And Other Questions That Will Start Arguments at Dinner
This is Part 2 of the original article about whether we are born empaths or whether we become empaths, because Part 1 apparently struck a nerve. Thanks so much to everyone who wrote to me!
Few questions in popular psychology generate more passionate responses than this one. Some people are absolutely certain they arrived on this earth more plugged-in than everyone else—more attuned, more full of feeling, basically walking around with the emotional equivalent of a satellite dish strapped to their soul. Others insist the whole “empath” concept is a comforting story we invented to explain why grocery stores are exhausting.
The truth is messy. Annoyingly, inconveniently messy. And it starts with a somewhat awkward fact: several states that look like empathy aren’t quite empathy at all. Let’s call this pseudo-empathy. And yes, this section might just get a little personal, but don’t click just yet, the information below might well be life-changing for some of you.
As it was for me.
Not sure if any of this applies to you? Maya’s story might give you some insights.
The Trophy For The Most Thoughtful Person in the Room Goes To…
Everyone said Maya was the most empathic person they’d ever met.
She knew how you took your coffee before you told her. She could feel the exact moment a conversation was about to turn difficult and would gently, deftly steer it somewhere safer. She noticed when you were quiet in a way that was different from your usual quiet. She remembered the name of your difficult sister, your dog’s medication, the anniversary you were dreading.
People said she had a gift.
Maya believed them. It must be a gift.
She had learned to read rooms the way other people read books — fluently, hungrily, and with a great deal at stake. Growing up, the rooms had needed reading. Her mother’s moods moved through the house like weather systems, and Maya had become an expert emotional meteorologist before she was ten. A certain stillness in the kitchen meant days (or weeks) of silent sulking were on the cards. Laughter that was slightly too loud meant a storm was about to break. She learned to adjust, deflect, and absorb — to make herself useful before anyone could decide she was in the way.
She thought she’d left all that behind, though.
Now, at thirty-four, she had a close circle of friends who adored her. A boyfriend who called her his “safe place.” More than one colleague who rang her whenever things got too hard to bear.
She was appreciated. She was valued. She felt she belonged.
What she didn’t have was a clear sense of what she actually wanted for dinner, or which film she’d genuinely choose if nobody else had a preference, or what she thought about anything before she’d checked what everyone else thought first. These felt like small things. Of course, these things were irrelevant. She had convinced herself they were small, irrelevant things.
Until one perfectly ordinary and unremarkable Tuesday, when her boyfriend said — gently, carefully, the way you say something you’ve been rehearsing — that he sometimes felt like he couldn’t reach her. That she was always fine. Always accommodating. Always one step ahead of what whatever he needed.
“It’s like you’re carefully watching me all the time,” he said.
She laughed it off. Then she went outside and sat in her car for forty minutes, not knowing why.
Her therapist asked her once: “When you check in on everyone else — what are you actually checking for?”
Maya opened her mouth to say I check in because I care. And found, to her horror, that another answer was already forming underneath it, quieter and much less flattering:
Because if they’re okay, I’m okay. She sat with that for a long time.
She began to notice things she hadn’t let herself notice before. The way her shoulders relaxed the moment someone smiled in relief after she’d said yes. The way she’d already started composing an apology before any conflict had actually happened. The way she monitored, constantly, the emotional temperature of every room — not only because she cared, but because of something much more alarming.
She was, she realised, always braced. Always aware of potential ways things can go wrong.
She had spent thirty-four years calling this bracing-for-the-worst “empathy.”
The grief that came with this realisation was strange. Not dramatic — no sobbing, no screaming, no revelation with a swelling soundtrack. Just a quiet, persistent ache. The ache of understanding that the thing she’d built her identity around, the thing people praised her for, the thing that made her feel valuable and needed and safe, had never quite been about other people at all.
She didn’t stop caring. That part, she came to understand, was real. The wanting to help was real. The noticing was real. But she started, slowly and with considerable difficulty, to ask herself the question she had never thought to ask:
What do I (me, myself, I) actually feel right now?
Not: what does this person need? Not: how can I make this easier? Not: How can I avoid conflict? Not: what will keep everything from imploding?
Just: what do I feel?
It was harder than it sounds. Some days she genuinely didn’t know. The signal had been buried under so much noise for so long that trying to find it made her feel like an archaeologist — digging carefully, patiently, determinedly, and occasionally uncovering something that had been there, waiting to be acknowledged, for a very long time.
She’s still working on it.
But last week, when a friend asked where she wanted to go for lunch, Maya paused — actually paused, instead of immediately reflecting the question back — and said:
“You know what I want? Thai food. I really LOVE Thai food.”
Pseudo-Empathy States Examined
The thing all pseudo-empathy states have in common is that they’re essentially safety strategies dressed up in a caring sweater. They’re not freely chosen, generous or thoughtful responses to someone else’s pain. They’re your nervous system doing damage control while wearing a volunteer badge.
