I Stopped Being an Emotional Dumpster: A Struggle with Empathy
Have you ever found yourself in a situation where someone you care about unloads all of their emotional baggage on you without considering how it might affect you? That, my friend, is what we call emotional dumping.
Emotional dumping is a term used to describe the act of offloading one’s emotional burden onto another person without regard for the other person’s emotional state. It can take many forms, from constant venting to obsessive talk about one’s problems, and it can be incredibly draining for the person on the receiving end.
The Trigger
As the go-to (unqualified) therapist of my friend group, I was used to being the person others turned to when they needed to unload their emotional baggage. I loved being there for my friends. I supposed they felt comfortable enough to open up to me without the fear of judgment. But as the holiday season approached, I found myself feeling more and more burnt out.
It seemed like everyone ‘wanted to have coffee’ and I knew what coffee meant. One day, I just shut myself off from my friends, deleting Instagram, muting Messenger, and all other notifications on my phone. I stopped answering calls and texts, and I cancelled all social events. I felt like I was drowning in other people’s emotions and no space for mine.
The Side-effect: Guilt and/or Resentment
As a recovering people-pleaser, it’s tough to admit that we can’t always be there for others. When I found myself burnt out, I felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. I didn’t want to let my friends down. It doesn’t help to know that these friends have gone through worse things than myself. But in the same breath, I knew that I was running on zero.
The other side effect was a build-up of resentment. I kept asking myself, “Why can’t they process this themselves?” “They leave me with all these heavy emotions but why don’t they at least ask how I was doing first?”
It was a toxic soup of these two emotions that put me in my own spiral with very little to work with.
Oddly enough, it reminded me of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism when he said:
“The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious. People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.”
Of course, not all emotional dumpers are narcissistic, and not all narcissists engage in emotional dumping. But remembering Lasch’s book made sense of how most people (myself included) are constantly in a state of pursuit— for relief, for acceptable answers, for meaning and purpose.
Everyone seems to be struggling mentally and emotionally. I’m guessing it’s the cumulative effect of so many things, like how the Internet and social media have reprogrammed our brains; and how culture has shifted in relation to technology. And how that same culture over-pathologizes normal behavior because it either makes good content, fulfills a need for attention, or removes accountability for bad choices.
An Evolved Relationship with Empathy
As I try to be self-introspective about all this, an uncomfortable question comes up:
Have I been doing this all this time because it fed my own ego of wanting to please people (and being better than them) or did I genuinely want to be there for my friends?
In both scenarios, no one gets really hurt but it does make me question what my intentions were or will be as I navigate empathy post-burnout.
I don’t have a real answer to this because I have yet to answer other big philosophical questions like “Do I really know myself (or will I ever)?”
All that I am sure of for now is that while going through that, my empathy muscle felt strained and maybe even severed. I started to wonder if I even had any empathy left in the tank, or if I had used it all up trying to understand them.
It’s difficult to admit that there are times when my own mental limitations make it challenging to be as present and engaged as I would like to be. But this event made me question if I truly valued connections and empathy. It made me want to be selfish and it felt good to be unavailable.
In hindsight, what I needed was a break and to recharge. But more importantly, I needed to be honest with others about what I can and cannot do for them.
We learn after we burn.
