Empathy From Exhausted to Alive

Drained to Risen Empathy is my next blog post and it’s here!

For most of my life, I wore the title empath like both a crown and a curse.

I could feel what others couldn’t say. I didn’t just sense emotions — I absorbed them. I would walk into a room and instantly know what people were trying to escape. I often found myself in the role of caretaker, savior, mother — the one who held it all. Not out of ego, but because I didn’t know there was another way. It was automatic. Subconscious. Embodied.

But what most people didn’t see was the cost.

Sitting next to misaligned energy would leave me drained for days. Sometimes I took five showers just to feel like myself again. Other times, I needed to retreat in silence, spending days alone in nature to reclaim my energy. Yoga helped. The ocean helped. But still, there was a deeper depletion that no practice seemed to touch.

What I was experiencing wasn’t just sensitivity — it was empathy exhaustion. And it was real.

The Root of the Pattern

Like many of our wounds, this one had deep roots.

As a child, I carried a naturally radiant field. My essence was light, love, and openheartedness. But that light met resistance early on especially from my mother. Her body and nervous system, wounded by her own generational pain, couldn’t receive my love. I remember trying to snuggle, only to be told I was “too much.” Too loud. Too affectionate. Too emotional. Too me.

So I learned not through words, but through energetic imprinting early on that my love needed to be dimmed to be accepted. That my presence was overwhelming, even when all I wanted was connection.

These shackles of guilt and shame passed down enough to make me doubt my essence. And although my light was resilient constantly adapting and recalibrating at lightning speed it was clear I had internalized one core message: love must be filtered, and often withheld.

Breaking the Cycle

It wasn’t until years later, after repeating patterns in relationships and finding myself in the same cycle of loosing myself, that I realized something had to shift.I followed a journey of radical self-inquiry. Tools like Byron Katie’s “The Work” helped me find my own zero points and deal with problems appropriately. I also learned to embraced my own emotional chaos into reclamation. Which was empowering perception to feel it all. With sincerity from an emotional stand point I found shame to be the most crippling.

But here’s the truth I uncovered:

Love is our natural state.

It’s not something we do to be good.
It’s something we are when we stop shrinking.

Love doesn’t ask us to burn out in service to others.
It asks us to burn true — to shine in our fullness without apology.

The Remedy to Empathy Exhaustion

Eventually, I distilled the core of what helped me move from exhausted to alive into two sacred practices:

1. Love
2. Boundaries

Love not as sacrifice, but as self-honoring.
Love that says: “I care deeply, but I will not carry it for you.

And boundaries not as walls to push people away,
but as sacred edges that allow us to stay soft and sovereign.
Boundaries that say: “My light is not up for negotiation. My energy is sacred.”

This was the turning point.
I stopped rescuing and started witnessing.
I stopped absorbing and started aligning.
I stopped abandoning myself in the name of empathy.

Coming Alive Again

Today, empathy no longer exhausts me it enlivens me.

Because I now meet others from a place of presence, not depletion.
Because I know that being “there” for someone doesn’t mean losing myself in their suffering.
Because I’ve learned that the world doesn’t need another martyr.
It needs people alive in their own light.

So if you find yourself drained, stretched thin by your sensitivity,
know this:
You don’t have to numb out.
You don’t have to shut down.
You just need new agreements with yourself.

Empathy is not about carrying the world.
It’s about being anchored enough to feel it without losing yourself in the waves.

From exhausted to alive, it’s not about being less of who you are.
It’s about being more of your true self,
with clarity, with love, and with the boundaries that let you breathe.