For a long time, autistic people, in particular, were thought to be lacking in empathy. It was believed that we couldn’t fully understand what other people were experiencing, on an emotional level, and found it hard to connect with them at an empathic level. This is absolutely part of some people’s experience and is usually linked to alexithymia, which we’ll look at later in the course. But these generalised ideas about autism and lack of empathy are outdated and more recent research and people’s experiences have shown that whilst neurodivergent people may experience differences around empathy, often this presents as very deep empathy. Not only for other people, but often for animals and the environment. Some people describe their empathic experience as overwhelming, and as if they have an antenna turned to every emotional wave around them. 
Empathy means that we have some sense of what someone else is feeling and we might feel a degree of what they’re feeling ourselves. For instance, we feel sad when someone has lost someone close to them. Or we feel that sense of frustration and hopelessness that someone feels when they’re experiencing an ongoing illness. Empathy can help us share in others experiences and can help us connect with them. 

But when we experience deep empathy for others, the whole world can start to feel so emotionally charged that it reaches a point of overwhelm. I was recently at a school prize giving for my son. I was already terribly nervous on his behalf and becoming emotional and when a twelve-year-old boy sat down to play the piano, I was so overcome for empathy, for him, for his parents, for everyone sitting in the hall, for my own son and what he’d be going through soon, that I started crying. I managed not to make a noise, but the tears were streaming down my face and it was embarrassing. I’m sure other people were moved, but I was moved to such an extreme extent I couldn’t control my response.

Many of my clients explain that experiencing this deep empathy means that they can be regularly triggered, often by their own thoughts. Being deeply empathic comes with benefits – there’s a joy to experiencing some situations on such a deep level, and feeling that underlying sense of knowing what someone else is experiencing without them having to name that feeling. And feeling the collective mood in a room – whether it’s excitement, sadness, or joy – can make your own experience feel heightened and enjoyable.

One of the downsides, apart from feeling generally overwhelmed, is finding it difficult to know where you stop and others’ start, because you feel so connected to their experience. Constantly picking up on how others feel is exhausting and draining. Just being in someone’s presence when your emotional antenna are working overtime can suck the energy out of us. And when you add a whole roomful of emotionally charged people, it can make it hard to stay in control or stay in that situation. 

Over time, we can start to feel burnt out and situations that might have little impact on most people start to take their toll. Recognising that this is part of your experience, and that it’s real and you’re not alone, is a starting point. This intensity of feeling reflects how you take in situations, including other people’s experiences. 

And when you recognise that, you can start to take measures so that you’re benefitting from the best parts of experiencing things in this way, but protecting yourself from some of the downsides. 

And one of the biggest downsides can be knowing how to create healthy boundaries between yourself and others. If you’re so connected to others’ experiences that it’s hard to distinguish your own experience from other people’s, it can make it hard to establish healthy boundaries. And without healthy boundaries, we can find ourselves taking responsibility for other people’s emotional responses. It’s our fault that they’re angry, sad or struggling. 

We can also feel that we can’t cope with their emotional pain and become so upset by it that it’s hard to function properly. Instead of feeling for them, we become completely enmeshed with their experience and can become depressed and anxious ourselves. 

If we’ve grown up in an environment where we’ve been made to feel responsible for someone else’s emotions, such as being raised by an emotionally dependent parent, we might feel even less of a separation between ourselves and others. This can lead to us getting involved in co-dependent relationships, where we might sacrifice our own needs for the sake of someone else or adopt behaviours to avoid upsetting them. Co-dependency can also show up as our self-worth being tied to someone else’s approval, or supporting their damaging or destructive behaviours. 

Even if we’re not in a co-dependent friendship or relationship, weakened boundaries which stem initially from deep, felt empathy can mean that we push ourselves to do things that don’t feel right or manageable, all because we’re too aware of what the other person might feel if we put our foot down and assert our needs. 

If you recognise yourself in this discussion around empathy, recognise when some of your behaviours that are more focused on the other person than your own needs, come from a point of feeling too deeply for those around you. If we go back to thinking about how we experience our emotions more generally, and that feedback loop that means our logical brain often takes longer to calm and reassure our emotional brain, we can recognise this as an emotional response. If it makes sense, go with it. But if it feels like it’s causing you problems over time, find some ways to remind yourself of what you need to do to respect your own needs. 

This can simply be reminding yourself that, no matter how reasonable your response feels, you’re in your emotional brain at this point and it might be helpful to take some time to reflect on how you want to respond to a person or situation. 

Take some time, when you’re not feeling overly affected by someone else’s emotions, to consider what’s your emotional property and what is their emotional property. Emotional property is a great concept to help us consider what we are responsible for, and what others are responsible for. If you think of your house, you have walls, doors and locks which separate you from the outside world. What’s in the house is yours and you can physically protect it. But when we’re deeply empathic we often don’t protect ourselves and our emotions in the same way. And – and this is a key point – we often don’t respect other people’s ability to do the same, even when they have the capacity to do so. Instead, we take the blame when they’re upset or angry and feel responsible for having caused them to respond in some way. 

I’ve attached an emotional property handout, and it’s worth time spending some time going through it. It looks very simple, but requires a lot of awareness and effort to put into place. Don’t worry if you find it hard, just keep being aware of it and find opportunities to try and establish a distinction between yourself and others. Even if you can’t act differently towards someone at the start of your journey, just being aware that their stuff is theirs can help make a difference as to how deeply you’re affected by it.