The Invisible Weight of Carrying Everyone Else’s Feelings
- Fabienne
- Sep 3
- 5 min read
I want to share what this has felt like in my own life, because maybe you’ll recognise yourself in it too.
When someone tells me they have a headache or a sore throat, I often feel it in my own body as if it were mine. Years ago, when my former partner came home from long shifts at the hospital — carrying the weight of stress and urgency — I would feel it instantly in my own system. His body told a story, and mine responded before I even had a chance to think.
Maybe you’ve felt this too, in your own way.
You walk into a room and immediately feel the heaviness in the air, like an invisible fog settling onto your shoulders. You leave a conversation buzzing with anxiety, only to realize later that nothing was actually wrong with you, you were just holding what belonged to someone else. For some of us, even the smallest encounters, like the sad cashier, the impatient driver, the tense colleague, can leave traces in our bodies long after they’re gone.
That’s the thing about being deeply empathic: your nervous system doesn’t always know where you end, and the other begins. It tunes in, absorbs, and adapts, often before your conscious mind even notices. At first, it can look like compassion. You’re caring, supportive, attentive. But underneath, it’s often something more primal: your body’s way of keeping you safe. If you can sense the mood of the room, you can adjust. If you can catch the tension early, you can avoid conflict, rejection, or abandonment.
And while that strategy may have helped you survive once, it can leave you exhausted today. Disconnected. Unsure of what’s truly yours and what never was.
Why We Do This
Most empaths didn’t choose this sensitivity. Rather, it chose them. As children, many of us learned early that paying attention to others was a matter of survival. If Mom was upset, you’d better tread carefully. If Dad came home angry, it was safest to shrink and stay quiet. If someone was hurting, maybe you could ease their pain by carrying some of it yourself.
Your body remembers those lessons. The hypervigilance, the scanning, the constant tuning-in to the world outside you. All of it became second nature. Even now, as an adult, your nervous system is still wired that way. I know mine is.
Sometimes I catch myself orienting completely around another person without even thinking. Their mood becomes my compass, their needs my to-do list. It’s as if I disappear for a moment, melting into the other until I’m not quite sure who I am anymore.
Does that sound familiar?
The Cost of Carrying What Isn’t Yours
Living this way is exhausting. It’s not just “being a good listener” or “having a big heart.” It’s holding other people’s emotional weather inside your own body.
And it comes with a cost:
Your own needs fade into the background.
Rest feels impossible because the world around you never stops buzzing.
Relationships feel one-sided, with you giving and giving — but rarely being seen.
Deep down, you start to wonder: Who am I, apart from what others need me to be?
I’ve been there too. The loneliness of being surrounded by people but never really seen. The quiet resentment of showing up for everyone else but having no one show up for you. The ache of knowing you’re not fully living your truth but not quite knowing what your truth even is.
A Different Way Forward
Here’s the part I want you to hold onto: you don’t have to keep carrying what was never yours.
Healing doesn’t mean shutting off your sensitivity, that beautiful gift of tuning into life. It means learning to stay rooted in yourself, so you can feel with others without losing you.
For me, this has looked like somatic practices. Gentle ways of coming back into my body, finding my breath, and sensing what’s truly mine. It has looked like noticing, “Oh, this tension in my chest isn’t actually mine. I can let it go.” And little by little, it’s given me the space to feel safe in my own skin again.
When you reconnect with your own inner truth, something shifts. Boundaries stop feeling like walls and start feeling like natural edges. Relationships become more authentic, built on presence rather than performance. And love, that real, nourishing love, begins to flow.
I still catch myself absorbing what isn’t mine. A headache, a tension, a sadness that doesn’t belong to me. But these days, I notice it sooner. I place a hand on my heart, breathe into my own body, and whisper: This is mine. That is not.
And when I feel the weight of someone else’s emotions sitting inside me, I imagine returning it: gently, with consciousness attached. It’s not rejection, it’s release. A loving act of remembering what is mine to hold, and what is not. It’s also an act of respect to the other. Because when I stop carrying their burdens, I allow them the empowerment to carry their own, to walk their soul path, and to learn what they came here to learn.
Sometimes I invite support from the natural world in this practice: a calming herb like lemon balm to soothe my nervous system, a grounding crystal like smoky quartz to anchor me, or a Bach flower essence like Walnut to protect my energy as I move through the day. These little allies remind me that I don’t have to carry the world (alone).
Because the truth is: I don’t have to disappear into others to feel safe. I don’t have to carry their storms in my body to prove my love. I am allowed to stand firmly in myself, tender and strong, and let the world meet me. That’s where real connection begins.
And if you want to go deeper — to the root cause of this hypervigilance, this constant scanning and tuning into the world outside (because yes, that is trauma) — know that it can be healed. Root Cause Therapy allows us to meet and release the patterns that keep you in survival mode, so your body can finally rest in safety.
And don’t forget: your animal is part of this too. They often mirror or even compensate for what you carry. They come into our lives for a reason — and when you heal, you can heal together. 🐾
With warmth and possibility,
Fabienne
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