Empathy Is Information, not a Personal Assignment

I used to believe that sensing another person’s emotional state meant I had been given a responsibility to help fix it. If I could feel their discomfort, I was supposed to soften that for them. If I understood why they behaved the way they did, I should make allowances to accept it and manage it.

If I could see the wound beneath their cruelty toward me and/or others, then surely, I was supposed to tend to their wounds instead of responding to their cruelty.

And maybe if I tended to their wounds, I could fix their cruelty. And they’d stop hurting me and others.

This is one of the most dangerous lessons highly perceptive people take on: that understanding the origin of someone’s behaviors creates an obligation to accommodate them.

It absolutely does not. And to take it further, this is where we actually become an enabler at the expense of our own mental health and well-being.

Empathy coupled with high sensing is a data center with antennas that pick up on what may be happening inside another person, and the data center started to go into action. Awakening took a very long time, and a lot of internal pain and practice, to accept that allowing my sensitivities to operate in this way required me to abandon myself in response.

There is an exhaustion that comes from continuously interpreting other people while they take no responsibility for interpreting themselves. You become the translator, the regulator, and the one who notices the temperature changing before anyone.

Meanwhile, the person creating the discomfort gets to remain unexamined, because you are doing all the emotional labor required to tolerate their behavior under the guise of giving them space to grow.

In this mindset, empathy stops being a gift and becomes a draining account of your energy bank.

The way out is not to become less perceptive. It is to stop treating every perception as an assignment.

I can understand and see that someone is either overtly manipulative or has behavioral problems and still refuse to attempt to fix or enable any of it. I can recognize the childhood wound beneath an adult’s behavior and still hold the adult accountable for what they do with it.

I can feel someone’s pain without volunteering to become the place where they deposit it.

This is where empathy becomes useful again: not as a command to rescue, excuse, absorb, or remain present, but as accurate information I can use when deciding what happens next. For me and my own self-protection and boundaries.

Usually pain that I sense in others draws me closer. It’s their behavior that requires me to leave. Wisdom is knowing how to balance that and understanding both responses derive from the same deeply empathic place.hiding in that darkness, and you don’t have to be controlled by their facades.

Anatomy of the Dark Empath © 2023 by Vennie Kocsis is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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Introduction – Start Here: Anatomy of the Dark Empath →