Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Toxic Empathy
The flood of emotions you experience when someone you love is hurting? It's not just empathy; it might be toxic empathy that's destroying your peace.
Toxic empathy occurs when you become so entangled in others' emotions that you can't distinguish where their feelings end and yours begin. For many Muslim women especially it's a learned survival strategy born from cultural expectations to carry emotional labor without complaint.
The solution is learning to build gates, not barriers. Through the soulful intelligence paradigm, you can develop the ability to feel with someone without drowning in their experience. You can offer genuine support without making their healing your responsibility. This transformation begins by recognizing that empathy should be a momentary connection, not a constant burden.
Whether you're dealing with a frustrated spouse, a child's meltdown, or difficult workplace conversations, regulated empathy lets you stay connected without getting consumed.
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Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizable. Successful Now your host, dr Kamal Aftar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you.
Speaker 1:Today's topic again extremely powerful, extremely near and dear to my heart and, I think, is going to create a huge difference in your life, especially if you implement it. We're going to be talking about empathy today, and I have talked about it previously, but this is a different take. Today, we're going to be talking about empathy and how it turns toxic. Women who have a very high likelihood of being an empathic person in a relationship, have also a very high likelihood of living in toxic empathy, something that's actually harmful to you.
Speaker 1:Toxic empathy is a form of emotional entanglement that feels like love but functions like control. It happens, when you become over-identified with somebody else's emotions, that you can't tell where their pain ends and your nervous system's pain begins. You convince yourself that it's compassion, but it's not. It's toxic empathy. Empathy is supposed to stay in your system for a flash of a moment until you're able to gather information from the people around you what they're experiencing and how, if possibly, you can help them. Toxic empathy keeps you entangled with their emotions constantly, which is extremely burdensome and very metabolically and mentally tolling. And to get over that emotional turmoil that you're constantly feeling, in the name of empathy, you attempt to control other people just so your internal chaos calms down. Your attempt to soothe yourself comes by trying to manage everyone else's choices. You don't want them to spiral, just so that you don't spiral, because if they spiral, then that means that your emotional safety is threatened. So you try to preempt their pain. You try to control their choices. You offer advice that they might not have asked for. You subtly or not so subtly, try to get them into making decisions that would bring you relief. It looks like support, but it's not. Underneath all of that there's a subconscious avoidance of your own discomfort. So instead of sitting with your anxiety, your helplessness that you're feeling on account of others, from the fear of watching yourself suffer, you externalize all of it and you try to control others so you don't have to feel their emotions. You make their healing your project. You make their journey your responsibility.
Speaker 1:And for many Muslim women it's more than a tendency, it's a learned survival strategy. As Muslim women, you might have been raised to carry emotional labor without complaint to anticipate other people's needs before they're spoken, and through toxic empathy, this comes at an expense of your own sanity. So when someone you love is hurting, instead of pausing to ask, is this pain mine to carry, is it even my responsibility, you dive in headfirst trying to fix other people just because you think that you're doing the righteous thing. But in these cases you're avoiding your pain that toxic empathy is creating that you don't have to live in and you're over-functioning trying to control other people. This is definitely not empathy, not the healthy kind at least. This is emotional codependency and it leaves you and your relationships worse off.
Speaker 1:Toxic empathy is when your care becomes control. It starts with over-identifying with someone else's emotions deeply and completely that you lose the ability to separate their experience from your own. Not only do you feel with them, you feel responsible for them and because of their sadness, anger, anxiety. When they're feeling it, you're feeling it in your body and at times it becomes unbearable. So you start to fix things, not out of love but out of your discomfort. You think if they would just calm down, if they make the right decision, then we could both stop spiraling and I could finally breathe again. That is a trap of control. And in this trap you're not responding from compassion, you're reacting from your own emotional dysregulation and from this trap you're not responding from compassion, you're reacting from your own emotional dysregulation and from this place. When you try to manipulate others, you're trying to manage everyone else, to attempt to control your nervous system.
