. That is not support. That is two people underwater.
One thing to try: Notice whether you are feeling with somebody or feeling instead of them. There is a difference.
In this episode
(0:00) Being fully human, and fully accepted for who you are
(2:24) Empathy is grown, not handed to you
(5:07) Being stuck there a long time, or feeling like I was
(7:16) Therapists, counsellors, and the two versions of this
(9:34) No point going round in the same grieving state they are in
Can you care about somebody without drowning in it?
Yes, and it is a skill rather than a gift. Empathy is not something you were handed at birth. It is something you grow, and there is a version of it that eats you alive.
The heart of it
Nobody is born empathetic. You learn it by being hurt.
Two people underwater is not support.
Feeling it and carrying it are different jobs, and only one of them helps.
You arrive as a blank canvas. Then you get an ego, then preferences, and then, eventually, loss. And it is the loss that teaches it.
When my granddad died I learned what grief feels like. That is the only reason I can meet somebody else's. Not exactly, because I do not know how close they were or what else they are carrying, but near enough to be useful.
You cannot explain a bungee jump to somebody who has not done one, and you cannot explain losing somebody either.
Which is worth knowing, because it means empathy is something you built. If it had simply been given to you there would be nothing in it to be proud of.
Now the two failures.
The first is disconnection. I will not take their pain on, I will keep this professional, they are not my family. That is not restraint, that is absence.
The second is the one people mistake for being deeply caring. You take it on completely and carry it home, and next week, and to the next person.
There is an old story about two monks who meet a young woman who does not want to ruin her dress crossing a muddy lane. One picks her up and carries her over. The other is quietly appalled and says nothing until that evening, when he raises it.
The first one says: are you still carrying her?
Think about a nurse. If she took every patient home she would not last a fortnight, and every patient after that one would get less of her.
One small thing to try
Feel it fully, then put it down when you leave.
That is not coldness and it does not make you less caring. You can pick it back up next time you see them, and you will be in far better shape to be of use.
The test is simple. If my daughter rings me struggling, does me being miserable for the rest of the week help her? It does not. It gives her something else to worry about.
Questions people ask
Is being an empath a bad thing?
Not at all, and I have been there. What I am saying is that carrying everybody's pain around is not the finished version of empathy, it is an early stage of it, and it costs you more than it gives anybody.
How do I put it down without feeling guilty?
By noticing that the holding was never the help. Nothing you carry between visits reaches them. What reaches them is you turning up able to be present.
Can empathy keep improving?
Yes, and that is the encouraging part. It is a muscle. You get better at going deeper into somebody's experience while staying steady enough to be of some actual use.
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The transcript
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empathy · boundaries · compassion
Read the transcript
Hey, welcome to Living Deeper Lives, the podcast that helps you to be fully human and to be fully accepted
for who you are and your purpose.
This week, I want to talk about empathy and healthy empathy versus unhealthy empathy.
What do I mean by this? And this is something that I've been thinking about more and more the last
few years. and it's not something I see much around. You see a lot of people talking about empathy and
what empathy is and what it means to be an empath, but I want to dig deeper into that, and
that's what Living deeper lives means. Let's dig deeper into empathy. Where does it come from? How do we develop
it? And what is the difference between healthy empathy and unhealthy empathy? So briefly, let's start with where
does empathy come from? Are we born with it? Well, no. I hate to burst many people's bubbles, but we're
not born in caring, loving, beautiful, empathetic creatures. We really not. We're born into this world as a
blank canvas. And then as life goes on, we develop an ego of what we want and what we enjoy
in life. And then as time goes up by we develop the things we like and
things we enjoy, and we have relationships. But then when the relationships start breaking down or when we lose someone
or somebody in our family passes away, we develop pain. We. We
recognise what it's like to be hurt and we feel grief. And when we start feeling the grief, we start
understanding what it feels like to be in pain. And then empathy really is just understanding someone else's
pain, putting ourselves in their shoes. So when someone comes along and tells us their story, we feel their pain,
we feel their discomfort and their suffering.
And the thing is, with all of these things we develop, when we develop them, once we're in them, we
feel like we always had them, but we really didn't. So that's one of the first big myths that I
would like to bust. When you suddenly think. When you suddenly feel like you're a really caring, loving human, you
suddenly feel that that's always been you down to the core, but it really hasn't. So recognise that empathy is
a wonderful thing we develop. It's a wonderful thing we grow and we learn to do. It's
not just given, because if it's just given, there's nothing to be proud of. It's like any born talent. If
we don't have to work at it, why be proud of it? It's like when people say, I'm proud to
be Cornish. It's Like, well, what did you do to become Cornish?
Nothing.
So why be proud of something that, you know, Be proud of something you work hard at. And empathy is
something you work hard at. Empathy is something you learn. You learn through having hard times and pain.
