Is It Empathy or Enmeshment?

The word empath gets thrown around a lot. People often use it to describe those who feel deeply or seem unusually tuned into others’ emotional states. But there’s a subtle and important difference between true empathy and something else entirely: enmeshment.

Empathy has space. It allows you to feel with someone, without becoming them. It honors both your experience and theirs. It listens without absorbing.

But what’s often called empathy is actually a coping mechanism formed in early life: the need to constantly monitor others’ emotions, to soothe, fix, or absorb them—because somewhere, long ago, it felt like safety depended on it.

This isn’t sensitivity. This is survival.

When empathy becomes entanglement, when feeling for others comes at the cost of self, it’s no longer compassion—it’s enmeshment. And it’s exhausting.

The journey back is one of disentangling. Of sensing where someone else ends and you begin. Of trusting others to carry their own experience. Of letting go of the reflex to fix.

True empathy doesn’t drown; it meets, and then lets go.

The invitation 

If you often feel a need to retreat, or find yourself constantly drained around others, it might not be because you're "too sensitive"—it might be worth gently asking: Is this really empathy, or have I learned to lose myself in others? The invitation is to look deeper. There’s nothing wrong with needing space—but there may be something even more freeing in discovering why.

The beautiful truth

It is possible to be in the same space with others—without fear, and without feeling drained. Real presence doesn't cost you anything. It arises naturally when there’s no longer a compulsion to fix, manage, or hold others' emotions as your own.

Sometimes what we call compassion is actually self-erasure. But you don’t have to disappear to care.