Brazil finds cure for exhaustion from others’ demands

For years, the author believed she was an “empath,” a person highly attuned to the feelings of those around her. Learning the term about ten years ago felt like a relief, offering an explanation for why people exhausted her, why she could read others instantly, and why she was constantly helping, listening, or supporting people in crisis. She no longer believes that definition applies to her.

The author says she is no longer an empath. She has not been cured, but instead found a different understanding that allowed her to stop feeling trapped. She discovered she could change her responses to people’s emotions and stop managing her life around them.

After learning about the concept of empathy, she recognized several challenges: attracting people who were struggling and needed support, an inability to focus on her own life due to others’ stresses, and exhaustion from social interaction. She followed common advice for empaths, such as avoiding “toxic” people, but found it felt like another cage. Even with precautions, she felt overtaken by the emotions of relatives, children, a husband, or close friends. She described this as being in permanent reaction mode.

A few years later, she discovered a different word: appeasing. Appeasing is a survival response activated when emotions or situations feel overwhelming, similar to fight, flight, or freeze responses. She learned that at an early age, she had learned that anticipating and supporting the feelings of others made her feel safest. Her survival reaction was to be hypersensitive to others’ emotions and to help with them.

The author explains that when people learn young that safety comes from suppressing their own feelings to help others, they often continue that pattern into adulthood. They feel safest when their own emotions are not attended to, but others’ are. They may draw feelings of belonging, connection, and validation from being the supporter, listener, helper, or fixer. They may also feel ease and safety by not expressing their own emotions or needs.

She recalls feeling proud of being helpful and a “good person,” but realized it was not driven by genuine desire. Instead, it was driven by a need for safety, belonging, acceptance, and love. Unraveling this appease response has been a challenging experience, as it was woven into her identity as a delightful, easygoing, no-stress person who does not add to the emotional load of any group but helps remove others’ problems.

Coming out of those responses required awareness. She learned to attend to her emotions, build a sense of safeness in her nervous system, and be gentle with herself. She recognized that other people’s emotions can feel scary and dangerous, and that sharing her own feelings does not come naturally due to childhood survival patterns. With awareness and tools, she learned to walk toward authenticity and safety, surrounded by others’ emotions but not overtaken by them.

She also learned that her way of supporting people—fixing, smoothing things over, helping, taking over, endlessly listening—was not the kind of emotional support that helps enact change. True emotional support, she says, only happens when people are not in survival reactions, and it never comes at the emotional cost of another. Her support should never risk her energy, time, or sense of safeness.

The author offers several tips. The first is awareness. She suggests noticing what it feels like to be around people when they are emotional, what happens to the body, and what emotions activate. She advises turning attention away from others and toward oneself, asking questions like: Do I feel a sense of urgency or doom? Do I immediately want to jump in and help? Do I lie awake mulling over others’ emotional challenges? If there is a sense of urgency, it is a sign that survival responses have been activated, and the next step is to bring a feeling of safeness to the body.

Another tip is creating a sense of felt safety in the body. She recommends an orienting exercise when feeling urgency or overwhelm. This involves gently and slowly looking around the room, scanning the surroundings, and letting the gaze drift. She suggests stopping on objects that catch interest, looking above, below, and behind. If there is a window, looking outside and to the horizon line can be soothing for the nervous system. Doing this for a minute or two, then noticing any changes in breathing or sensation, can help signal safety to the body.

Her final tip is to create a pause. When busy and being asked for things, it can be hard to remember what to do. She notes that when people make requests, such as asking for help with children or animals, a pause can help shift the response away from the automatic survival reaction.