What happens when you can understand the person who hurt you, but that understanding keeps you from protecting yourself?
As both a therapist and an empath myself, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about empathy. We talk about empathy as an inherently good thing. We praise people for being empathetic and encourage children to develop it. In therapy, we often work toward understanding where other people are coming from, especially when relationships feel complicated. Empathy allows us to step outside of our own perspective and imagine what someone else might be experiencing. And I do think that is a beautiful human capacity.
But... I also wonder if we sometimes place empathy on such a high moral pedestal that we forget to ask what happens when our empathy begins to cost us something. What happens when you are able to understand the person who hurt you so well that you lose touch with the fact that you were hurt?
I can personally say I've experienced this before. Someone treats you poorly, crosses a boundary, disappoints you, or repeatedly does something that causes you pain. But instead of sitting with your own anger, sadness, or hurt, your mind immediately starts looking for an explanation.
"Maybe they're struggling right now." "Maybe they didn't mean it that way." "Maybe their childhood explains why they behave like this." "Maybe they're afraid of abandonment." "Maybe they don't know how to communicate." "Maybe they're hurting, too."
But when we start focusing on just the reasoning behind the action, we start spending way more energy understanding their pain than acknowledging our own. This is where I think the distinction between empathy and compassion becomes really important.
Empathy is often described as the ability to understand or feel what someone else is experiencing. It happens internally. You can recognize someone's fear, grief, shame, insecurity, or pain without necessarily doing anything about it.
Compassion takes that understanding and moves it toward action. It asks, "Given what I understand about this person's experience, how do I want to respond?"
This distinction is important because compassion does not necessarily mean getting closer. Sometimes compassion looks like listening. Sometimes it looks like forgiveness. Sometimes it looks like offering someone another chance.
But compassion can also look like creating distance. You can understand why someone behaves the way they do and still decide that you don't want to be around it. You can have compassion for someone's wounds without volunteering to be wounded by them. You can recognize that someone has their own pain without making yourself responsible for carrying it.
I think this becomes particularly complicated for people who have learned, somewhere along the way, that understanding other people's emotions is part of staying safe.
If you've spent much of your life monitoring other people's moods, anticipating their reactions, trying to keep the peace, or figuring out what someone needs before they even ask, you're probably very good at understanding people. From the outside, that appears to be incredible empathy (and sometimes it is).
But for many of us with trauma histories, what looks like empathy is actually hypervigilance. Sometimes you're not asking, "What might this person be feeling?" because you're simply curious about their inner world. You're asking because your nervous system wants to know what is coming next.
"What do they need from me?" "Are they upset?" "Did I do something wrong?" "How can I make this better?" "What can I say so they don't leave?" "What can I do so they aren't angry with me?"
This is where we have to work on understanding another person's experience without feeling responsible for regulating it. That can feel really difficult to see when you're used to putting yourself second.
This is also why I think we need to be careful about how we talk about empathy in relationships. Is it really empathy if your understanding of another person is rooted primarily in fear? If you're constantly putting yourself in their shoes because you're afraid of rejection, conflict, abandonment, or disapproval, there may be something else happening underneath the empathy.
You may actually be trying to create emotional safety for yourself.
And there is nothing wrong with wanting emotional safety. In fact, you deserve that in all of your relationships. But if understanding someone else's pain consistently requires you to override your own, we may need to ask whether empathy has turned into self-abandonment.
When does empathy end and self-abandonment begin?
I don't think the answer is simply that we should stop empathizing with people who hurt us. In fact, I don't think we need to stop seeing their humanity at all.
You can know that someone has trauma and still hold them accountable for how they treat you. It's okay to understand that someone's behavior comes from insecurity and still recognize that their behavior is unhealthy. You can know that someone is struggling and still decide that you cannot continue being the person who absorbs the consequences of that struggle. That is not your job.
Understanding ≠ excusing. Compassion ≠ access.
This is where I think many people get stuck after being hurt by someone they love. They believe that if they set a boundary, stop responding, end the relationship, or refuse to keep offering chances, they are somehow becoming less compassionate. There can be an almost moral quality to this fear.
"If I were really a good person, wouldn't I understand?" "If I were really empathetic, wouldn't I be able to see where they're coming from?" "If I walk away, am I abandoning someone who is already hurting?"
Sometimes we become so concerned with being on the "right side" of things that we lose sight of what is actually happening inside the relationship. We don't want to become the bad person, be cruel, or become like the person who hurt us. So we keep understanding, forgiving, making room, and explaining.
But at some point, we don't need to question whether we have empathy for the other person. We need to question whether we have empathy for ourselves. Empathy isn't supposed to require you to choose between yourself and someone else.
You can look at another person's pain and say, "I understand why this is happening," while also saying, "And I don't want to experience this anymore." Those statements can coexist! And I think that may actually be a more mature form of compassion.
Not the kind of compassion that requires you to erase your anger or stop acknowledging harm, but the kind that allows you to hold a fuller picture. This person has a story. So do I. This person has wounds. So do I. Their pain matters. Mine does too.
So here's some things to remember:
- Truly caring about another person involves accepting that you cannot heal them.
- You cannot love someone into feeling more emotionally safe with them.
- You cannot understand someone so perfectly that they stop hurting you.
- You cannot take enough responsibility for another person's wounds to make their behavior your responsibility.
Compassion may require us to stop asking, "Why are they like this?" and start asking, "What do I need now?" We need a balance between compassion toward others and self-compassion.
That doesn't mean the other person's story no longer matters. It just means yours matters too. Recognizing this improves our self-worth, which in turn improves our own mental health.
The goal isn't to become less empathetic; we just want to become more discerning about where that empathy goes and what you do with it.
Empathy is a beautiful thing. But empathy that requires your worth and needs to disappear isn't compassion; It's self-abandonment.
If you’re an adult in Ohio who struggles with people-pleasing, overextending yourself, or feeling responsible for other people’s emotions, therapy can be a safe space to begin untangling those patterns. You don’t have to stop caring about other people in order to start caring for yourself, too. Together, we can explore where these patterns came from, how they show up in your relationships, and what it might look like to build boundaries without losing the parts of yourself that are compassionate and caring. If this is something you’re ready to work on, I’d be happy to help.
