Why does being empathic feel like a Catch 22?

If you are a highly sensitive person or an empath, there have probably been at least a few times when you’ve felt that you have an unsolvable problem on your hands. You don’t want to stop being empathetic, but your empathy seems to keep pulling the wrong people towards you.

You give people the benefit of the doubt, and then, get entangled with narcissistic and controlling people.

That wouldn’t ever happen to someone who had drawn a hard line in the sand.

After you have had yet another encounter with a narcissistic person who has bled you dry, you might think: Should I try to NOT be empathetic? Should I try to become more like those no-nonsense people who say that I listen too much to people’s sob stories?

But you also know that even if you tried, you couldn’t not be who you are.

How do you change the very essence of yourself?

Many sensitive people have these thoughts time and again. We wonder whether we are doomed to repeating the same patterns, doomed to “Always Being the Listener” in relationships.

We wonder why God (or Nature or the Universe) has made us like this.

I have wrestled with these feelings in my own life, and I know just how hard it can be. I know how tough it is to separate the strands of empathy from our beliefs about what a “good person” or a “nice person” behaves like. I know that when mixed with these beliefs about how we “should” act, empathy can become part of a dangerous cocktail.

In The Empath’s Journey, I talk about my own experiences with separating these strands. I talk about how I’ve built better boundaries and how I learnt to pay attention to red flags with people so I could steer clear of the problematic ones.

I also talk about something I want to tell you now. If you have ever wondered just why the universe would make you like this, make you this empathetic without giving you the tools to protect yourself, I want to tell you that you DO have the tools.

It’s just that often, as sensitives, we talk ourselves out of using these tools.

As highly sensitive people, we are often also highly intuitive. And since we pay attention to subtle details, we can also see things developing before they actually happen.

Like most other people in society though, we have been conditioned to not listen to our intuitive knowing. We value rationality more than a bodily sense of what feels right or wrong to us. And we don’t want to be judgmental about people we don’t know.

We want to be nice and give people a chance.

But if our intuition is telling us that something is off about a person or situation, what it is telling us to do is to be discerning, not judgmental.

The next time you feel a niggling doubt about someone new you’ve just met, listen to it. Your deeper self is asking you to take it slow with this person, to trust your own self, and to gather more facts. And it’s offering you a chance to turn your empathy towards yourself, so you notice the part of yourself that’s having doubts, that knows something is wrong even if it can’t spell out exactly what that is.

When we are able to do this, being empathetic no longer feels like a Catch-22 situation.

Our empathy is now tuned in not only to our “shoulds” or into the other person’s needs and expectations, but also to our own deeper self and what this self is trying to tell us.

I hope you won’t override this wise part of you. Your intuition is the protective shell around the pearl of your offering as a sensitive person. It helps you give to the right people, in the right way, and helps you be replenished by this giving instead of drained and depleted.

Our intuition transforms our empathy from compulsive, even obligatory giving into a true gift and a choice.

When we are in charge of our empathy, we give to others.

AND we also give to ourselves.

Our empathy then belongs not just to others, but to our own selves as well. And that’s what a true gift is all about.

Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which combines personal stories with practical tools to help highly sensitive people channel their deep sensitivity. Sign up for Ritu’s newsletter for two free chapters of The Empath’s Journey.

You can find The Empath’s Journey here.