Emotional sponginess. A blessing and a curse. Sure you may be empathetic to others and read emotional situations more than the average person, but the emotional toll that being a sponge can create can lead to fatigue and burnout.
Ways to tell if you are an emotional sponge:
Others emotions can impact how you feel
Other people’s problems become your problems
This creates distress to you even after leaving the situation
I want to first build the idea of a sponge to use later as a metaphor. Sponges can be great to clean up small messes. Even after they help with a small mess they can still be helpful because they have more capacity to soak up more liquid. If I throw a sponge in a bucket though, the sponge will become so saturated that it takes in no more water. When a sponge is at it’s maximum absorbency, it isn’t going to help clean any more messes.
So let’s bring it back to people and emotions. Just like a real sponge, I can take in a little bit of added emotion. If I have a friend or family going through something challenging, I can feel for them. But if I take on too much emotion from others, I get weighed down and I can’t manage my own emotion from just day to day living.
In therapy school, we were introduced to the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is when we take on others emotions as our own whereas empathy is having understanding for others emotions. This is a very subtle but important difference.
As a therapist, I can be empathetic to a patient. I can try to understand what they are going through and support them through it. It would not be helpful for me to be sympathetic, or take on the emotion from all of my clients. That would be unhealthy for me and all of the clients I see. If you are able to make this gentle shift, it may help you to help more people, use your sponginess as a super power and not get burnt out with helping others.