When Feeling Everything Isn't the Same as Empathy

On emotional absorption, regulation and staying present with another person.

Vicki-Lee Alomes

Psychologist, Energeia Psychology

We tend to speak about empathy as though more must be better.

More feeling. More sensitivity. More awareness of other people's emotional states.

But there is an uncomfortable question sitting underneath that assumption:

What if feeling another person's distress very intensely sometimes makes it harder to be there for them?

Psychology makes a useful distinction between affective empathy — sharing or resonating with another person's emotional state — and cognitive aspects of empathy, which involve understanding another person's perspective or experience (Decety & Jackson, 2004; Singer & Lamm, 2009).

They are related. They are not identical.

And that distinction matters.

When sensitivity becomes absorption

You can care enormously about another person and still become overwhelmed by what they are feeling.

Perhaps someone's anxiety makes you anxious.

Their anger immediately changes the atmosphere in your body.

Their disappointment produces an urgent need to make things better.

Their distress becomes almost impossible to distinguish from your own.

That may feel like extraordinary empathy.

Sometimes it is also worth asking whether something else is happening.

A nervous system can become extremely attentive to changes in other people. Tone of voice. Facial expression. Silence. Tension. The almost imperceptible shift in a room when something isn't quite right.

That sensitivity can have many origins and meanings. In some circumstances, heightened monitoring of possible threat is associated with stress and hypervigilance.

Which gives us a rather different question:

Am I understanding what this person is feeling — or has what they're feeling taken over my own nervous system?

There is no moral judgement in that question.

There is useful information.

Your house can also be on fire

I often think about regulation in very ordinary terms.

If your own proverbial house is on fire, it becomes rather difficult to stand calmly in somebody else's kitchen while theirs is smoking.

The same thing can happen emotionally.

Once our own distress becomes sufficiently intense, attention inevitably shifts towards managing it. Perspective can narrow. Thinking can become less flexible. Our capacity to choose how we respond can diminish.

Stress is known to affect prefrontal cortical functioning, the systems involved in capacities such as attention, working memory and cognitive control (Arnsten, 2009).

So the goal isn't to become less sensitive.

It is to have enough capacity around that sensitivity that we retain some choice about what we do with it.

Regulation doesn't make us care less. It can make caring more usable.

The body gets a vote

None of this happens in a disembodied brain.

Our ability to respond thoughtfully is affected by the condition in which we arrive at the moment.

Sleep matters.

Pain matters.

Sensory load matters.

Hunger matters.

Physical illness matters.

The argument we had this morning matters.

So does the accumulation of ten apparently insignificant demands before lunchtime.

For Autistic and ADHD people, sensory demands, executive-function demands and regulation difficulties may add further load. But this isn't exclusively a neurodivergent phenomenon.

It is human physiology.

That broader distinction matters to me.

A diagnostic framework can help explain part of our experience without needing to become an explanation for everything we experience.

Staying in the room

Perhaps grounded empathy is less about how much of another person's emotion we can absorb and more about whether we can remain present in its company.

Can I recognise your distress without needing it to disappear?

Can I notice what is happening in my own body without automatically acting from it?

Can I understand that your emotion belongs to you without becoming indifferent to it?

Can I tolerate the possibility that I have misunderstood you?

And can I remain curious long enough to find out?

That is a different kind of sensitivity.

It involves boundaries, certainly. But it also involves regulation, perspective and the ability to distinguish between what we feel and what we know.

There is something quietly powerful about being able to say:

I can feel something happening in me without assuming it tells me everything about what is happening in you.

Empathy with somewhere to stand

I don't think the answer is to feel less.

Nor do I think every intense emotional response needs to be celebrated simply because it is authentic.

Our reactions can be authentic and still deserve examination.

We can respect the nervous system without making it the final authority on every situation.

We can be compassionate towards ourselves while remaining curious about our effect on other people.

And we can become better at distinguishing sensitivity from absorption, intuition from assumption, and caring from the need to remove our own discomfort.

Perhaps that is what grounded empathy gives us.

Not distance.

Somewhere to stand.

References

Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signalling pathways impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.

Decety, J., & Jackson, P. L. (2004). The functional architecture of human empathy. Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, 3(2), 71–100.

Decety, J., Yang, C. Y., & Cheng, Y. (2010). Physicians down-regulate their pain empathy response: An ERP study. NeuroImage, 50(4), 1676–1682.

Singer, T., & Lamm, C. (2009). The social neuroscience of empathy. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1156(1), 81–96.

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