Brazil learns how to stop exhaustion from others’ needs

For years, a woman believed she was an “empath,” a person highly attuned to the feelings of those around her. The label felt like a relief, offering an explanation for her exhaustion and her constant role as a helper and listener for others in crisis. However, she now rejects that definition and no longer identifies as an empath.

Instead of a fixed personality trait, she came to understand her behavior as a learned survival response called “appeasing.” Just like fight, flight, or freeze, appeasing is a reaction to a sense of emotional unsafety. She realized that from an early age, she learned that anticipating and managing the emotions of others made her feel safe. This pattern, she found, is often developed in childhood to maintain connection and avoid conflict with caregivers.

This survival response meant she felt safest when her own emotions were minimized and she was focused on helping others. She drew a sense of belonging and validation from being the supporter and fixer. However, she recognized this was not a genuine desire but a need for safety, acceptance, and love. This habitual pattern left her feeling permanently in reaction mode and disempowered, even when she tried to avoid “toxic” people as common advice for empaths suggests.

Unraveling this appease response required immense awareness. She had to learn to attend to her own emotions and build a sense of safety in her nervous system. She recognized that other people’s emotions felt scary and even dangerous to her, and that sharing her own feelings did not come naturally due to childhood patterns.

With the right tools, she learned to walk toward authenticity. She can now be around other people’s emotions without being overtaken by them. She also discovered that her old way of supporting others—by fixing, smoothing things over, and endlessly listening—was not the kind of support that helps people change. True emotional support, she concluded, should not come at an emotional cost to the person providing it.

Practical Steps to Change

Awareness. The first step is to notice what happens in your own body when you are around emotional people. Do you feel a sense of urgency, doom, or a need to jump in and fix things? This urgency is a sign that a survival response has been triggered. The goal is to turn attention away from the other person and toward your own physical and emotional state.

Creating a Sense of Felt Safety. When you feel that urgency, you can signal safety to your nervous system. One simple exercise is “orienting.” Gently and slowly scan the room with your gaze, looking at colors and shapes. Look above, below, and behind you. If possible, look outside at the horizon line, which is very soothing for the nervous system. Doing this for a minute or two can help calm the body’s stress response.

Creating a Pause. In the busyness of daily life, it is easy to react automatically. The final tip is to simply create a pause before responding to someone else’s emotional need. This brief moment can help you choose a response instead of reacting from a survival pattern.

The author emphasizes that feeling exhausted by others’ emotions is not a lifelong sentence. It is a learned response that can be unlearned with awareness and practice. By attending to one’s own nervous system and creating a sense of internal safety, it is possible to be present with others without being drained by them.