The Boundaries of Burden

There are a tonne of brave people out there who speak and share about the roadblocks to reaching out for help during seasons of struggle with big or difficult emotions. Sometimes it’s fear that is the hindrance to help-seeking, other times it’s pride or the need to feel self-sufficient. Another common blocker is a history of feeling shamed or reprimanded during help-seeking. But perhaps the one I hear the most, in my reading, in my practice with struggling people, and within my own life, is a deep, and seemingly selfless, desire to not be a ‘burden’ to those around us.

A burden is defined as a heavy load. I enjoy the visual of this language. The imagery that comes to my mind is someone bent underneath a cumbersome weight; someone shouldering something that is of such great size or substance that it impacts their ability to move freely. This resonates with how many of us describe and express what it feels like when we are struggling with life’s darker moments. When we interact with difficult emotions, we are carrying a heavy load. We are bearing a burden that often influences or even dictates our ability to move and function as we normally would.

This imagery/idea also makes sense of some of the other reasons why we often don’t feel comfortable seeking help when we are burdened. In order to get help, we must expose the reality our heavy load. We must talk about it, bring it into focus, draw the attention of others to our own burden. This is scary, it is humbling, and it is risky.

But what remains curious to me is this notion of a ‘burden transfer’. The idea that exposing or sharing about the reality of my own burden will result in another person becoming heavy laden.

I don’t think this idea has been concocted by people struggling with their mental health. I think it’s very real and reflects the truth of how many of us interact with our loved ones when they are struggling. However, this brings to my mind a big question! Why DO we tend to feel burdened by the pain or suffering of other people?

I don’t pretend to have definitive answers, but I think it’s a question worth asking, and I have pondered the following possibilities:

I think we tend to feel burdened by the pain and suffering of others for two key reasons:

1)      Because as humans we have an innate capacity for empathy. We are biologically built to attune to the experience of other humans we feel connected to. This is both a primal survival mechanism, and a uniquely human experience. But many of us don’t really understand empathy, or how to use it.

2)      Because humans, especially those in Western cultures, have a deep-seated belief that pain and struggle is inherently wrong and that it is our job to eradicate it.

Allow me to elaborate on these two points…

1. EMPATHY

Empathy is the act of ‘feeling with’ another. Empathy requires a shared vulnerability, meaning we open ourselves up to experiencing a measure of whatever the other person is feeling. Therefore, there really IS a sharing of the heavy that occurs. If we are empathetic, it makes sense that we would feel heavy laden when someone shares their struggles with us. This is because we must connect with and feel a similar load on our own shoulders in order to help them feel less alone in the carrying of theirs. The distinction here, however, is that the two loads actually remain distinctively separate. Think of it this way:

Imagine one person’s emotional burden as a basketball. When they share it with someone else, they are (metaphorically) holding their basketball out in front of them, they are showing the other person. They might describe what it looks like and how it feels in their hands.

Now, in order to effectively recognise the basketball as a basketball, the other person must recall their own knowledge and/or experience of a basketball. They must be able to call on their own memories and emotions to remember the general characteristics of a basketball in order to identify it correctly. This is what allows them to genuinely say “I see the basketball”, “I have a frame of reference for how a basketball looks and feels” and “I too know what basketballs are; you are not alone”. This is empathy. If they don’t do this, or if they have never seen a basketball, they are unlikely to recognise the basketball and they will likely respond in ways that communicate things like, “that’s not really a basketball” or “I don’t believe in basketballs”. This can feel very isolating and even shameful for the person who has been brave enough to hold out the basketball in the first place.

So, I think empathy is necessary for genuine connection and helping, but I would posit that it does not involve a transfer of burden. We don’t take the ‘basketball’ from the other person. When we show empathy, we are digging out our ‘basketball’, holding our ‘basketball’ long enough to remember what it feels like, and then using that memory to aid genuine connection during hard stuff. There are two ‘basketballs’. Same, same, but different. (I have so much more to say about our emotional ‘basketballs’ by the way, but that’s a different paper!)

So, herein lies the first boundary we can lay in order to avoid the sense of a burden-transfer. When we aim to show empathy, it can help to visual two basketballs. This is also how we ensure that we do not end up laden with the weight of whole world’s ‘basketballs’. I can see your pain and I can recognise it by reconnecting with an element of my own pain, but there is no exchange of pain. My pain remains mine, yours remains yours. When we leave one another’s company we each take our respective ‘pain-basketball’ with us and, through the magic of empathy, feel a little more seen and heard and a little less alone.

