There's No Such Thing As An Empath.

Feeling overwhelmed by the emotional states of others? This may be due to an adaptive response to trauma, not to a special gift of sensitivity.

I am currently on vacation with my family, so in lieu of a new essay, for the next few weeks I’m inviting you to read some previously published blog posts. I hope you’re finding some summer joy: some watermelon slices, sun-kissed skin, poolside hangs & summer jams.

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I used to strongly identify as an empath. When I learned about the concept maybe 10 years ago, it gave me language and context for an experience that was deeply painful and yet one that I didn’t understand: namely, why I was so sensitive, and why the emotions of other people were so overwhelming to me.

Identifying as an empath helped me understand myself, and helped me find other people who shared this experience. I wasn’t alone anymore, and I made sense to myself, and for this reason I clung to the term like the buoy that it was.

Then two things happened that had me question whether the term empath did in fact fit like a glove, as it once had. One, I began to learn more about developmental and attachment trauma, and in so doing started to suspect that the concept of empath is flawed in several ways. Two, I started to notice that the term held sway with the kind of white woman wellness influencer that causes a lot of harm through appropriation and spiritual bypassing.

In this post, I want to outline: what my actual beef is with the term empath & with (some of) the folks that use it; what we’re actually talking about when we’re talking about being an empath;  and why this distinction and nuance is so important.

YOU DO YOU, BOO

Let me pause for a moment and say very clearly: I am not here to police anyone’s language or experience. I don’t want to take the term empath away from you if it helps you make sense to yourself, like it used to do for me. I don’t think that everyone who uses the term does so in a harmful manner. And even if I did, it’s not my place to decide what people should or shouldn’t say.

If identifying as an empath is helpful and meaningful to you, my hope is that this blog post will help deepen your understanding of your experience, and of yourself, and more importantly, will help direct your efforts towards repair in the most supportive direction.

WHAT EVEN IS AN EMPATH?

For the sake of clarity, let’s define what we mean here when we talk about being an empath. The Empath subreddit, as quoted in a 2021 Vice article, describes the phenomenon as “the ability to apprehend the mental or emotional state of another individual despite the fact that they themselves are not going through the same situation.”

Another key component of the empath experience is being easily and often overwhelmed by the energy and emotions of other people. This pain point–which I want to stress is very, very real–seems to be what rallies folks to the term empath, and to the community of people who identify as such. (That was certainly the case for me.)

I want to clarify that I understand the concepts of empath and that of a Highly Sensitive Person (or HSP, as defined by Elaine Aron) to be closely connected, yet separate. The way I see them, empath is a relational concept, having to do with how we relate to other people, while HSP is more related to sensory perceptions, which I see as being functionally distinct, even though they overlap greatly. Lots of people appear to use the terms interchangeably; your mileage may vary.

MY BEEF WITH THE TERM EMPATH

My main issue with the use of the term empath, and why I stopped using it to describe myself and my experience, is that it posits as a special trait or gift conferred onto the rare few what is a fundamentally, intrinsically human characteristic, one without which we would not survive as a species.

Feeling the energies and emotions of other people is the way babies adapt to their environment and their caregivers. Our ability to sense each other’s emotional states and to co-regulate together is how humans create the kind of belonging we need in order to survive. Far from being a rarefied or special gift, it is an evolutionary and developmental necessity.

To me, it’s a bit like claiming you have some sort of special gift or power because you can metabolize oxygen through breathing. Is it amazing that our bodies are designed to accomplish such an alchemical process so that we can stay alive? Absolutely. Is this a unique trait conferred to certain individuals who create elevated language around it? Absolutely not. Plants can do that shit.

WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON WITH EMPATHS?

I can hear the arguments forming. I can imagine folks who identify as empaths argue that what sets them apart from non-empaths is not just the fact that they can feel the emotions and energies of the world and people around them, but that they can feel them more than most other people, in a way that allows them to tend to the needs of others in ways that other people can’t, but one that also causes them great discomfort and stress.

On its face, this makes a lot of sense. Calling oneself and empath provides an explanation and a unifying concept for experiences that were previously confusing and isolating. I’m an empath! That’s why I feel like this. This kind of self-concept is extremely helpful, especially when the experience it gives language to is such a painful one. Once we find an explanation that makes sense, why look any deeper? Identifying as an empath might be all the empowerment and understanding a person needs.

LOOKING FOR THE ROOT CAUSE

But if we don’t look deeper at the actual root causes of why other people’s feeling states can be overwhelming for us, we can run into some trouble in a few ways.

If we don’t understand what’s really going on under the surface, our attempts to manage our experience of being an empath can lead us down the wrong paths, on which we might expend a lot of effort and energy without getting the results we want. And, if we don’t attribute our emotional overwhelm to its accurate relational and systemic causes, and view it instead as an exceptional, individual trait, we might end up causing harm to ourselves and others.

I began to shift my own understanding of myself as an empath when I started to study developmental and attachment trauma, specifically when I learned about the concepts of adaptive survival strategies, and of the Attunement survival style as described by the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) as taught by Dr. Laurence Heller.

There, I learned two things: one, that every behavior and belief is an adaptation in service of survival (this is actually adapted from Deb Dana, who writes on the nervous system); and two, that the problem wasn’t so much that I could feel the emotions of others too keenly, but that I had adapted to take too much responsibility for them as a survival strategy.

INTERNALIZING THE FAILURES OF OUR ENVIRONMENT

NARM defines five Survival Styles, each associated with a stage of early childhood development, from birth to around age 5. Each style develops around a compromised core capacity, to which we adapt by creating a survival strategy. We might identify with some aspects of all five survival styles, but tend to specialize in one or two.