1. People-Pleasing (Kindness With a Catch)
People-pleasers are attentive, accommodating, and lightning-fast to respond—all of which looks like empathy from the outside. But the engine running underneath isn’t love; it’s often fear. Fear of disapproval. Fear of being rejected. Fear of being unmasked as an imposter. Fear of losing control.
The tell? Your inner monologue shifts from “I want to help” to “I must prevent this from going wrong at all costs.” Your self-worth gets tangled up in whether everyone’s okay with you. You agree before you’ve even checked whether you actually agree. You apologise, over-explain, self-silence, and smooth things over—then feel quiet resentment when nobody notices how hard you are working to avoid a clearly impending catastrophe.
That’s not empathy. That’s an invisible toll booth.
2. The Fawn Response (As in Fight, Flight, Fawn and Freeze)
The fawn response is what happens when your nervous system decides the safest way through a threatening situation is to become extremely, enthusiastically agreeable. It’s a survival adaptation—your internal threat-manager moonlighting as a people person.
It can mimic empathy so closely it’s almost eerie, because it produces high attunement, anticipating needs, and tuning into moods—all in service of a very primal goal: if you’re pleased with me, I’ll be okay, I’ll be safe. The short-term relief of pleasing someone is real. Rewarding even. But so is the long-term cost: resentment, burnout, and the vague sense that you’ve been renting out your serenity to whoever needs it.
3. Codependency (Care That Becomes a Career)
Codependency is where the “need to please” upgrades into a “need to be needed”—and if people-pleasing is a part-time job, codependency is a full-time vocation with loads of unpaid overtime. One person overfunctions. Another gets to underfunction. Somehow, this becomes the whole relationship.
It often has its roots in childhood, in households where love came with conditions attached—where a child learned that the way to stay safe was to monitor the emotional weather of the adults around them at all times. That’s exhausting work for a small person. And it tends to follow people into adulthood, producing what looks remarkably like the empath identity: obsessive attunement to others’ feelings, difficulty knowing where their emotions end and yours begin, and an almost compulsive need to fix things.
Here’s the crucial difference: real empathy lets you feel with someone while staying grounded in yourself. Codependency pulls you straight into their emotional current because nobody ever taught you how to swim alongside someone without drowning in their sorrow.
The danger of slapping the “empath” label on this pattern is that it can turn something that genuinely needs attention into a personality trait to be celebrated. “I can’t help it, I’m an empath” is a much cosier story than “I never learned to have emotional boundaries,” but only one of those stories leads to real safety.
4. Hypervigilance (Noticing Everything, for Reasons)
Some people who identify as highly empathic are, in fact, highly attuned—but the attunement isn’t to connection. It’s to threat. They’re scanning tone shifts, micro-expressions, and loaded silences not because they’re especially loving, but because their nervous system learned long ago that missing a cue could mean serious trouble.
Research has found that adults who experienced childhood trauma often score higher on empathy measures than those who didn’t—and the more severe the trauma, the higher the score. Think about that for a moment. It reframes the whole conversation.
A child raised in an emotionally volatile household becomes an extraordinary reader of people. They can sense when the air in a room has changed before anyone’s spoken a word. This isn’t a gift—it’s an adaptation. A very impressive, very exhausting adaptation. And it can follow someone into adulthood long after the original danger has passed, presenting itself as remarkable sensitivity while actually being an old alarm system that never got switched off.
Framing that as a superpower is validating. It can also stop someone from recognising there are old wounds that deserve treatment—not a badge.
5. Over-Responsibility (Carrying Everyone’s Luggage)
Some people do the emotional heavy lifting in every room they enter. They anticipate needs, absorb anxieties, and make themselves perpetually available in ways that everyone around them comes to quietly rely on. This reads as empathy from the outside. From the inside, it feels less like generosity and more like a job you never applied for.
The unintended consequence of never saying no and always smoothing things over is that the people around you learn—gently, without malice—that they can push a little further. It’s not manipulation. It’s just that you’ve been so reliably absorbing everything, so why would anyone think to stop?
A Few Honest Questions Worth Asking Yourself
Before you next describe yourself as highly empathic, try these on:
“Am I saying yes because I want to, or because I’m afraid of what a no will cost me?”
“Do I feel personally responsible for how this person feels right now?”
“If they were disappointed in me, could I stay and hold my ground?”
No wrong answers. Just useful ones.
5 FAQ about being an Empath
Q: Am I a real empath, or is something else going on?
A: Honestly? Probably a mix of both — and that’s worth sitting with. The most useful question isn’t whether you qualify as a “real” empath, but what your sensitivity is actually doing for you. If it brings genuine connection and richness to your life, great. If it mostly leaves you exhausted, responsible for everyone, and unable to say no — that’s a signal worth paying attention to, not a personality trait to protect.
Q: What’s the difference between empathy and people-pleasing?
