Offer Empathy Without Getting Exhausted

Workshop participants have often said to me, “You must be exhausted giving all that empathy.” The truth is that offering empathy itself is not particularly exhausting. But when offering empathy involves resistance to emotional experience, taking responsibility for another’s experience, or depletion from your own unmet needs, it’s definitely exhausting.

Fundamentally, empathy is a heart-based response to a heart-based expression. In Mindful Compassionate Dialogue, it is a form of attunement, a response to emotions whether expressed verbally or not. Empathy requires the intention to connect and to honor another person’s experience as valid, regardless of how it compares to your own. In practicing empathy, you give compassionate curiosity to another by silently or verbally guessing their feelings and needs.

A formal empathy guess follows this structure: Do you feel___because you need/value ____? For example, “Do you feel discouraged because you need support?” When empathy is expressed verbally, the central task is to guess at another's emotional experience while avoiding the trap of assigning feelings to other people's actions or other external circumstances, but, instead, connecting feelings to needs. This form of responsiveness depends on an internal sense of spaciousness and equanimity and requires you to stay centered and self-connected.

To develop a practice of empathy you learn the vocabulary of feelings and needs and build a fundamental awareness, acceptance, and comfort with emotional experience. An important part of being able to do this is recognizing and working through what gets mixed in there for you that requires extra energy to manage. Let's look at three things that can wear you out when you are trying to offer empathy.

1) Resistance: When you resist another's experience while attempting empathy, you will feel the heaviness of this internal conflict. Resistance takes many forms. Judgment, pulling away, or trying to change the other person’s experience are common examples. Here’s how resistant thinking might sound:

• If she hadn’t done that in the first place, she wouldn't have this problem.

• The other person is hurting just as much as he is.

• He's getting what he deserves.

• She keeps herself stuck.

• They are making such a big deal of things. They just need to put things in perspective.

• I certainly wouldn’t have this reaction.

• He should be more mature.

• She needs to get over herself.

When you notice that, even as you are trying to offer empathy, you are resisting the other person's experience, two things can be helpful to remember. First, you may need empathy for your own suffering that comes up related to their experience. This might mean taking time for self-empathy or receiving empathy from someone outside of the situation. Second, you may need to take time to grieve that someone you love is suffering and then to internally affirm that you are not responsible for their suffering. All you can do is offer kindness, empathy, and your own belief in their ability to find their way through it. 

After offering empathy you may have something else supportive you would like to offer. Whatever wise counsel or comfort you may eventually offer this person, it will have a much higher probability of being received if you begin with empathy.

2) Obligation: It might seem like there is a program hardwired in you that says something like, If I see someone's need, I have to do something. This belief can show up in at least two major ways. 

One, it can have you avoid offering empathy or even avoid being aware of others’ feelings and needs because you don't know how to offer empathy while maintaining boundaries. Over time, this narrows your awareness and hardens your heart. You lose access to deep joy, insight, and transformation.

Two, you spend a lot of time analyzing, giving advice, and carrying an extra backpack full of the suffering of the world and how you should alleviate it. Your shoulders get tense from carrying that extra weight, and you start to resent people whom you perceive to be adding to it.

The obstacle of obligation requires discernment about the difference between wanting to contribute from a place of aliveness and generosity versus wanting to fix and rescue someone else from a place in yourself that needs healing attention. The latter is usually accompanied by anger, resentment, desperation, collapse, hopelessness, or compulsion, with an agenda for how people should be or behave. 

Contributing from a place of aliveness and generosity is characterized by a sense of play, creativity, spaciousness, choice, and discovery. From this place, you recognize that helping others is actually engagement in a larger collaboration, an expansive circle of giving and receiving that you trust is mutual.

You also trust in each person’s ability to awaken, transform, and access the wisdom and joy that is always present. To support groundedness in this view, you can bring to mind examples of times when you saw this person light up with joy or act with wisdom. No matter how small those examples may seem, they are a window into what's possible and help you maintain an expansive perspective.

3) Your own unmet needs When you have a tentative relationship with your own needs, it’s hard to have space for the needs of others. If you imagine that you don't deserve or aren’t worthy of the care and attention you often offer to others, then you likely are chronically depleted of emotional support. Beliefs like these often are buried deep in the subconscious. They manifest as a facade of martyrdom, self-reliance, or toughness. 

Emotional depletion shows up in little ways, such as judgment, making the other person wrong, impatience, or resentment. When emotional depletion catches up with you as you offer empathy, you find yourself fighting off a voice in the background that's screaming for mutuality and a break. Having this internal conflict makes giving empathy exhausting.

To offer empathy without becoming exhausted by this, it’s essential to establish a relationship of self-trust with regard to your needs through ongoing practices of self-empathy, setting clear and consistent boundaries, and maintaining support systems that contribute to care for your body, heart, mind, and spirit.

Practice

Take a moment now to reflect on the last time you offered empathy to someone. If it was a tiring ordeal, notice if any of the three challenges listed above were up for you. If they were, what needs were present for you and what request would you like to make of yourself or another to meet those needs?