Deep-dive #18: The need to be needed

Empathy is one of the most admired and most misunderstood human capacities. If we were asked to sketch a deeply empathic person, we might picture someone warm, generous, and intuitive. A person who notices emotional currents long before anyone else does. And all of that is true. But it is not the whole story.

Empathy is not just a nice personality trait. It is a complex psychological, neurobiological, and relational process. When we don’t understand its depth, we misunderstand ourselves.

What Empathy Is

At its core, empathy is the ability to tune into people with presence and clarity. It’s the capacity to feel with someone, not for them. It is joining someone for a moment in the waters they’re swimming in. Not diving in to rescue them, not drowning with them. Just being next to them at their depth so they don’t feel alone.

Psychology describes three intertwined layers of empathy:

• Affective empathy: the emotional resonance we feel automatically.

• Cognitive empathy: understanding why someone feels what they feel.

• Compassionate empathy: responding with care while holding healthy boundaries.

Doesn’t this sound wonderfully altruistic and admirable? It does! And yet, empathy is a superpower and a gift that consumes a significant amount of psychological and physiological resources. Beneath the surface of its three layers sits a surprisingly expensive neurobiological system powered by

• the mirror neuron network, our emotional antenna (see deep-dive #1)

• the principles of co-regulation described by Stephen Porges (see deep-dive #5)

• the amygdala’s heightened vigilance (see deep-dive #4)

• and the inner narrator who nudges analysis and overthinking (see deep-dive #11)

  
  

With this neurochemical complexity exposed, it is no wonder that for some empaths, the true difficulty is not feeling too much. It is not knowing where and when to draw the line.

When Empathy Turns into Overload

Empaths eventually reach a point where they notice that their caring is no longer compassionate and that it has become compulsory. Their nurturing turns into emotional labor. Their intuition becomes hypervigilance, and their desire to help transforms into an unconscious survival strategy. Welcome to the empath’s first awakening: the moment they realize the trait they relied on to feel connection, belonging, and safety has started to drain them.

Carl Jung would describe this as the moment the shadow breaks through. The long-suppressed parts of self, e.g., anger, agency, boundaries, self-protection, which were masked as empathy are rising to the surface after years of being exiled. What follows often feels like friction: numbness, irritability, chronic overwhelm, difficulty regulating the impulse to care for others, and the guilt of no longer being able to carry everyone’s emotional weight.

At this point, relationships can also change. People who were used to the empath's constant availability may rebel against this change, or they may distance themselves from the empath. This can lead to the empath being torn between their own healing and feelings of guilt towards the outside world.

But still: what the empath’s sensitive soul might think is a collapse is actually a blessing in disguise – and a way out.

From this point on, empathy becomes a confident action, not a survival strategy and certainly not a currency for belonging. Healthy empathy is not characterized by the empath becoming emotionally hardened or feeling less. It is characterized by the empath expressing their empathy in a more conscious, selective, grounded, and thus clearer and more differentiated way, without neglecting themselves in the process.

In a seashell

Empathy is a wonderful yet demanding human ability; a mixture of resonance, understanding, and compassionate action, shaped by our psychology and nervous system. When practiced with healthy boundaries, it allows us to sit with others in their depth without drowning in it. However, when driven by old patterns, excessive responsibility, or the need to be needed, it becomes very costly neurologically. The empath falls into an overload of their emotions and nervous system, often without realizing it.

In its healed form, empathy is both caring and conscious. It gives without disappearing, it feels without absorbing, it supports without sacrificing itself. Sensitivity is no longer a survival strategy but becomes a source of strength and resilience.

And it is precisely this grounded, conscious empathy that our work environment, our relationships, and our society need most.

How Coaching can support

Coaching offers something that empaths rarely allow themselves: a conscious, safe space to refocus their energy on themselves and thus establish a lasting connection with their own resources. It helps them understand where their empathy enriches not only the lives of others but also their own, and where it quietly and silently exhausts them.

Empathy thrives when our nervous system is regulated and collapses when we are exhausted. In coaching, empaths learn exactly that: to consciously decide where their energy flows and when a healthy “no” is the most loving and honest answer of all. Through neuroscience-based practices, somatic awareness, trauma-informed or polyvagal exercises, coaching strengthens the ability to better regulate one's own nervous system, recognize emotional boundaries, and separate intuition from responsibility.

Coaching helps people realize that empathy is a precious gift, not an inexhaustible resource. It offers empaths a space where they can hear their own voice again.

My books of the month

The quiet revenge of the empath (Aria Rodman, 2025)

The Healed Empath: The Highly Sensitive Person’s Guide to Transforming Trauma and Anxiety, Trusting Your Intuition, and Moving from Overwhelm to Empowerment (Kristen Schwartz, 2022)

The Genius of Empathy: Practical Skills to Heal Your Sensitive Self, Your Relationships, and the World (Judith Orloff, 2024)