True Empathy: Learning to Honor Our Emotional Boundaries
You’ve probably known people who devote their empathy and effort to helping others, sometimes to their own detriment. It might be the single parent who is pulled in so many directions needing their presence, that they feel guilty for resting. Or the kind young adult starting out in a helping profession, who finds themselves regularly working late into the night. Or you yourself might have been the child who cried easily, who felt and took on the weight of the world’s pain without quite knowing why.
Empathy and emotional support are critical relationship needs in our lonely world. Sociologists would say that instinct helps us stay prosocial and connected. We also feel deep fulfillment in giving others a helping hand, or knowing that we’ve made someone else’s day through heartfelt service. But there can be real moments of tension, exhaustion, or even burnout that happen when we blur emotional boundaries between ourselves and others.
Rather than withholding our compassion, what we can benefit from are frameworks for understanding our high empathy, and practicing ways of relating that honor where others end and we begin. This isn’t a growth process for certain people. Even therapists and helping professionals aren’t exempt from overextending themselves for others. There are also many who possess deep wells of compassion whom we might call empaths, or highly sensitive people. For all of us, this inner work can be invaluable for sustaining well-being and the health of our relationships.
Empathy As Soul Energy
The term “einfühlung” was coined in the 1870s by German philosopher Robert Vischer to describe the way humans share emotions, or even project them onto objects. The following concept of empathy was derived roughly fifty years later by psychologist Edward Titchener, who believed that our reactions to others’ feelings were tied to keen observation of their bodies, mirroring their expressions, and feeling the weight of their moods within ourselves.
In 1971, psychoanalyst Carl Jung described empathy as the result of mankind’s shared collective unconscious, a well of archetypal forces feeding our capacity for symbolic imagination and feeling. He saw our natural emotional responses as echoes of the same energies and patterns of meaning-making within all of us. Jung believed these to be the foundation for building a rich personal and communal life, saying, “The man with the empathic attitude finds himself…in a world that needs his subjective feeling to give it life and soul. He animates it with himself.”
Other psychologists in the mid 1990s focused on the healing uses of empathy, including Carl Roger’s concept of “unconditional positive regard” applied in therapy. Rogers saw empathy as the capacity to understand others’ experiences as if we were them. Family systems therapist Salvador Minuchin also warned of the dangers of “emotional enmeshment”, when relationship boundaries are blurred. His work inspired Al-Anon leaders to coin the term “codependency” to describe individuals with alcoholism who had family members enabling their behaviors.
Many enter into therapy to work through relationship conflicts, often colored by enmeshment or porous boundaries. It’s not surprising that the skill of keeping healthy emotional boundaries has become hugely important for us, as people who are locked into a 24/7 online network where emotional contagion happens within seconds upon opening a social media reel. Because of this hyper-connectivity, our collective unconscious is becoming more visible and overshadowed at the same time, often leading to soul confusion.
Where Empathy Lives in The Body
Some of us were called “sensitive” growing up, perhaps because of our emotional tenderness and ability to feel things deeply. It turns out there is neurological proof for this trait. In the 1990s, researchers studying emotional processing used the term Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS) to describe levels of sensitivity to outside stimuli. FMRI Studies showed that some people’s brains are more active in default mode and salience network processing. These directly increase emotionality, empathy, and deeper cognitive processing as well. There were also connections made between SPS and dopamine system variations.
The Highly Sensitive Child Scale has also been used to explore SPS in children, with research finding that kids with higher SPS notice and react to emotional cues more intensely, and can struggle with feeling more easily overwhelmed.
Another finding is about risks and benefits of emotional contagion, a phenomenon where our emotional resonance with others and ability to automatically mirror their feelings leads to “catching emotions” unawares. The Emotional Contagion Scale was developed to help individuals assess this tendency, whether through crying during movies, coming alongside those who’ve lost a loved one, or in other situations where people emotionally impact each other.
Emotional contagion is made possible by a collection of brain cells called mirror neurons. Brain scans have shown how intricate neural relay mechanisms in our anterior insular cortex enable us to instinctively imitate others’ facial expressions, mannerisms, and body postures. This is what helps us notice and even interpret the subtlest microexpressions that flit across someone’s face in conversation.