 2. RESPONSIBILITY

The second reason we really do feel burdened by the emotional discomfort of others is more nuanced and harder to address or shift. This is because it is a deeply ingrained cultural one.

During the recent, more affluent, history of the Western World I think we have collectively convinced ourselves that it is unreasonable to experience pain and struggle. Further to that I observe that we seem to have taken on a strange and somewhat entitled “responsibility” for saving people from our definition of pain and struggle. This is evident in so many things, from the rationale for the colonization and indoctrination of entire nations to the ‘helicopter’ parenting style of the 21st century and even in the way we generally respond when people say, “this is hard”.  

On the meta level we tend to avoid pain and struggle at almost all costs. We are often incensed when we experience it, and those of us in privileged positions often vehemently defend our ‘right’ to have a comfortable, struggle-free life. At the micro level, we actively narrate emotional discomfort (fear, anger, disgust and sadness) as something that is ultimately unhealthy, unhelpful and needs to go away, or at the very least hidden from plain sight.

We really do feel responsible for the eradication of uncomfortable or painful emotions. We feel responsible for our own emotional discomfort, and we often feel responsible for the emotional discomfort of others. Sometimes we even feel responsible for how people experience their uncomfortable emotions, and we therefore feel responsible for minimising said discomfort where and if we can.

We’ve absorbed and integrated this sense of responsibility into many things. Our relationships, our education systems, our parenting and our interactions with people who are struggling. We have begun to believe that it is our job, not just to see or connect with pain and struggle via empathy, but to take it away, to take it on, to influence and manipulate it.

If this is a real responsibility, it is a huge one. No wonder we feel burdened by it!

Whilst all this responsibility is very well intentioned, my hypothesis is that it is misguided, misinformed and ultimately damaging to the helping and healing process. My suggestion is that we’ve thrown the autonomy baby out with the empathy bathwater, and it’s not helping! In fact, I wonder if it is a significant contributor to why people DON’T reach out for help when they are struggling, because struggling people DON’T want (or need) others to feel responsible for taking away or ‘solving’ their difficult emotions.

It is important to note here that I am not referring to perpetrators of abuse or purposeful inflictors of pain and suffering. Justice, attribution of wrongdoing, contact boundaries and insistence of accountability are all vitally important parts of healing from any kind of abuse, intended or otherwise.

What I am referring to is the assertion that a transfer of the responsibility to eradicate difficult emotions can and should occur between two people. I contest this notion on principle and make the somewhat controversial suggestion that there is no responsibility (or need) to eradicate difficult emotions at all!

Don’t get me wrong, I think we have a great responsibility to one another as humans. To connect, to travel alongside, to tether ourselves to one another through good times and bad, to protect the weak and vulnerable, to lead and wield our personal and communal powers with grace and humility. But I do not think we are, or were ever, responsible for eliminating uncomfortable emotions from our existence. Quite the contrary.

The foundation of my assertation is based on the understanding that the entire spectrum of human emotion is valid and valuable, needed and worthy of being just as it is. Being in emotional discomfort or pain isn’t wrong, or bad in and of itself. It is our body’s way of communicating a need to us. Ultimately, if we block, avoid or downplay these emotions we hinder, not help.

This culturally constructed and socially conditioned responsibility to get rid of difficult emotions is a relational red herring. None of us are responsible for eliminating, changing, shifting or manipulating emotions. Emotions need a mirror, not a makeover. They need to be seen and recognised, not fixed or masked.

So, the second boundary we can set to avoid this notion of burden-transfer in helping, is to let go of this unreasonable, untenable and unhelpful sense of responsibility. We can practice and embrace the freedom of letting hard things be. We can change our mindset from “I must fix this” to “I can see and understand this”.

Interestingly, it is often the feeling of being seen and understood, not fixed, that invigorates healing and wholeness for human beings.

Here are your two take-aways if you’ve made it this far:

1)      Empathy is not taking on someone else’s pain; it’s recognising and acknowledging someone else’s pain by being brave enough to revisit your own.

2)      Contrary to our current cultural narrative, difficult emotions don’t require eradication. It is not your responsibility, or mine, or theirs, to make uncomfortable emotions go away. All emotions are important, valid and useful.   

May we boundary and embrace all who are heavy laden, surrounding one another with empathy and welcoming the richness and realness of all our emotions, in both comfort and pain. No faux fixing, just free feeling.

On the journey with you,

K.