The Empathetic Heart
When helping others becomes a pattern that hurts you
I was talking to a widowed client about how she has spent a lifetime being a caregiver.
She recently ended a relationship with a widowed man who had been manipulating and gaslighting her — preying on her self-perceived expectation to take care of others.
Even though she ended it, she walked away feeling “less than” in so many ways.
She felt like she should have helped him. Saved him. Cared for him.
She couldn’t fully see what was happening consciously, but intuitively, she was backing away.
Meanwhile, her family and friends had been watching the situation unfold — they saw right through this man.
His Story Pulled Her In Through Shared Pain
He told her that his late wife hadn’t told him she had cancer until it was too late to save her.
A story soaked in self-pity.
For my client — whose own husband died of cancer — that hit hard.
Right in the heart.
When he told her that story, the emotions she felt weren’t just for him — she felt them as him.
His pain, his loss, his regret…
She drew in their pain as if it were her own.
And it emerged in her as literal heart pain.
Empathy vs. Sympathy: What’s the Difference?
We talked about what she was feeling.
And I shared a comparison between an empathetic heart and a sympathetic heart.
“I feel sorry for you” — which is sympathy —
is a literal feeling. You physically take in another person’s emotion.
Especially when their experience hits close to home.
This is why the heart pain is real.
It’s not imagined. It’s adrenaline — a survival hormone meant to get us ready to run or fight.
But when you’re not doing anything with that adrenaline, when it just sits in the body, it hurts.
Empathy Doesn’t Mean Absorbing Pain
An empathetic heart is different.
It understands what the pain might feel like — without pulling it in as its own.
It cares without becoming entangled.
It holds space without getting hooked.
An empathetic heart doesn’t trigger your own sadness, your own history, your own adrenaline surge.
It supports others from a grounded, aware place.
How I Had to Learn This the Hard Way
During my psychology and counseling degrees, I had to work hard to avoid absorbing the pain of other survivors of CSA.
I tried method after method to disassociate with empathy —
to be present without being personally flooded.
But nothing truly worked until I found NLP in Hypnosis.
That was the turning point.
It gave me a way to release the sympathetic pain connected to my own trauma — pain that used to rise up any time I heard someone else’s story.
I no longer fall “victim” to my pain-feeling self.
And because of that, I can now give others what they need —
Not what I need for me.
That’s true empathy.
We All Absorb Emotions — But We Don’t Have To
We all have moments where someone else’s story cuts deep:
We get teary
Angry
Fearful
Overly attached
Heartbroken
And unless we learn to recognize the interference these responses create,
we become more vulnerable to them again and again.
The brain tries to reconcile and learn.
But the patterns just get deeper.
Rewiring the Pattern: The Shift to Empathetic Heart
That’s why trance work matters.
Through access to the out-of-conscious area of the mind —
where automatic responses live — we can:
Identify the root of the pattern
Break the sympathetic attachment
Rewire it to a cleaner, empathetic response
Her Breakthrough
This is what I did with her.
She realized this man’s story reminded her of her grief —
but more importantly, it reminded her of grief she never processed from childhood.
When she lost her mother, she stepped in. She took care of her father. Her siblings.
There was no space for her own pain.
We worked to break the pattern of caring for others before healing herself.
And she finally made space for her healing.
From an empathetic heart — not a sympathetic one.
If you’ve spent your life absorbing others’ pain, it’s time to give yourself the same care.
Let’s retrain your heart to respond with empathy—not overwhelm.
👉 Click the link below to schedule a call with me and start healing without carrying what was never yours.
