4 ways to support your empathy with embodied boundaries

In the past two blogs (here and here) I’ve been sharing some thoughts on empathy and how it impacts our wellbeing. 

The short version:

When we feel empathy for an animal or person in pain, it lights up the pain center of our brain. 

Being in pain all the time is exhausting (that’s why it’s called empathic distress or compassion fatigue) and eventually that depletion impacts our ability to do our work well.

We can learn to use our empathy skillfully, so that we’re able to stay connected to others without causing harm to ourselves. One way to do that is through empathic discernment. 

This means mindfully observing ourselves - noticing our thoughts, feelings, and body sensations in real time - to determine the best empathic response for oneself and others. In other words, if we’re feeling empathic distress, there are ways we can protect ourselves so we’re not overwhelmed by the pain we encounter every day. 

As promised, today we’ll look at how to use embodied boundaries to help us regulate our empathy, so that we can be with suffering without taking it on as our own.

We can use these types of practices: 

• Throughout our day, as a way to care for ourselves or to strengthen our ability to use these skills when we’re with an animal or person in pain,

• In the moment, when we feel ourselves getting lost or overwhelmed by the pain of others, or 

• Afterward, to help us come back into the safety of our bodies. 

4 ways to practice embodied boundaries:

1. Protect: Reduce emotional and traumatic contagion. Protect yourself from empathic distress and secondary traumatic stress by staying aware of your body. Are you unconsciously mirroring the posture, behavior, or feelings of the upset person or animal? If so, adjust your body so you’re not copying them exactly. Shift position and see if you notice a change in how you’re feeling. 

If you think you aren’t susceptible to this kind of contagion, I dare you to watch a scary or emotional movie without leaning forward, moving your hands, or changing your facial expression. 

2. Pat down: Reconnect to your body. Patting yourself down to bring awareness into the edges of your body can help when you’re lost in someone’s story, video, or your own thoughts. Gently pat yourself down from head to toe or cross your arms and pat the outside of your arms a little more vigorously. Then stop and notice the sensations on your skin. 

Here’s one way to use it: you’re looking at images of animal cruelty for work and you start to feel foggy. Pat down your edges and feel the boundary of where your body ends. What’s happening on screen is not happening in your body. 

Remember: you don’t have to feel their pain to take compassionate action to help animals (if we feel all the pain, we’ll be too exhausted to help!). We can also do pat downs repeatedly throughout the day to gently bring sensation back into our bodies and help break cycles of numbing out.

3. Point of contact: Ground yourself in the present moment. Feel into a point of contact between your feet and the floor or your body and the chair. Feel how you are supported by the chair and the ground. This helps us to feel more safe and stable. 

By focusing on the present moment sensation of our body and this point of contact, we can move away from racing thoughts about the past or future and feel the steadiness of the present moment. This has a calming effect on our mind and nervous system, decreasing stress arousal that may have been triggered by empathic distress. 

You can do this practice on its own as a way to ground and center yourself. Or you can use it in real time to feel the boundary of your body while you listen to an upset pet owner or change a dog’s bandages. Use dual awareness to stay aware of your point of contact while simultaneously being aware of the other being.

4. Power push: Sense your strength. We see so much suffering and feel so much empathic pain that we can start to feel helpless. Trauma specialist Jane Clapp taught me to tap into the power of my arms and legs both as a boundary practice to regulate empathy and as a way to feel powerful again. Jane shared that feeling the strength in your arms and legs can help diminish a sense of helplessness that can be triggered by stress. 

Here’s how: Stand a couple feet away from a wall and actively press your hands into the wall and feet into the ground. Find length in your neck and a broadness in your shoulders while noticing your breath. This posture can elicit a feeling of power in the body and help you feel more resourced and able to deal with whatever challenges are in front of you. 

So the next time you’re with a traumatized animal, a grieving person, or lost in images or thoughts and you notice you’re experiencing empathetic distress, give one of the above practices a try. 

Experiment to see if any of these embodied boundary practices help you to shift out of that empathic pain. They may not be the right fit for you (you're the expert on what works for your body) or you might notice your stress response calming down or feel less emotionally distressed. 

These simple practices, in conjunction with other kinds of care and support, can help us tend to our empathy, so we’re not overwhelmed or disconnected from it, and we can continue to help others ethically, effectively, and sustainably!

Want to practice this together?

Want to practice stuff like this live with me? Join me in the next session of Compassion Fatigue Strategies, Plus! at UFL’s Shelter Medicine Program! We’ll get together for multiple live calls on zoom to learn more and try these practices together. 

Class starts October 21st and you can save on enrollment if you sign up by 9/21! You can learn more here. 

“What Jessica has put together is a truly incredible combination of materials, tools, inspiration, and know-how. NOT cookie cutter or superficial, rather the course is useful and tailored to our work. I got real tools I can use in my self-care, on and off the job.” 
- Ana Mónica, emergency responder volunteer