I’ve had times of pain or loss that caused unpleasant emotions. Early in my survivorship, my husband’s love for me triggered vicious cycles where my emotional pain caused his emotional pain, which exacerbated mine. While grateful for his love and caring, we realized that we needed him to put a check on the empathy.
Empathy is when seeing someone else’s sadness or distress causes you to feel similar emotions. In contrast, sympathy is when you understand someone else’s emotions but there’s distance, and you are not feeling similarly.
When empathy helps you caregivers to understand what’s going on with patients and what might help, it’s good. You can use the information provided by the empathy. But then put a lid on it because if you’re only feeling their sadness or their worries or their fear…well, that isn’t helping you. And it may add to the burden of those patients if they now feel responsible for causing your pain—even though it’s not their fault.
For Healthy Survivors, reassure your caregivers that it helps you if they check empathy pain and distress.
For caregivers, ask yourself whether your empathy is helping anything. If not, try to put a lid on it.
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