Empathy and Absorbed Trauma - How to Stay an Effective Healer
This post is coming at you just in time for Valentine’s Day. The Hallmark heart day when we buy flowers and chocolates for our loves ones, which includes ourselves (wink).
In the spirit of love and hearts and connection, I thought it would be a great time to talk about empathy.
Empathy and sympathy are not the same thing. If you want to take five and watch this great animated video distinguishing the two narrated by Brene Brown (does she author this blog or do I?), then feel free and pop back over to this post for a deeper dive.
To summarize, sympathy is feeling sorry for someone. It’s similar to looking down on someone in a bad situation. Empathy is climbing down into that low space, throwing your arm around your friend, and offering to lend an ear and help diffuse the hurt.
Empathy is the foundation of real human connection, but there is a big asterisk here.
Some of us who identify as empaths or “feelers” might have a hard time not taking the full weight of the heavy thing and putting it on our own shoulders. So we walk around the world with a precarious balancing act of other peoples’ burdens and traumas (along with a side dish of our own) on our shoulders until we develop mad arthritis or torch the cartilage in our knees from the weight.
We try to help others by absorbing their trauma and in a way, making it our own. This is evidence of great love and good intentions for our friends, as well as flimsy boundaries that reveal our own wobbling self love.
Let’s lay it all out there right now: You can’t make it through life carrying the heaviness in your life and the heaviness in your friend’s life. Even if you think you have relieved your friend of their burden by demonstrating how willing you are to carry the weight for them (and crush yourself in the process), what is really happening is you are both weighed down.
In this scenario you have taken on some of their trauma and they still are carrying it themselves.
To love others and embody empathy in our friendships we need to give our time, attention, and heart to give our friend a space to release their hardship. Then, we both need to leave it in that space. To each walk away unweighted or even just a little bit lighter.
There are bad and menacing and damaging things that happen in this world, and to attempt to transfer the burden from one person to another doesn’t provide relief.
Connection, empathic listening, admiration of strength, and validation of experience relieve hurt.
How we can relieve hurt and weight is to cultivate whole and knowing spaces to share with our loved ones. Then, allow the space to carry the echo of our words and thoughts and feelings and close the door to walk lighter back into our lives.
The Impact of Carrying the Burdens of Many
How do I know all of this you ask?
I am a former burden carrier. “Hi my name is Emily and I am chronically empathic and suffer tension headaches and a constant sense of doom because I collect and carry the hardships of those around me.”
I know you’re probably thinking, something like “Wow, what a fun group! Do you also serve finger sandwiches?” My answer to that is no, but I like the way you think.
Now, onward.
I went to college with the initial plan to become a therapist. Why? Two reasons.
One, I was moved by the healing that my time in therapy offered me. Two, I understood hurting.
After volunteering for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline for a time in college, I realized I am a burden carrier by nature. I then pivoted (but like, not that much) career paths because I doubted my ability to leave work at work.
As a volunteer at the hotline, I took my job very seriously. Afterall, we were talking about very serious things! Then one day I heard someone make a joke that I found distasteful. I don’t even remember what the joke was, but I remember feeling insulted that this person seemingly did not take our job as seriously as I did.
I showed up to work my 6:00AM to 9:00AM shift twice a week somber and prepared to carry the burdens of others.
She showed up cheery, asking about my day and seeming to me to be what I can only describe as ignorantly happy. Did she not know we were here to answer the calls of people who were contemplating suicide?
Then, as I witnessed more and more of her calls, I noticed something.
She answered every call with genuine empathy and concern and followed every protocol outlined in our 40+ hours of training. Then she returned the phone to its docking station (landlines, people) and proceeded to engage me in beautiful conversation.
Whereas I hung up each call worried about the caller’s life and circumstances, and whether I even made a difference. Then I would answer the next call with a heaviness in my voice. A heaviness I carried from the first call.
By willingly carrying the burdens of others I was affecting my ability to be a helper, which helped no one.
My coworker appeared to be carefree, which I came to understand and admire as balance. A sense of reverence and respect for the lives of her callers, as well as her own life.
She left the heaviness that she had lifted in some small way from her caller in the space between the phones.
She exuded empathy and love for her callers and herself, which allowed her to do more helping and less personal damage.
How to Be Empathic and Unburdened
I know this story is not unrelatable. Chances are, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
So in this season of love, as we witness a world that needs you to love and show up unweighted and unburdened, ask yourself who would you rather be?
You can be serious and reverent and light. You can hold space without carrying the weight out the door with you.
The next time you offer an ear or a shoulder to someone you love, even if it’s a stranger over the phone, allow yourself to exhale and decide what you will leave in the space you cultivated in empathy, and what you will take with you.
I encourage you, just as in a yoga practice, to take the beautiful energy you cultivated and leave what will not serve you off the space on your mat and out in your very precious and beautiful life.
Yours in unweighted empathy,
Emily Rose // Miss Magnolia
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