I hear you, Kath this is a deep subject for me. I’ve struggled with this for most if not all of my adult life I didn’t even realise how destructive this type of behaviour was to myself and the people involved.
This year i’ve taken the time to try and understand how people like us, people so kind, generous warm hearted and sincere, still struggle to maintain relationships and constantly be overlooked. It’s only now that I’m starting to see things from an outsiders perspective, Here’s my take on it
I think on deeper subconsious level empaths fear being unwanted or loved, maybe a part of us feels that we’re unworthy of love and so we go out of way putting our own needs aside, giving away all of our energy to offer help to others in a desperate attempt to counteract that fear, and to gain love and acceptance from others
But from my experience it always has a habit of backfiring and the people we set out to help always end up taking advantage of or resenting us. In the end we’re left feeling confused, emotionally drained, overlooked and sometimes bitter about the whole experience, so we try even harder next time and the dangerous cycle continues…
I’ve lost a lot of close friends because of my “good nature” and its it’s even worse coz in my
mind I always had their best interests at heart and felt I’ve done everything i
could to help them in their journey.
Now that I’ve taken the time to understand my behavior and become more
aware of my actions, I’ve come to the conclusion that helping others is good as long as you are doing for the right reasons.
This year I made a decision to establish and stick to some new rules when it comes to helping others.
Here’s my advice
1. if you spot an opportunity to help someone you have to understand that you may not receive and appreciation for your actions
you have to be willing to accept that as part of the “arrangement” before you help someone, if you can’t for what ever reason then don’t offer the help. People can sense when you’re trying to help for your own selfish reasons of wanting love, acceptance or to been looked at a certain type of way by the people around you etc, and thats where the resentment in other people come from.
2. Be aware that in some cases helping forces another person to become dependant on us and so we inherit another persons negative energy which we carry around as our own. (extremely energy sapping.)
3. Never ever self sacrifice!! (giving up your own interests for the interest of others) although it might feel noble its actually the opposite. it’s a very selfish way of helping and again its very emotionally draining
4. Many empaths feel like they have to take responsibility for everyone they come into contact with. We feel guilty most or all of the time that were simply not doing enough to help people around us and so we help in an attempt to relieve ourselves from the guilt. Help must never come from a feeling of obligation but more from a knowing of choice. (in other words were not obliged to
help anybody but we choose to and are more than capable)
5. Helping others a lot offers a good distraction from our own wants and needs. By helping people with our own problems i think we ignore the problems we have in ourselves. The antidote to this is to know what you want from life and do what you can to get your inner game right before you attempt to do any kind of helping or healing work. When you know your own worth and what you want it becomes a lot easier to turn down a help request if it conflicts with your own principals or priorities, infact i’ve found that people respect you more for it
6. Remember that although people might be in need of help they might not always want help, and in doing that it can disempower
people (no one wants to feel like they can’t do something by themselves) which in turn causes negativity & resentment which affects your emotional state try to establish weather helping someone will empower or disempower them before you do it.
Being an empath is a beautiful thing, the world could definitely do with a few more people like us, but if we want to protect our own energy and gain the right response from people we have to be totally honest with ourselves about our motivations behind helping someone before we do it. It’s easy to jump to someone’s needs without giving it a second though or just hide behind the excuse of “making them happy makes me happy”
From now on when i help someone I Just get in n get out. I don’t expect anything in return and I’ll never again self sacrifice.
All this is easier said than done tho. Undoing a lifetime worth of bad habits is hard enough for the best of us I’m just trying to take each day as it comes, until everything becomes second nature, once i’ve moved into this new space im confident i’ll be able experience the joy of helping people without it’s ugly drawbacks
Anyways thats my 2 cents. I know I’ve gone slightly off topic here but i really wanted to share as much as possible
in the hope that someone going through a similar thing can read this and take something from it.
Would love to hear anybody else’s view on this
thanks
LB