Speaker 1:Spiral contagion is what happens when someone else's breakdown becomes yours. Their frustration becomes yours. It might look like you're trying to be supportive, that you're feeling what they're feeling, but you're not in a place of where you can control how you're feeling. So while it might look like support from the outside, it's emotional chaos that's activating inside of you. And for many Muslim women, especially those raised with high emotional attunement but low emotional boundaries, this becomes a patterned response.
Speaker 1:You're taught to care to give, to anticipate, but not to regulate yourself. So when this faucet of empathy turns on, it gushes like a fire hose. There's no gate, there's no filter, there's no control, just emotional flood. And in your attempt to not drown yourself, you swing to extremes. You either fuse with the other person's experience and lose yourself in the pain, or you slam the door shut on the relationship and you cut off that connection and you call it boundaries and protecting your peace, but both of these extremes are hurtful. Over enmeshment burns you out. Emotional cutoff leaves you isolated. The problem isn't empathy, it's unregulated empathy. It's toxic empathy, especially when you haven't learned the basics of emotional regulation yourself. And coaching is one way how you learn how to dial that in not to completely disable it, but to engage in it in a controlled manner.
Speaker 1:So I've told you about my soulful intelligence paradigm in my program. That changes everything in this regard. It teaches you that the solution isn't to shut yourself off or to blame empathy. The solution is to build gates, not barriers, but gates that you can open and close at your discernment, gates that respond to how resourced you are, not how guilty you feel. With soulful intelligence, you'll realize that you don't have to carry someone else's pain to prove that you care. You offer presence without absorption of their pain. You can say to yourself this isn't mine to carry, and you still show up with compassion.
Speaker 1:The toxic empathy does not flood you. You're able to control it with resources and healthy boundaries. This is the ability for you to stay connected without being consumed. This is empathy with regulation and this is a radical shift from how most of us are engaging with empathy, especially the high-functioning, heart-centered Muslim women. You're taught to love and you're taught to give, but instead of rescuing others to feel safe, in this case, you root yourself in your own nervous system and then you offer help. You stay regulated and then you provide empathy, and then you provide the nurturing and the care that everyone else might need.
Speaker 1:So, like this, instead of drowning in the flood, you start to flow with the water and it becomes much more natural and it keeps your peace much better. You choose when to step in and when to step back, not because you fear your burnout or you want to control others, but because, out of respect for both of your capacities, a deeply empath, empathic Muslim woman holds a lot of power, like a raging river, powerful, instinctive and, a lot of times, god-given. When that empathy rushes in the moment of somebody else's pain, it wants to soothe, it wants to fix, it wants to absorb, it wants to carry. And if all of us are not attuned to the power that empathy can carry, the river will start to flow unchecked. But building soulful intelligence through coaching helps you build floodgates, and this is not just so you can drown gracefully, but how you can control the energy behind your empathy and the raging river being in your soulful intelligence and being resourceful. That doesn't make you dam up your river and pretend you don't care. It teaches you how to build gates, intentional openings that regulate how much of empathy you want to allow to flow in any given moment to a relationship. You still care, you still feel. You just don't get washed away with the current Gated empathy means you can stand beside someone in their suffering without taking it into your body like it's your responsibility.
Speaker 1:You can hold space for their pain. You can understand it without making their healing your responsibility. You carry care, but not the weight and the burnout of their experience. And this distinction changes everything, because now your decision to lean in or lovingly step back comes from a place of wisdom, love, resourcefulness, and you don't do any of this to avoid, and you have a lot of your own energy available to be able to provide the empathic care that everyone else might need. In this case, you honor what your nervous system can hold in a day and you stay present with boundaries. This level of wisdom and inner strength makes your empathy sustainable. It makes it safe for you and your loved ones. Okay, so, besides the learning to manage the floodgates of empathy.
Speaker 1:There's a second, equally important shift that's very often overlooked, and that's learning to turn empathy on its head and using it to connect with others through positive emotional states, not through just their pain and negative emotional states. So since in human beings our nervous system has more of a propensity to attach to pain, we forget that empathy can be used to attune to other people's positive emotions, and that is a huge gift. If you're a kind of woman who can notice a slightest change in tone, if you're a kind of woman who can notice the slightest change in tone, shift in expression, you're accurately responding to other people's feelings and energies. This is a powerful gift, but it only feels like a burden if you don't use this attunement power to borrow other people's joy, happiness, peace. Most of you are only using this sensitivity to track pain, stress and instability. When you train yourself to anticipate tension, conflict, disappointment, that's the only thing you're going to see.
