How To Care For Ourselves - "Carrying Someone Else's Stuff"

Over the past two days I’ve had a conversation (via email) with a beautiful friend about "taking on other people's stuff".  She's an empathetic, kind and truly caring person who is wondering how to help others while also knowing she is very sick and needs to care for herself.  

So, how can we keep ourselves healthy while also help those who we choose to help? 

That’s a complex question with a variety of answers that can only be answered by our own self.  The world tells us to "just say no" or to "just breathe" or lots of other "just" suggestions.  Yes, that is part of the answer, but it's truly not that simple.  We do need to slow down, rest and breathe, but if our internal nervous system isn't healthy and regulated it is nearly impossible for us to do that. 

I've found that feeling internally safe and trusting myself helps to give me clearer direction.

When we talk about “taking on someone else’s stuff” this brings to mind a few things for me.  My assumption is that generally a person who is willing to "carry someone else’s stuff" is probably an "empathetic" person. 

When I think of a person who is empathetic, the next thing that comes to mind is empath.  I see these two words in this way:

I see an "empathetic" person as someone who pictures themselves in someone else’s shoes.  They’re willing to internally feel how what the other person is feeling/experiencing would feel to their own self (they are willing to feel what it may be like to be them) and then have compassion for the other person.  If the empathetic person doesn't have a healthy, regulated nervous system and they've learned to "carry someone else's stuff" as a way to protect themselves and to stay safe, this may cause them to become overly tired or sick.

I see "empath" as a person who internally determines what another person may be feeling via their own internal experience.  Again, if the empath person doesn't have a healthy, regulated nervous system and they've learned to "carry someone else's stuff" as a way to protect themselves and to stay safe, this may cause them to become overly tired or sick.

I've sat with people who are empathetic, kind and humble.  They want to help the world but they're sick, exhausted and want to learn how to do differently.  They want to be healthy and living their full life while also figuring out how to help the world.

I've sat with empaths who are coming from ego of believing they are superior to others and who use the ability to sense energy for ill-intent (narcissism and sociopaths).  I've sat with empaths who have been abused and traumatized as a child and only know to do this as a way to keep themselves safe and they are burned out.

For me, the art of learning how to help people and be healthy has been in learning how to be an empathetic person who can internally feel safe and now go through an internal process of choosing whether or not I am going to "carry something for someone".  I can now make a choice that I didn't know I could before.  I have empathy for myself by seeing how this amazing insight to take on other people's stuff as a child kept me safe then, but it was making me sick and I wanted to learn something different as an adult.  

Our Nervous System is an incredibly important system in our body.  It helps us to keep moving through things instead of getting stuck (frozen).  If we have a healthy nervous system, it doesn't mean that nothing "bad" ever happens in our life; that we never feel anything other than happy; or that we react/respond perfectly every time.  It means that we have healthy internal support to help us in continuing to move in a healthy way through processing (feeling) every feeling and making decisions more easily as "life" happens.

As a child, my only hope in having a peace-filled home with my parents was for me to believe that I could "take on their stuff".  I became a people-pleaser, I was frozen, and I tried to carry their dysfunctional "stuff".  I kept myself safe by being an empath.  I was smart in figuring this out while it also became my pattern as an adult.  It was my survival as a child and most of my adult-life.  It made me sick.

We count on our care givers to give us a safe, regulated atmosphere and to model a healthy nervous system to us so that we can naturally adapt into that.  If we are born into dysregulation, as children we quickly adopt a role that we have learned (through trial-and-error) that will keep us safe.  We have no examples of how to live life with a healthy nervous system so we have no idea how to respond to life in a healthy, regulated way.  This means that as an adult, we have some work to do to learn how to live a different way.

I'm not sure that we can ever truly carry someone else's burden.  My assumption is that we are actually carrying our own burden, but it gives us hope (a feeling of being able to do something when we have no control or we're not able to see how we could help in another way). 

Unfortunately, in repeating this pattern that we've learned, we're also making ourselves sick.  We can be appreciative that we were smart enough to figure out how to do that as a child and that we are still here, and there may come a time as an adult when we want to no longer be sick and we want to learn a different way.  

As a child I learned that being an empath was a way to keep me safe.  If I could attempt to read the energy of my parents, maybe I stood a chance.  I was a child in a world where no one was safe and I was shamed if I spoke up for myself, therefore, I needed to read everyone's energy.  I "took on other people's stuff" as a way to feel some sense of control and safety in my life.  

I am one of the people who was always sick, always tired, always angry, and who wanted to help others while also knowing I didn't want to be sick, tired and angry any more.  I realize for me that being an empath was due to childhood trauma and a dysregulated nervous system that was frozen.  It was how I could feel safe in a dysregulated childhood home.  

From my personal experience, I have found one of the most important things an empathetic or empath person can do is to work with a qualified person on their nervous system.  Without this work, everything we're feeling and taking on internally can become frozen and cause illness.  Without a healthy nervous system, it always feels unsafe externally and internally in the world.  Without a healthy nervous system, we can try to rest to re-charge, but we will probably never be fully rested and re-charged.

What the nervous system work has done for me is in helping me to consciously take a next step by asking myself a question, "Lisa, do you want to make yourself sick by carrying something for someone else or do you want to try something different?" I'm finding that I can now trust my system more-and-more to feel safe with all of my feelings, to keep feelings moving and to know that I have more choices to make now than I did before.  I can now more easily and clearly speak for myself and my wants/needs.

I believe that there are many different ways to help people.  One of them is in choosing to "carry someone else's stuff" and that's okay until maybe it isn't for you any longer.  

If we've learned to "carry someone's stuff" as a child and we want to learn something different, we'll have to learn a new way and it will take practice.

If we are "carrying someone else's stuff", there's not enough energy left to care for ourselves and others in a healthy way.  We can't truly "be" with those we want to help if we don't have the internal space (capacity) to be with them.

When we are caring for ourselves in a way that leaves us healthy, we're more easily able to decide how much energy we have to give before we give too much and make ourselves sick.  By helping ourselves, it gives us more reserve to choose when and how we can help others.  It gives us energy to live our life the way we want to be living it. 

Taking time to take care of you by working with a qualified person to build a healthy nervous system is a great way to care for yourself and it's also naturally helping everyone around you (and that is being spread out to the world).

-- Lisa Pratt, January 2020