Understanding Toxic Empathy

Jul 31

-When Caring Too Much Becomes Costly

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You may have seen the term toxic empathy on social media recently. It’s a real psychological pattern, sometimes described as hyper-empathy, where empathy starts to work against you rather than for you.

What toxic empathy actually is

Toxic empathy is when an empathetic person over-identifies with someone else’s emotions and begins to carry them as if they were their own. Healthy empathy allows you to understand and feel alongside someone while still remaining regulated yourself. You can care deeply without losing your centre.

Toxic empathy blurs that boundary. You don’t just understand the other person’s pain — you absorb it, carry it, and begin making decisions as though it were yours to manage.

The result is that it becomes much harder to think clearly about the situation. You may struggle to see the other person’s behaviour objectively, and you may also lose the steady presence that someone genuinely struggling actually needs. At that point, your empathy may no longer be helping in the way you want it to. It has become overwhelming, consuming, and often self-abandoning.

Why women are especially vulnerable

The honest answer is: probably more than men, but not for simple biological reasons.

Research consistently shows that women tend to score higher than men on self-report measures of empathy, but when brain-based measures are used, those differences largely disappear. That suggests the gap is shaped significantly by socialisation — by the cultural expectation that women should be more caring, more available, and more emotionally tuned in.

Women are often taught, from early on, that empathy can be part of how they are valued. That being caring is part of being good. That the needs of others belong on their radar in a way that their own needs perhaps don’t.

This can show up differently across cultures. In some Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Asian family cultures, the expectation can be especially explicit — a woman’s availability to others, her emotional generosity, and her willingness to put family first may be treated as an expression of love and duty rather than choice. In Western cultures, the message is often subtler, but still present. Women are still praised for being selfless, attentive, and nurturing, even when that selflessness comes at a cost.

These are observations rather than rules, and every woman’s experience is shaped by her own family, culture, and history. But the pattern is common enough to name: when empathy is socialised as a virtue and a responsibility rather than a human capacity to be used wisely, it becomes harder to set limits on it — and much harder to recognise when it has tipped from healthy to harmful.

Who tends to be most susceptible

Toxic empathy tends to take root most readily in women who already carry certain patterns — people-pleasing, over-giving, and loose or absent boundaries.

When your sense of value is tied to being needed, to fixing, or to being the person who holds everything together, stepping back from someone else’s pain doesn’t feel like wisdom. It can feel like failure. Or worse, like abandonment.

Women who grew up in families where they took on a caretaking role can be especially prone, because the pattern isn’t just a habit. It often becomes a belief: my value depends on how well I manage other people’s experience.

Without clear boundaries, it can become very difficult to say no, even at the expense of your own wellbeing. You may experience other people’s distress as if it were happening directly to you. And in a nervous system sense, it partly is.

What it can look like in practice

Toxic empathy doesn’t always look like obvious martyrdom. It can be subtle.

It might show up as:

Being more distressed about someone else’s situation than they are.
Finding it almost impossible to enforce a boundary because their disappointment feels unbearable.
Making decisions based on what will prevent someone else’s pain rather than what is actually right.
Feeling personally responsible for someone’s mood, choices, or outcomes.
Offering advice, solutions, and support that weren’t asked for, and feeling hurt or frustrated when they aren’t taken.
Growing resentful despite genuinely wanting to help, because the giving has become so consuming there is nothing left.

How it can be exploited in romance scams

Toxic empathy can also make someone more vulnerable to romance scams.

A scammer may share a heartbreaking story, create a sense of emotional intimacy quickly, and then ask for money or urgent help. Because the story feels so painful, compassion can rush in before discernment has time to catch up.

This is one reason romance scams can be so effective. They do not just target kindness — they target the part of you that wants to help, rescue, and care. The emotional story creates urgency, and urgency can make it harder to pause and check whether the situation is real.

That doesn’t mean the person is foolish. It means the manipulation is designed to use empathy as a doorway.

When you start dating someone new

This is the version of toxic empathy that I see most often — and one that’s worth naming directly, because it’s rarely talked about honestly.

When a woman with a history of over-giving, people-pleasing, or weak boundaries begins dating someone new, something can happen that looks like deep connection but is actually something else. She can become absorbed — not just interested, but emotionally consumed. She may start anticipating his needs, worrying about his feelings, and managing his experience. She can become, without fully realising it, a kind of emotional caretaker or rescuer to someone she has only just met.

This can feel like love. It can feel like extraordinary intimacy. It can feel like finally meeting someone who really needs her in a way that makes her feel essential.

The difficulty is that this dynamic can make it very hard to see the person clearly. When you’re absorbed in someone’s emotional world, when you’re managing their feelings and finding your purpose in being needed, you can lose the regulated distance needed to ask the questions that matter: is this person being honest with me? Are their actions matching their words? Is this relationship actually reciprocal?

I have seen women in this pattern discover, months into what felt like deep connection, that the person they had been so invested in hadn’t been truthful — about their circumstances, their feelings, or their availability. And the toxic empathy had made it very difficult to see. Not because those women were naive or foolish. Because their nervous system was so attuned to the other person’s emotional world that there was very little room left to process what was actually happening.

The link to healthy boundaries

When empathy is grounded in boundaries, it becomes sustainable rather than depleting. Boundaries aren’t about caring less. They are about keeping enough separation between your experience and someone else’s that you can stay clear, steady, and useful.

The question worth asking is not, “Am I being empathetic enough?” but, “Am I still myself in this?”

Can you feel for someone and still think clearly about them?
Can you care about what they’re going through and still notice when what they’re saying and what they’re doing don’t quite match?
Can you be present for their pain without making it your responsibility to fix?

If the answer is consistently no — if your empathy leaves you confused, exhausted, or unable to see the situation clearly — that is worth paying attention to.

How RTT hypnotherapy can help

The root of toxic empathy is almost never simply a habit of over-caring. It’s usually a subconscious belief — something along the lines of my worth depends on how well I take care of others, my safety depends on keeping people happy, or love is something I earn through giving — that was formed early, often in a family system that needed you to play exactly that role.

RTT hypnotherapy goes to where that belief was formed and updates it at the source, so that your empathy becomes a genuine choice rather than a compulsion. Not less empathy. Empathy with a self in it.

Maria x