Empaths and Highly Sensitive People
Measuring your own empathy is a self-reflective activity where you can use assessments like the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire to gauge your cognitive and affective empathy. The Empathy Quotient Scale is another resource that was originally designed for neurodiversity research. Or, you might have an intuitive sense of how empathic you are based on how you move through the world, and how easily you “pick up” on others’ emotions. You might even identify as an empath.
The term empath was coined in the 1950s by science fiction author J.T. McIntosh, and is widely used to describe highly empathic people with sensitive nervous systems. Many see empaths as exceptionally attuned individuals who can easily absorb the emotions of others, often without meaning to.
Psychologist Elaine Aron formed the concept of the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). She proposed that HSPs are 15-20% of the general population who have significantly higher levels of sensitivity. Using her Highly Sensitive Person Scale for adults, you can measure your sensitivity to things like pain, caffeine, noise, art, violence, and people’s moods. Many online communities have been created by those who identify as HSPs and want to connect with those who share their inner experiences.
Signs of Emotional Burnout
None of us are immune to having our empathy and goodwill leaned on by others, even to the point of destabilizing us into burnout or resentment. Neither are we exempt from moments when compassion turns to guilt that we can’t do anything to help someone in need. Sometimes this guilt weighs on us in a helpless, disempowering way. We’re reminded that we can’t save everyone, sometimes even the ones we love the most.
Empathic people can often feel fatigue, exhaustion, or self-blame if they feel unable to help. They can also experience more anxiety, not only through strong compassion for other’s distress or pain but also in feeling it viscerally themselves. These psychological and physical markers are unfortunately tied to risk of developing depression symptoms, often from the intensity of negative emotions and interpersonal guilt. This has led some psychologists to call empathy a “risky strength”.
Research focused on Highly Sensitive People has also found that, when self-care needs to rest and recharge away from overstimulating environments are neglected, higher stress and even physical illness become more likely. Teenage HSPs can also experience social rejection or exclusion by peers very keenly, leading to greater risk of isolation and unmet needs for mutual relationships.
While I don’t personally score highly as an HSP, I have learned the hard way as a therapist what porous emotional boundaries can lead to. I grew up in an environment where emotion regulation wasn’t strongly modeled, and that meant leaning into my own intuitive, empathic nature to respond to emotional cues like others who were suffering. Becoming a therapist came with its own challenge of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma, which can both be related to burnout.
After years in the profession including periods of burnout recovery, I learned to notice the tell-tale signs of emotional “merging”: collapsing in my upper body when hearing a client’s traumatic experiences, the sense of helplessness and a desire to “rescue” a client from their current distress, and feeling so emotionally shaken by their story that I become unable to offer a grounded, attentive presence.
When Trauma Loosens Our Boundaries
Heightened empathy is often a byproduct of having lived through adverse experiences of all kinds. Some who were parentified and raised to be “little adults” with adult responsibilities from a young age can come to identify as default caregivers later on. Attachment losses like parental abandonment and absence, or emotional neglect can instill false feelings of shame, and lead to coping mechanisms like overextending yourself to earn others’ appreciation and care.
Fawning is also a common result of relationship traumas, when threats to your safety have embedded an instinctual need to placate, reassure, or defer to others in order to prevent further abuse. This is a painful, sometimes unconscious drive that many who struggle with feeling guilty for resting experience. A valuable resource for deepening awareness and overcoming the fawning instinct is the book Fawning: Why the Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves—and How to Find Our Way Back.
Those who have looser emotional boundaries might have had their goodwill and compassion regularly taken advantage of by others in the past, or the imbalance became normalized over time. A sobering example is the codependent relationship between an alcoholic parent who places strong pressure on their empathetic child to help them survive and meet their addictive coping needs.
Strengthening our Emotional Boundaries
Deepening Self-Confidence and Self-Worth
Healthy interdependence requires autonomy, and this becomes easier to sustain when we have a strong sense of who we are and what we deserve. When relationship abuse or neglect have shaken our sense of self, we can feel called to a process of healing. A therapist trained in Attachment-Based Therapy for individuals, or Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples, can support you in your growth. For some, learning to seek emotional support yourself can be a critical act of self-worth. It becomes essential to practice asserting your own needs, and learning in an embodied way that they deeply matter.
