Empathy is the ability to feel what another person is feeling. To share their emotional experience rather than just observing it from the outside. It’s a quality we generally consider positive, for good reason, but there are many nuances.
There’s a common version of what gets called empathy, which I believe is worth exploring more carefully because it may not be quite what it seems.
The apparent dynamic goes broadly like this: someone close to you is anxious or distressed. Immediately, you feel their anxiety too, along with a drive to step in, help, and resolve whatever is causing them difficulty. This is experienced and described as empathy: feeling “their” feelings, and responding with helpful intent.
But what is happening may be the reverse of what you believe. The discomfort you’re feeling isn’t theirs; it’s yours. Being around someone else’s distress may, in itself, be difficult for you, causing a sudden, profound, and familiar unease in the presence of situational or relational insecurity. The impulse to fix things is, in that case, a hope of relieving your own discomfort rather than primarily addressing theirs.
This pattern often has roots in early experience. If you grew up in an environment with prevailing tension, family discord, struggle, or a general mood of instability, then other people’s difficult emotions would have felt like, or actually been, a threat to your sense of safety. Intervening and smoothing things over was a way of regaining some control over a situation that felt uncertain. It worked well enough, and over time it became a default and compulsive response.
What began as a coping mechanism became the role you now play: “I’m someone who feels what others feel, who won’t stand by when someone is apparently struggling, who steps in to fix their pain.” That framing isn’t entirely wrong, but it doesn’t acknowledge the self-protective act beneath it.
The person on the receiving end may or may not need the help you’re offering. They may simply want to be briefly witnessed by you. They may be keen to work through their own difficulty, in their own time. However, your dynamic doesn’t pause to find out, because the driver isn’t really their need; it’s your pressing discomfort with this unwanted contact with their struggle.
The identity of “empath” can, in thin this case, be a tidy explanation for something that is actually about a difficulty tolerating unresolved situations, even when these are fundamentally someone else’s responsibility. Your fixing and your attentiveness may be real. It may even be greatly appreciated. But the motivation may be less outward-facing than it appears.
The question of whose distress is being managed and whose needs are really being served can harder to answer than the label of empathy suggests.
Image credit: Giovanna Gomes