Children cannot conceive of themselves as being a good kid in a bad environment; if they feel bad, they will conclude that they are bad, that it’s their fault if their needs are not met, even though the failures lie in environments where there are insufficient emotional resources, and not with them.

Paradoxically, blaming themselves and internalizing the failures of their environment in this way is the most hopeful position a child can take, because if they see the cause of their distress as being their own failure (I am bad), then maybe, they might be able to make themselves good in order to maintain attachment, and maybe get their needs met. This is how the Adaptive Survival Strategies are born.

Folks who specialize in the Attunement Survival Style (including yours truly) adapt to environments where their need for relational safety isn't met by exiling and disavowing their own emotional needs, and instead focus on meeting the emotional needs of others. 

What’s important to note here is the survival piece: this style develops around ages 6-24 months, when a child is entirely dependent on their caregivers for every aspect of their survival. Maintaining attachment is imperative for survival, so if the nervous system senses that the caregivers’ emotional needs supersede their own emotional needs, then taking care of the needs of the caregivers will be experienced as a matter of life or death.

Children cannot survive without secure attachment, and will try to cope with lack of emotional attunement in whatever way they can. If the only option in their current environment is to be alone with their feelings, which they cannot survive, then it’s better to pretend that they don’t have feelings of needs at all. And the adaptive survival style of taking on responsibility for the feelings of others accomplishes that.

So when we’re looking at an adult who routinely feels overwhelmed by the emotional states of other people, it’s not so much because they’re more sensitive or empathic, but because from very early on, they have learned that their survival depends on taking responsibility for the emotional states of other people.

It was never our job to assume responsibility for the emotional needs of other people, especially not that of our caregivers–it was their responsibility to care for us. It was always too big a burden to carry. This strategy helped us survive those early environments, but it was always meant to be short-lived. As a band-aid, it was effective. As a life-long way of being, it moves beyond being protective to being actively restrictive and harmful.

WHY DOES THIS DISTINCTION MATTER?

The distinction of whether we feel overwhelmed by the emotional states of others because we’re empaths and have a special sensitivity, or because we are taking too much responsibility for them, matters a whole lot because it’s going to inform how we attempt to cope with the pain of the overwhelm.

If I understand the cause of the overwhelm to be the fact that I am an empath, and if calling myself an empath is central to my identity, then I might attempt to remedy that overwhelm by blaming other people & their energy for my discomfort, and distancing and disconnecting from other people might be what I do to attempt to protect myself.

The problem here is that this leaves me alone with my discomfort, and leaves my needs for connection still unmet, which perpetuates the very circumstances that I’ve been trying to survive since infancy. It keeps me stuck in a pattern of protection, even while I have long outgrown the early environment that the temporary strategy was designed to help me survive.

Another way to say this is: setting boundaries cannot protect me from harm when the harm is internalized. If the call is coming from inside the house, simply putting my phone on mute doesn’t protect me from danger.

And cord-cutting and energy-cleansing rituals cannot resolve the core issue unless the original harm is acknowledged and named, and the lifelong patterns that emerged as a result are understood.

IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT YOU

Keeping people out and my own needs unmet does not only harm me; it can cause harm to other people, as well.

One way that might happen is if I use being an overwhelmed empath as a way to disengage from issues pertaining to social justice; this can be especially problematic for white people who want to opt out of anti-racism work.

I’m not mad at all at anyone who reads this post and wants to keep referring to themselves as an empath, unless it’s an attempt to eschew having to examine your own privilege, and the ways it’s causing harm. In that case, I’m giving you major stink-eye.

For care workers and professional space holders, taking too much responsibility for the feelings of other people, and attempting to “fix” said feelings in order to feel safe, can have a major negative impact on our clients (not to mention being a one-way ticket to Burnout City.)

At minimum, our clients might not feel seen, heard, or validated in our presence. At worst, we may be overstepping onto their agency, extending ourselves outside of our scope of practice, and violating their consent.

OK, SO WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?

If I understand the cause of the overwhelm to be the fact that I have developed an adaptive survival strategy that leads me to foreclose my own feelings and needs, then in order to transform this pattern of protection into a pattern of connection, first, I’m gonna need to examine the ways in which my needs were not met, and realize how I’ve adapted to that lack & scarcity.

(This process will definitely bring up some grief, and processing that grief is going to be a painful but necessary part of the process. This is a topic for another blog post.)

Then, I’m gonna need to change my relationship to my needs, and practice attuning to, advocating for, and practice receiving the love, care, validation, and support I really need.

I know. RUDE.

The NUMBER ONE ISSUE I see in my students and clients, most of which are caregivers and healing professionals (and I count myself in that lot), is chronic under-receiving as an adaptation to relational scarcity.

Recovering from under-receiving is about more than just more self-care. In fact, piling on self-care onto a nervous system that’s optimized for scarcity is like pouring water through a sieve. It’ll get you wet, but it won’t slake your lifelong thirst to feel deeply loved, seen, valued, and safe in your relationships.

I know that changing these patterns can feel impossible, when it’s the only way we’ve known to feel safe in relationships.

I know that the prospect of feeling deeply nourished and truly cherished might inspire in us equal parts longing and terror.

I know, because I’ve been there. And, I’m here to tell you…

THERE IS LIFE BEYOND OVER-CARING AND UNDER-RECEIVING.

If you want to find out more, you can sign up for my free webinar, How to Cultivate a Sustainable & Ethical Healing Presence here.