What do I need?

LIKE A LOT of people, I find it hard to ask for help because I am empathising too much with others. My thinking will be ‘I know how busy X is, so I can’t possibly ask her to do this’, or ‘Y’s children are young and he’s not getting a lot of sleep these days, so I don’t want to ask him’.

There are benefits to empathy, but it can deplete your mental resources, which can lead to burnout. What you want is sustainable empathy.

‘COVID felt like the straw that broke the camel’s back,’ said a client, who had been demonstrating almost superhuman levels of empathy towards her husband and kids and had stopped asking for help around the house. On reflection, she saw that she was deciding for them what they could or couldn’t do, which was neither helpful for her nor empowering for them. By exploring the bounds of her empathy, as well as its power to enable and disenable, she identified specific situations in which she could call on her family to practise shared empathy.