For years, the term “empath” felt like a relief to one writer. It explained why she felt exhausted by others and why she was always helping, listening, or supporting people in crisis. She believed she was an empath, someone highly attuned to the feelings of those around her. But she no longer believes that definition.
The writer says she is no longer an empath. She found a different understanding that helped her stop feeling trapped. She discovered she could change her responses to people’s emotions so that she no longer managed her life according to them.
When she first learned about empathy, she recognized many of her challenges. She attracted people who were struggling and needed her support. She could not escape the stress of other people’s lives to focus on her own. She felt exhausted after spending time with people. She followed common advice for empaths, but that felt like another cage. She tried to avoid “toxic” people or “emotional blood suckers,” but she still felt overtaken by the emotions of her relatives, children, husband, and close friends.
A few years later, she discovered a different word that changed her life: appeasing. Appeasing is a survival response that gets activated when emotions or situations are too much. Like fight, flight, and freeze, appeasing is a response to a sense of physical or emotional unsafety.
She learned at an early age that if she could anticipate and support the feelings of those around her, she would feel safest. Her survival reaction was to be hypersensitive to others’ emotions and to help with them. When a person learns young that safety comes from suppressing their own feelings to help others, they spend their adult lives in that same pattern. They feel safest when their emotions are not attended to, but other people’s are. They draw a feeling of belonging and validation from being the supporter, listener, helper, and fixer.
The writer realized that her helpfulness was not driven by genuine desire. It was driven by a need for safety, belonging, acceptance, and love. Unraveling her appease response has been a challenging experience. She had to learn to attend to her emotions and build a sense of safeness in her nervous system. She recognized that other people’s emotions can feel scary and dangerous to her. It does not come naturally to her to share what she feels because of survival patterns laid down in childhood.
With awareness and the right tools, she learned to walk toward authenticity. She can be herself in the world, surrounded by other people’s emotions, but not overtaken by them. She also learned that the way she supported people—by fixing, smoothing things over, and endlessly listening—was not the kind of support that helps them change. True emotional support only happens when a person is not in survival reactions, and it never comes at the emotional cost of another. Her support should never risk her energy, time, or feeling of safeness.
To the writer, being an empath felt like a lifelong sentence. But she now knows it is a learned response that can be unlearned. She offers several tips to assist.
Awareness
Creating awareness was the most powerful first step. A person can start by noticing what it feels like to be around people when they are emotional. What happens to the body? What emotions activate when hearing another person’s emotional activation? It is about turning attention away from others and toward oneself. Does a person feel a sense of urgency or doom? Do they immediately want to jump in and help? Do they lie awake at night thinking about other people’s emotional challenges? If a person feels this urgency, it is a sign that survival responses have been turned on. The brain is sending signals to the body that there is a threat.
Creating a Sense of Felt Safety in the Body
One way to offer the nervous system a cue of safety is to do an orienting exercise. Start by gently and slowly looking around and scanning the whole room. Let the gaze drift slowly. Turn the neck gently. Take in all surroundings. If desired, stop on any objects that catch interest as collections of colors and shapes. Slowly look above, below, and behind. If there is a window, look outside and to the horizon line. The horizon line is soothing for the nervous system. Knowing what is around and that there is no threat on the horizon brings a sense of safety. Do this for a minute or two, then see how it feels in the body. Allow ten seconds for any changes to be soaked up by the nervous system before continuing the day.
Creating a Pause
The final tip is to create a pause. When in the world and being asked for things, it can be hard to remember what to do. When people ask for help or support, a pause allows the nervous system to regulate before reacting. This pause can help a person choose a response that is not driven by survival needs.