A: Empathy comes from a place of genuine care and choice. People-pleasing comes from fear — of disapproval, conflict, or not being liked — and tends to come with an invisible price tag attached. The clearest tell is how you feel afterwards: genuine empathy leaves you grounded; people-pleasing tends to leave you quietly resentful, waiting for a thank you that may never come.
Q: Can trauma actually make you more empathic?
A: Research suggests yes — and strikingly, the more severe the trauma, the higher the measured empathy tends to be. But this reframes things considerably. What often reads as exceptional sensitivity may actually be hypervigilance: a nervous system that learned to scan for emotional threat as a survival strategy. It’s a remarkable adaptation. It’s also an exhausting one — and recognising it as such opens the door to actually healing it, rather than just managing it forever.
Q: Is codependency just a more extreme version of being empathic?
A: They can look almost identical from the outside, which is exactly what makes this tricky. The real distinction is in what’s happening underneath. Empathy lets you feel with someone while staying rooted in yourself. Codependency pulls you into their emotional current entirely — because the skills needed to stay grounded were never developed, usually due to early family dynamics where emotional caretaking felt like a survival requirement. One is a capacity. The other is a pattern that can be changed.
Q: Is there anything wrong with identifying as an empath?
A: Not inherently — it can be a genuinely useful framework for understanding yourself. The trouble starts when the label becomes a fixed identity that explains suffering without offering any way through it, or worse, slides into a sense of spiritual superiority. Real empathy includes humility. The moment sensitivity becomes a status symbol rather than a description of experience, something important has gone quietly sideways. Use the label as a starting point, not a destination.
The Real Cost: Running on Empty
Whether your emotional sensitivity comes from biology, adversity, or—most likely—some cocktail of both, identifying as an empath often comes with a genuine toll. Chronic overwhelm. Escalating anxiety. Compassion fatigue. The persistent sensation of being emotionally supportive of the entire world, which is a poetic way of saying: very, very tired.
Recognising that you experience things intensely is a meaningful first step. The problem comes when the recognition becomes the whole journey—*”This is just who I am, I have to endure it”—*rather than a starting point for actually doing something about it. There’s a real difference between accepting your sensitivity and resigning yourself to being flattened by it. One is self-awareness. The other is a bad habit.
The Shadow Side: When Empathy Becomes a Trophy
In certain corners of empath culture, sensitivity has quietly morphed from a trait into a rank. Empaths aren’t just different—they’re better. More evolved. Burdened with gifts ordinary mortals couldn’t possibly comprehend. Basically, gifted with deep feeling, cursed with having to share a planet with everyone else.
This is where things get a little uncomfortable. Because actual empathy includes humility. It includes the recognition that other people carry their own invisible weights, that emotional sensitivity isn’t superior to other ways of moving through the world, and that you don’t get extra points for feeling things deeply.
When “empath” shifts from a description to a status symbol, something important has quietly left the building. Ego in empathy’s clothing is still ego.
5 Key Takeaways
1. “Empath” might be describing a wound, not a gift. Heightened emotional sensitivity often develops as a survival adaptation to trauma or difficult early environments — not as an innate superpower. That doesn’t make the experience less real, but it does change what to do about it.
2. There’s a crucial difference between feeling with someone and being consumed by them. Real empathy keeps you grounded while you’re present with another person’s pain. If you regularly absorb everyone’s emotions and end up depleted, that’s enmeshment — and it’s something that can actually be worked on.
3. People-pleasing, fawning, codependency, and hypervigilance all wear empathy’s clothes. These pseudo-empathy states look generous from the outside but are driven by fear, anxiety, or unmet needs on the inside. The honest question isn’t “am I sensitive?” but “how does my sensitivity enrich my life?”
4. The label can be a ceiling as much as a comfort. Identifying as an empath can be a genuinely useful starting point — but if it becomes a fixed identity that explains suffering without offering any way out of it, it stops being self-awareness and starts being a very comfortable rut.
5. The origin question matters less than the lived one. Whether your sensitivity is born or built is interesting. Whether it’s bringing richness to your life or quietly running you into the ground is urgent. Start there.
So—Born, or Became?
Almost certainly both, in proportions that vary wildly from person to person. Some people are genuinely wired to process emotional information more intensely. Some people develop heightened attunement as a direct response to difficult early circumstances. Many have both happening at once, their biology shaped and deepened by experience.
But here’s the thing: the origin question matters less than what you do with the answer. Does your sensitivity bring depth and connection to your life? Or does it leave you depleted, enmeshed, and unsure where you end and everyone else begins?
The most honest version of this conversation isn’t “are empaths born or made?” It’s: “Is the way I’m living this actually working for me?”
If the empath identity helps you be more compassionate, build better boundaries, and seek the support you deserve—hold onto it. If it’s become a fixed story that explains your suffering without offering any way through it, it might be worth getting curious about what’s underneath. Gently. With, yes, a little empathy for yourself.