Brazil learns how to stop exhaustion from others needs

For years, a woman who identified as an empath felt drained by the emotions and needs of those around her. She believed she was born with a heightened sensitivity to others’ feelings, a trait that left her exhausted and constantly in reaction mode. However, she now says this was not a fixed identity but a learned survival response that she has since unlearned.

The term “empath” is often defined as a person highly attuned to the feelings and emotions of those around them, feeling what another person is feeling at a deep emotional level. When the woman first learned this word about ten years ago, she felt relief. It seemed to explain why people exhausted her, why she could read others instantly, and why she was always helping, listening, or supporting people in crisis.

But she no longer believes that definition applies to her. She says she is no longer an empath. She found a different understanding that allowed her to stop managing her life according to other people’s emotions.

Initially, she followed common advice for empaths, such as avoiding “toxic” people or “emotional blood suckers.” But this felt like another cage. Even when she tried to protect herself, she still felt completely overtaken by the emotions of relatives, children, a husband, or close friends. It was a disempowering state of permanent reaction.

She later discovered a different word that changed her life: appeasing. Appeasing is a survival response, similar to fight, flight, or freeze. It activates when emotions or situations feel too overwhelming. She realized that she had learned at an early age that she would feel safest if she could anticipate and support the feelings of those around her. 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 assist others, they often spend adulthood in that same pattern. They feel safest when their own emotions are not attended to, but other people’s are. They may draw a feeling of belonging and validation from being the supporter, the listener, or the fixer. They may also feel ease by not expressing their own needs or true selves.

The woman says she often felt proud of being helpful and a “good person.” But she now believes that response was not driven by genuine desire. It was driven by a need for safety, belonging, acceptance, and love. Unraveling this appease response has been a challenging experience. It was woven into her being to be a delightful, easygoing, no-drama person who helps take away the problems of others.

Coming out of those responses required immense awareness. She had to learn to attend to her own emotions and build a sense of safeness in her nervous system. She recognized that other people’s emotions can feel scary or dangerous. Sharing her own feelings did not come naturally due to childhood survival patterns.

With awareness and tools, she learned to walk toward authenticity. She can now be herself in the world, surrounded by other people’s emotions, but not overtaken by them. She also learned that her old way of supporting people—by fixing, smoothing things over, or endlessly listening—was not the kind of support that helps them change.

True emotional support, she says, only happens when a person is not in their survival reactions. It never comes at the emotional cost of another person. Her support should never risk her own energy, time, or feeling of safeness. To her, being an empath felt like a lifelong sentence. She now knows it is a learned response that can be unlearned.

She offers several tips for others who feel similarly. The first is awareness. People can notice what it feels like to be around emotional others, what happens to their own body, and what emotions activate within them. They can turn their attention away from others and toward themselves. A sense of urgency to help, fix, or support is a good sign that survival responses have been turned on.

When that urgency is felt, the next step is to create a feeling of safeness in the body. One exercise is orienting. This involves gently and slowly looking around the room, letting the gaze drift, and taking in all surroundings. A person can stop on objects as collections of colors and shapes. Looking above, below, and behind, and then to the horizon line if possible, is soothing for the nervous system. Doing this for a minute or two allows the body to signal safety.

Another tip is to create a pause. When in the busy world and being asked for things, it can be hard to remember what to do. A pause allows a person to step back from the automatic urge to respond to others’ needs. This practice helps break the cycle of reacting from a survival response and allows for a more intentional choice about how to engage.