It’s not your job to heal your loved ones.
That’s right.
Your job is to save no-one but yourself.
Constantly acting as the saviour within your peer group and trying to save people you love can strip you off of your own identity – of course – that’s only if you aren’t well-equipped to take on that role.
You must learn that being there is all you can really hold yourself accountable for.
“You cannot heal someone who avoids help.”
What you can do is, however, help them desire help.
That’s really your best bet.
Again. You shouldn’t hold yourself accountable over their self-sabotage. Your empathy is your ultimate form of unconditional love. Beyond that, you lose yourself and become negatively inflicted, leaving you physically and emotionally drained.
Again, it’s completely normal to feel devastated over someone’s emotional pain and agony. It only makes us human. The intent behind writing this piece is to help you differentiate between healthy ways of feeling for other’s pain.
Because… Who doesn’t know someone living with immense pain?
We aren’t taught empathy; a major key trait that deeply affects our psychology.
The Two Ways People Usually Approach Others’ Suffering
So here are the two different approaches people usually take when triggered by feeling deeply for others’ pain. According to different people’s emotional intelligence, these approaches are often used:
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The Empathetic and Understanding Approach
Highly emotional intellectual people acknowledge others’ feelings and display empathy, which, in other words, is an understanding of someone’s feelings without necessarily harming themselves in the process.
Emotionally Intelectual people are extremely aware of their emotions while “feeling” for those suffering. Think of it like being at the movies watching a devastating scene. Disassociating with the actual event happening to the character allows them to develop a deep emotional understanding while not associating themselves with the emotions of the characters. That means when they walk out of the cinema, they are disassociated with the intensity of the feeling. While it may have impacted them, they no longer feel the same intensity of it.
Should they have been associated with the characters feelings, they would walk out of the movie traumatized.
While the above is an example of a movie, this is no different than the reality of some people.
In short, individuals who have high levels of emotional intelligence are highly aware of preventing other people’s pain wearing onto them.
They are aware that their purest form of love is their deep understanding for their loved ones going through their emotional turbulence.
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The Sympathetic and “Pity” Approach
Unfortunately, people who haven’t developed stern emotional intelligence are often victims of their surrounding environment(s).
These people are those who constantly feel guilty over others’ misfortunes.
We probably all know someone who feels guilty whenever they feel happiness and/or joy due to their constant comparison of those living with high levels of pain and suffering.
Those are the people who constantly feel that they don’t deserve to feel “better than others”.
Usually, their emotional well-being is associated with others. In other words, they constantly feel bad due to others suffering.
They approach others facing adversities with pity and sympathy, which in turn, affects their perception of the world.
On the other hand, we all know someone who perceives the world to only be a place filled with pain and suffering.
While this statement is partially true (there’s much more to the world though), the mere perception of it being fully someone’s reality is truly self-sabotaging.
People that cannot disassociate themselves from other’s suffering often end up playing “The Saviour” role within their social circles.
Their “need” to save others, and often their failures doing so, many times than not, wrecks their own emotional wellbeing.
The reality is that some “saviours” are deeply immersed in other people’s never-ending darkness, they completely forget to actually experience life.
They feel entitled to save others and put themselves last.
They forget that, at the end of the day, we are only really in control and entitled to heal ourselves.
How unjust is it to sentence your own soul for years of suffering over the misfortune of others.
Again, this is a kind reminder that it’s not your job to heal people.
And No! That is by no means a signifier of how much you love them.
We must understand that unconditional love is not quantified the amount of pain and suffering we experience with our loved ones.
Toxic Love is.
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We include our celebrity guest’s take on Mental Health and Wellbeing.
