Signs your empathy is negatively impacting your relationships

Empathy is an important emotion. It helps us to feel the emotions of others, understand them better and validate them. However, too much empathy can affect us negatively as well. Explaining this, Therapist Divya Robin wrote, "Empathy can be the foundation of beautiful connections but it can also become a dark hole - if we use that empathy to over-identify, make assumptions, or lose ourselves. When we use empathy to another extreme, we can become entangled in other people's struggles, have codependent tendencies, and blur boundaries. Empathy is an emotional experience, but when we behave in certain ways as a result, it can end up being more damaging than good."

ALSO READ: How empathy affects the learning and development of children?

Sharing how empathy can negatively impact our relationships, Divya Robin further noted down a few pointers:

Overwhelmed: Empathy can make us feel more. Often when people are talking of their difficult emotions, we find ourselves struggling to be present for them because of the way their emotions make us feel overwhelmed.

Hard to separate: We feel that our emotions and that of the other person are together. Hence, we are unable to separate ourselves from their emotions and be there for them for support.

Boundaries: Empathy comes with the responsibility of being there for the other person, come what may. This further causes a sense of guilt in us, and we find difficulty in saying no or setting boundaries for others.

Resentment: For putting aside our own needs, wants and expectations in the relationship for a considerable period of time, we start to grow feelings of resentment in the relationship.

Assumptions: When we are too empathetic, we start to make assumptions of the way others may feel – this can make us overthink and further ruin the relationship.

Toxic behavior: These habits are toxic for us and for the other person as well. Before we realise, we start to make the relationship unhealthy for us and the partner.

Self-care: We refrain from performing self-care and self-love because we are too busy being there for others.