The Downsides of Empathy
When I was studying in Singapore Management University, I was in this student body called the SMU Peer Helpers and it was one of the best decisions I made during those four years.
Essentially, because there is an underlying stigma against seeing the school counsellor, the school felt that students with mental health issues would be more willing to talk to a friend first.
Since the first point of contact for troubled students are their friends, it will be more helpful if these friends were trained in professional listening skills and frameworks to properly guide the troubled student. And if the case is too difficult for the friend to handle alone, they can persuade the troubled student to seek advice from the school counsellors.
The peer helpers are basically just students who are interested in helping their friends. And the professional school counsellors will teach us counselling skills every week based on a curriculum they designed themselves.
One thing we focused a lot on was developing empathy — the ability to sense other people’s emotions. Empathy allows us to relate to other people on a human level, and in that understanding we can learn to figure out how to forge a path of healing for them.
Some people might tell you that they are sad, but only when you empathize with them can you better understand which shade of sadness they are experiencing, and you can then figure out more targeted ways to help them.
But despite the many benefits of empathy, I feel like the downsides of empathizing too much are not talked about enough.
1. Emotional Hijack
Using empathy to help troubled people will allow us to put ourselves in their shoes, enabling us to feel their emotions. But when we take on their feelings in order to understand their experiences, it’s easy for us to get emotionally hijacked by their negative emotions and most of the time it’s difficult to shake these emotions off even after the session has ended.
Once you realize that you have absorbed these negative emotions, the best way to deal with them is to let them out the way you normally do. If you’re sad, have a good cry. If you’re angry, listen to some music or exercise it out. I’ve accepted that these conferred emotions are a by-product of having empathy, and I think it’s harmless unless you let it accumulate.
It will definitely be useful if you can learn how to compartmentalize your emotions when you’re taking care of other people. If you can build up an emotional resistance over time, you can protect yourself from unintentionally soaking up their emotions. But of course, I know this is easier said than done.
2. Empathy Fatigue
As a peer helper, there were many occasions where I felt the empathy fatigue, where I was so exhausted from taking care of the people around me I just felt empty by the time I reached home. And it wasn’t a sad kind of empty, it was more of an objective lack of emotions.
It’s a similar feeling an introvert gets after going out with an extremely extroverted person, as if you were drained out of your metaphorical social battery.
If you’ve faced this, my best advice for you is to find your restart. Find something that will help you restore your energy, or perhaps even end your day if you’re able to do so. Usually, sleep is the best solution to these problems. But for me before I sleep, I like to switch off the lights and play some music, just basking in my time alone before I call it a day.
It’s not realistic for me to tell you to stop taking care of people, because chances are it’s not something you can change overnight. But if you can find a way to take care of yourself once you recognize the burnout, you will feel much better.
It’s important to remember that empathy, like most things in life, works when it’s used in moderation. I know sometimes it’s not easy to control how much of yourself to personally invest in an emotional situation, but we owe it to ourselves to not end up as another casualty trying to save someone else.