I once worked with a smart, determined young adult client whose career and relationship dreams were constantly derailed by the pull to help her family members manage their chaotic lives. She understood boundaries logically and knew their importance, but felt compelled to sacrifice her own responsibilities and fun activities in order to “parent” her immediate family. In therapy we steadily unpacked the impacts of having been abandoned by her father as a child, her mother’s expectations for her to be like a second mother to her sibling, and her own unprocessed insecurities from deferring to others for so long.
It was beautiful to witness her growth, grieving process, and gradual reframing of her intense worry for her “lost, wayward brother” and her “withdrawing, hard-to-please mother” as personal strengths she could actually apply at will. Through practicing emotional boundaries and firm communication with her family, she came to understand her worth in an embodied way, knowing that “I am empathetic, committed to loving people, and also committed to letting others find their own way without me intervening to help them”.
2. Resting in Nature and Solitude
Self-care practices are also critical when you feel emotionally drained. HSPs report using solitude to reflect and build self-awareness, and practice self-compassion for their unique interpersonal gifts and challenges. For all of us, solitude that includes time offline is also much needed. In our chronically online world where the pull is to always engage, we need emotional and mental space to maintain a sense of clear self and own our autonomy.
A third way to recover from emotional stress and stress is to spend mindful time in nature. The practice of being outdoors, whether it be a solo walk or a communal sport, is known to regulate your nervous system and invite rest. It aligns with the goals of mindfulness and meditation, where our thoughts can quiet as we lean into our sense of aliveness and feel more connected to ourselves. In nature we are free to be ourselves, and even feel a deeper sense of belonging to the common humanity and the world at large.
3. Noticing Emotional Merging
If we start to feel the urgent need to fix a situation or feel paralyzed by hopelessness, these are signs of becoming emotionally merged. Taking a step back and recentering ourselves actually encourages others to regulate alongside us, which might help more than intervention. We can visualize a healthy emotional separation as sitting in our seat rather than sharing a seat with the other person, where we can connect with our own breath and feel our feet firmly planted on the floor.
We can also cultivate awareness of tell-tale signs that our boundaries have been crossed. A common sign is when resentment builds up toward someone who’s overwhelmed our capacity or willingness to help them. Or, emotional burnout can feel like having nothing left to give, and doubting our own capacity as not being “good enough”. We might feel tension and chronic fatigue. Continuing to override these signs also contributes to depression or anxiety.
Cultural and generational influences can often make it harder to name these patterns, even if we feel the distress keenly. For example, children of immigrant families might have been parentified for family survival, and women are generally expected to act in self-sacrificial, nurturing ways. Sometimes generations of families pass down the instruction to always be loving and pleasing to others, and our ability to say no when it counts suffers.
4. Tolerating False Guilt When Asserting Your Boundaries
According to social worker Nedra Tawaab in her book Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself, boundary-setting is a two-part process where you first commit to your boundary, then learn to tolerate the discomfort of practicing it. The discomfort often comes from the push-back of others who might have grown used to relying on your generosity, or have unreasonable demands. Ultimately, they might try to guilt-trip you in ways that are detrimental to the integrity of the relationship.
Asserting our own needs while also acknowledging the needs of others is what sustains relationships, and protects our mental health. Communicating boundaries becomes a matter of validating our needs and respecting the limitations on our own choices. It requires sharing a simple, firm, and brief message that can be repeated, and followed through on via the consequences you’ve chosen.
As for tolerating the false guilt of having stayed true to yourself, it helps to practice defusion from others’ reactions, whether it be the silent treatment, questioning you, or testing your limits. While we can’t control their behavior, we can control what we accept, how much we interact, how much space they take up in our heads, and what role they play in our life. You can find further strategies for boundary work by Tawaab here and here.
Empathy As Empowerment
Our empathy is one of the most quietly powerful things about us. It connects us to each other, moves us to act, and makes us human. But like any strength, it asks something of us in return: the ongoing practice of knowing ourselves well enough to stay present without losing ourselves. The frameworks and tools in this article are not about becoming less caring or building walls. They are about learning to offer the kind of presence that is sustainable, boundaried, and still full of warmth. When we do this inner work, we don't diminish our empathy. We honor it.