You learn through grieving and losing people. It's like when I lost my granddad and that loss developed pain
inside of me and developed grief. And with that, I learned what it was like to grieve for somebody. And
then when someone else could come along one day and say, like, I've lost my granddad, I can relate to
how they're feeling. Not exactly. Not entirely, because I don't know how close they were, I don't know their situation,
I don't know how caring they are anything but I can somewhat relate to it. It's the same with learning
any of the deeper feelings. We have to experience it to know what it's like. It's like, I can explain
what it's like to do a bungee jump all day long. Until you actually do it, you don't know what
it's like. I've never done a bungee jump, so I don't know why I use that example. But unless you've
lost somebody in your life, you'll never know what it's like to lose somebody. So that's the same with all
of our deeper feelings. But
what is healthy empathy and unhealthy empathy? Well, empathy, the same as any other skill, the
higher you get at it, the better you get at it, the the better your empathy is. And what do
I mean by better empathy? How can you how can you have like, how can you develop empathy as a
skill? Well the if you put it into levels, and I'm not necessarily putting in levels, but let's say we
do. When you first develop empathy, it's like, oh, yeah, I really feel for them. And then
we carry it with us we We find it hard to put down. We actually take on that feeling. And
that's what we might be labeled as, empaths. And I'm sorry, all you empaths out there, you're all going to
really. Not like this, but an empath, somebody that feels everything deeply and it really upsets them and
they carry along with them. And I was there for a long time, or I felt like I was there
for a long time I might have been kidding myself, I don't know. But when I felt like I was
there, I was. If someone come along and said, oh, you're an empath I'd be yeah I take on Other
people's feelings. I take on the world's problems and how do we live in this world? This world is a
really horrible, painful place to live in. Well,
that's unhealthy. Empathy. Taking on other people's pains. The next level of empathy has been able to feel
their empathy, but not. Not taking on, not carrying it and There's a wonderful Buddhist fable about this.
There's two Buddhist monks were walking down a lane, and they come across a beautiful girl that was wearing a
long black dress. And she said, I want to get to the other side of the lane, but I don't
want to get my dress dirty. And one of the monks looked up and said, well, I'll carry you across
So, okay. He picks her up and carries her to the other side and puts her down. And the other
british monk says online you really shouldn't have done that. We're not supposed to
carry them. We're not supposed to interact. We're supposed to let people solve their own problems and such like. And
he said, okay, well, it didn't hurt just to carry her across. Then later that evening, the British monk that
had a problem with her looked up and said to him, do you know what? I really think we did
the wrong thing today. I really think it did not fit what we're supposed to do. And the other one
looked up and goes, are you still carrying her? And
what it means by that is you take a nurse or a doctor, if they experience someone's
pain during the day and they take it to the next patient and they take it home, they cannot function.
They
cannot. They wouldn't be able to deal with life if they took on everybody's pains, if they took on every
person that passes away in their care or every illness they come across. And the
same as therapists or counsellors,
and and there is two versions here. There's the version of disconnection. Well, I'm not going to take on their
pain. I'm going to do it professionally. And it doesn't bother me they're not They're not me and my family.
That's disconnection. That's not empathy. Empathy is genuinely feeling their pain. It's putting yourself in
their shoes, in their story, in the best possible reference that you can have based on your
experiences in life. So you dig deep in your life and experiences to experience what they're going through.
But
then you let it go later. You let it go because it's not part of your life. It's not your
pain to share. It's not your pain. To pain and sorrow and grief to hold on to And no amount
of you keeping it and staying with it is going to help them.
You know, if my daughter phones me up and says, I'm really suffering today, me suffering as well, after the
bit of empathy, me suffering as well is not going to help her one little bit. What if I get
so um stuck in the suffering? What if I start going back to her and going, oh, I know, and
I'm really suffering now Kember your pain is really coming on to me and things like that. Now I'm gonna
make her miserable as well. So both of us are gonna be in a pit of misery. Well, that's unhealthy,
empathy. And I hear many empaths are very much like that. How do I deal with life when I feel
things deeply?
Well, we recognise that the empathy comes and goes, that we don't have to hold it.
It's the same with many feelings. It doesn't mean you're less caring by moving on later. And when you come
across them again, you can go, how are you feeling? And put yourself back in their feelings again. But there's
no point in you holding their feelings in the time when you're not with them or in the time.
But there's no point in you holding all the feelings in the time you're not with them. There's no point
in you going around in the same miserable um grieving feeling, understanding, deep, caring
way in which your experience their experience in their feelings and you experience in the same.
I hope that makes sense. I hope um you can see a difference between that empathy is a good thing.
I don't want you to misunderstand that I'm saying empathy is a bad thing because I'm not. Empathy really is
not a bad thing. It's a great thing and I wish more people would develop it.
But continue to develop your empathy, continue to improve it, make it better so you
can empathize in a deep, deep way without taking on their feelings. I'm
Steven Webb and I help people through troubled and hard times when they're struggling. And you can head over to
my website and download a free meditation and get started to find your own inner peace now Take care and
thank you. And if you can review this podcast or subscribe and follow, that would be really appreciated. Have a