Speaker 1:I'm asking you, through this podcast, to start practicing training yourself into attuning into laughter, joy, awe, a lot of love. When you mirror other people's low states but not their high states, then you're not using your empathy correctly. Then no wonder that you're feeling drained all the time. But the beautiful design here is that you're actually not absorbing someone else's emotion directly. You're responding to them through your own nervous system. That means that when someone around you is stressed, your brain predicts their emotional state very effectively and your body begins to stimulate it. But the same thing can be done when the other person is experiencing happiness and excitement and connection. Since your thoughts through your nervous system is what's creating the emotional experience in your body, then you can consciously choose to shift them towards the good. If you believe someone is in a moment of gratitude or calm, you can allow that state to echo in your body and your nervous system as well. The same neural pathway that mirrors other people's fear or frustration can also help you attune to their peace, their delight, their appreciation, their deep gratitude, and this is a powerful attribute of empathy.
Speaker 1:Think about the last time when you saw somebody laughing so hard that they were in tears and you were laughing because they are laughing. This is emotional mirroring. Your nervous system already knows how to do it. You just have to direct it to do it so that you're not always overwhelmed with negative emotions, and in the beginning this skill is going to require some redirection. Just like you're on your way to learning, control the floodgates so you don't drown in somebody else's crisis, you can now open the gates selectively to let in what feels nourishing If somebody is in deep awe for a sunset, or if they are in pure joy for a dua that was answered for them, or anything small like how they enjoy their baby's touch or how their tea tastes that day.
Speaker 1:If your brain is already scanning for other people's emotional cues, then choose to notice those moments as well. Let them register, let them land in your body, anchor it within yourself. You will notice that after a few exercises of doing this, you will feel so much better. And this kind of approach makes you so attuned to your empathy and so proud of it, instead of feeling like it's always a burden. And you can do that with a full disclosure to your mind that right now I'm attuning to their positive emotions, because the more you practice attuning to somebody's joy, the less likely you are that you'll collapse when they're in pain. The less likely it is that you will be completely dysregulated when they're in anger or frustrated. This way, you're training your nervous system to recognize that not every interaction needs to be an emergency. This way, you're building emotional resiliency with empathy, not despite of it, not outside of it. This way, slowly but surely, the entire experience of being an empathic human being shifts. This way, empathy is not just something you give, but something that fills you as well.
Speaker 1:Empathy has always been about connection. That includes the full spectrum of human experience Pain, yes, but also celebration, contentment. You don't have to carry other people's emotions if you don't want to, but when you do notice that choice, absorb and enjoy the good emotions as well. This is what makes your empathy sustainable. That's how you turn it from a constant flood to a life-giving river with strong gates, clear awareness and an ability to decide moment to moment what you want to let in.
Speaker 1:If your spouse is tired after a long day of work and you know he tends to get irritable your empathy will start predicting his emotions before he even walks through the door. Without realizing it, you'll spend your entire day mentally and emotionally bracing for his frustration and, because your empathy is so refined, your body will start feeling his emotion and recoiling from it as if it was your own. This is classic toxic empathy that puts you into overdrive and overfunctioning. You can care that he has had a hard day at work without letting his mood hijack yours. You get to choose how much of his energy you want to allow into your space. Sometimes the most loving and the empathic thing you can do is giving him and yourself space. And the same applies to your child.
Speaker 1:Let's say you've decided to cut back on their screen time or their sugar and they're having a meltdown about it. Your nervous system will immediately flare up. I don't want them to feel deprived. I hate when they cry. Maybe I could just give in a little bit. But your job isn't to avoid your discomfort through their discomfort just because you're feeling it so intensely. Your job is to tolerate your discomfort while staying anchored in what's best for them. While staying anchored in your own regulation. You can hold empathy for their big emotions without collapsing into guilt of your own or trying to rescue them for feeling their discomfort.
Speaker 1:Toxic empathy wants to control other people's feelings. It wants them to never feel any pain, especially if it's somebody you love. But their emotions are not your responsibility, or if you're in a position where you manage other people or run a business. This toxic empathy might show up every time you hesitate to give honest feedback. You worry that they'll take it personally and you feel embarrassed for them. You feel upset before you've even had a chance to give the feedback, just because you're predicting they're upset with high accuracy. When that happens, you soften your language to a point where your whole feedback message gets lost or, worse, you avoid the conversation altogether. But here too, empathy with boundaries is what matters. You can care about their growth and still say what needs to be said. You're not responsible for how they feel. You're responsible for how you communicate. This is controlled empathy, where you're highly attuned to what you have control over within yourself, and this is what keeps your relationship strong without burning you out.
Speaker 1:One of the most common patterns I see in my coaching, especially in Muslim women, is the tendency to over-empathize to a point of emotional entanglement and enmeshment. Of course, as predicted, this dynamic becomes unsustainable. Empathy is not the problem. It never has been. Lack of regulation. When you're feeling your emotions through, empathy is the problem. Most of you never learned how to dial empathy up and down. Most of you either shut it down and adopt a version of toxic individualism that sounds something like what you feel is not my problem. I'm not responsible for it. I'm out of here. Or, on the other hand, you stay in the relationship but you try to control the other person so that when they finally feel better, you can feel better. But no one likes to be controlled in relationships. When that is happening, it does not feel good to either party. You can't create a healthy relationship this way. So what you really need is not to kill your empathy, but to refine it. When used skillfully, empathy is a golden gift. It's how you connect, it's how you love, but it's only safe and sustainable and it only contributes to your.
Speaker 1:I can care deeply about what someone else is going through without carrying the weight of their experience inside my body. This is a flash of empathy, what it's supposed to serve you. I can honor someone's struggle, offer presence and even feel moved by their pain, without making it my job to fix it. And I know you want to fix their problems. It sounds very honorable job to fix it, and I know you want to fix their problems. It sounds very honorable, but their problems are theirs to fix. That's the difference between carrying care and carrying burden.
Speaker 1:When I internalize somebody else's emotion to the point that it costs me my own peace, I know I've entered toxic empathy. Soulful empathy means I stay connected and I stay rooted in myself. I say this matters to me and I can offer help to the other person if they're open to receiving it. This is not detachment, this is not toxic individualism, this is wise discernment. And the kind of boundary you create through this discernment, through this soulful empathy, does not create a disconnection the way judgment does.
Speaker 1:When you judge someone, when they're having an experience, you pull away from them and you feel superior just to stay safe. But when you set an internal boundary with empathy, then you understand why they're feeling the way they're feeling and why you are choosing to step back. It actually deepens your connection with the other person and yourself. From this place of self-awareness, connection to the other person becomes very honest and very sustainable. You're not pretending, you're not rescuing, you're simply honoring your limits and you're able to see the other person for who they are. This happens only if you're not too enmeshed, only if your empathy is not fusing very tightly with the other person's experience, only if you can tell what's yours and what's theirs. This way you can step away from the situation if you feel an emotional flood coming. Step away from the situation if you feel an emotional flood coming, and once that level of skill is developed, your nervous system will thrive instead of trying to control the situation.
Speaker 1:So, like I showed you guys, while empathy can turn very toxic, very easily, it can cost you your sanity and peace it can also very easily be turned into a golden currency that saves you your relationships, empathy that you use to stay connected to yourself and your loved ones. If you are given a lot of this currency of empathy, develop the skill of how to spend it, how to use it. Being able to absorb other people's positive emotions like joy, ecstatic experiences, excitement that is one of the most important advantages of empathy. So use it, and use it wisely.
Speaker 1:With that I pray to Allah SWT. Ya Allah, you gave me a heart that feels deeply. Now teach me how to use it wisely. Let me stay connected without getting consumed. Let me care without taking control. Guide me to know what's mine to carry and what's to let go. Ya Allah, make my empathy a source of peace for me and everyone, a means for love and not over functioning, and let my empathy be always a means to find a way back to you. Ameen, ya Rabbul Ameen, please keep me in your duas. I'll talk to you guys next time.