When You Feel Responsible for Managing Others’ Feelings

If you’ve survived medical trauma (like surgery, birth trauma, fertility trauma, etc), you are probably very good at reading your surroundings and reading people very well. You may identify as a highly sensitive person, an empath, or someone who “picks up others’ energy”. We, at Ruvelle, do believe this is a superpower because it allows you to maintain an ability to detect danger in your surroundings and relationships very well. Trauma survivors can sniff out the inauthenticity of their healthcare providers faster than any other client or patient, because of this superpower.

The flip side of this superpower, is that you may also be living in a constant state of perceived danger. Because you’re living in a constant state of perceived threat, your system is overworking all the time. This means, not only can you feel others’ feelings more, your threshold for how much you can tolerate those feelings is also lower. This can explain why you may feel exhausted around your children more quickly, why you may pick up on their energies and feel drained, or why you find medical appointments so tiring. Because your body is on very high alert almost all the time.

A truly trauma-informed approach to understanding our bodies is at the core of what we do at Ruvelle, so we don’t want you to think of this as something you need to fix. Instead, we invite you to think of it like this:

How many bags and boxes you could hold in your hands when you’re holding nothing. Now think of how much you could hold if you were already carrying a bag in one of your arms. No think of how much you could hold if you were carrying 3 bags already. You would not berate yourself for having too few hands for the additional bags and boxes. You would try to strategize how to carry more, or how to put some down or ask for help.

Living with unresolved trauma (aka incomplete threat cycles) means your somatic is diminished. That means you have limited capacity for sounds, emotions, movement partners, pain, thoughts, words, etc. Another way to say this is it takes much less to feel overwhelmed.

It makes perfect sense.

Anytime your brain is perceiving a threat, everything other than what is necessary to stay alive is physiologically deprioritized. Blood flow is rerouted away from the parts of your body that do not need to function optimally toward the parts of your body that are essential for survival. 

Holding, monitoring and guiding your loved ones’ emotions falls into that category of deprioritized functions, which is why it’s easy to hit your limit so much faster with them when you’re living with unresolved trauma.

This is why 

• feeling antsy and uncomfortable when your baby cries
• experiencing overwhelm when your toddler has a tantrum
• being the barometer for your family’s emotional needs
• feeling responsible for keeping the boat from rocking 

…etc.

is to be expected when you’re living with incomplete threat cycles.

You might recognize yourself in these experiences because you often find yourself skipping your only chance to eat in order to soothe a crying baby who is fussing because she’s bored, even though she’s perfectly safe. You need her to stop crying because the sound is overwhelming or you feel horribly guilty for not doing something to console her immediately when she squeaks with displeasure.

You might find yourself bursting into tears when your toddler throws a tantrum for the 34th time in the afternoon because you just can’t take it anymore. You are overwhelmed already and you have no idea how to help him feel better. This can also lead to feeling guilty, telling yourself you’re an awful mother.

You may notice that you downplay good news because excitement feels too exhausting. You may have received some news that you’d been waiting for, and though you feel relief, excitement, joy, happiness feel too big for what you have energy for. 

You might be wondering, “Well isn’t it my job to be aware of my children’s cries and respond? That’s how I keep them alive?”

You are right. But there’s a difference in how you experience both in your body. 

If you hear your baby cry and you aren’t living with incomplete threat cycles, your first reaction will be to perk up your ears and see if you hear it again, discern what type of cry it is, and act accordingly. If the baby truly is in danger, say he lets out a yelp of pain, you will drop your lunch and go save him from harm. But the important part is that your body will recover quickly, within minutes, after you do this and assess that your baby is, in fact, safe.

If you’re living with incomplete threat cycles, the cries may feel so uncomfortable and triggering that before you can discern what type of cry it, you’ll jump up to check on her. It will feel like nearly every cry is a sign of danger. This is because your body is operating in a survival state, as if there is a clear and present danger in every moment.

Your body will likely feel tight and tense. You will have a hard time sitting still. You may notice your eyes flitting about, your sense of hearing heightened, and your inability to notice much else in your surroundings, including the chair you’re sitting on. Even when the baby is quiet and you have confirmed she is safe, you will have a difficult time recovering, feeling like your heart is still racing and you’re unable to relax, even minutes later.

While these are examples for parents, this can be extrapolated to all relationships. You may find yourself having similar experiences to prevent arguments and keep the peace at work, with your partner, with families of origin, and even with best friends. 

For most people, the conclusion becomes that others’ emotions are your responsibility to manage because if you don’t the threat alarms will ring again. Unfortunately, this is a false conclusion because the alarms are not ringing due to others’ emotions but due to incomplete threat cycles you’ve been living with since your loss, high-risk pregnancy, or birth trauma. It’s an unsustainable effort to try to manage everyone’s emotions because you can never control how others’ feel, how they express their feelings, or when.

You’re not an overprotective, helicopter mother. You’re not weak or incapable as a parent. You’re not depressed or ungrateful for your life. And you are not a pushover.

This is trauma.

By completing the threat cycles that were activated since your last pregnancy or fertility treatment cycle, you’ll no longer feel the need to control your surroundings to mimic the sense of safety you’re craving right now. Start your journey with our Body Language Journal.