As a kid, you walk into a room and you feel anger there…well, you feel angry, so you must be angry.  You feel sad, so you must be sad.  We learn to internalize those things, to take them on, and to come at the world from the perspective of those things that we’re feeling – believing that they’re our own.

As we get older and lean a little heavier into our work, hopefully, we begin to sort some of that stuff out.  We begin to learn what’s ours and what’s not; what we can let go of – what we can hang onto.

And this can be incredibly difficult when we see people we really love going through a tough time.  One trap in particular that it’s easy to fall into as someone who’s empathic, is the fix, save, and rescue trap.  We see someone suffering, and we want to fix the situation.  We want to save them from it; to rescue them from their peril. 

Sometimes our motivations aren’t as unselfish as they seem, whether we’re aware of that or not.  Part and parcel of growing up in a house full of emotional instability is often the dance of codependence: “I love you because of how you make me feel.” 

In the presence of suffering, especially when it’s the suffering of those we care for, we don’t like the way we feel when we see them suffer, and so we want to rescue them; to stop their pain in order to stop our own.

If you’d like to hear more, please check out the latest episode of my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube…