When Saying Yes to Others Means Saying No to Yourself

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The cost of not listening to your own needs

People who are skilled at emotional attunement are, as the word suggests, well-attuned to emotional cues and the subtleties of human interactions.

They notice states of mind, tone shifts and micro-expressions in other people very easily. Nothing gets missed! For those of you who are highly sensitive persons (HSPs), empaths or for whatever reason have a heightened awareness of the needs and feelings of those around you, you will know what this feels like. It is a remarkable gift — but one that requires maintenance and boundaries.

Picking up on other people’s emotional states, thoughts, and subtle vibes is something that happens without effort. It’s like walking around with an emotional stethoscope tuned to the highest sensitivity. It picks up everything. What does require effort is the boundaries you must put in place to protect this gift.

If you are highly attuned, you will already know it, and it will likely have a strong impact on many areas of your life. When we are attuned to other people and their needs, they flourish because they feel heard, seen, felt, and accepted. It is a superpower of human interaction and provides an instantly regulating presence for their stress or frazzled nervous system.

In my job as a Psychologist, the ability to tune into another person’s inner world is a key skill. Proper attunement requires full presence and empathy. Dan Siegel, Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and a major contributor to attachment psychology and interpersonal neurobiology, has emphasised the importance of attunement in therapy:

“The most important elements in an attachment-based, neurobiologically savvy therapeutic approach was the requirement that the therapist feel the feelings, not merely understand them conceptually. This was, in a sense, a hands-on, body-on, mind-on therapy, in which the therapist’s whole self vibrated like a tuning fork to every quiver in the client’s being without, however, losing the basic emotional stability that the client needed to help regulate his or her own runaway emotions.”
— Dan Siegel

If there ever was a day when you doubted this skill (whether you are a therapist or not), you will probably be reminded by the many people who seek you out for support, advice, directions and just a moment of your presence. It is truly a gift. However, no gift comes without a few caveats.

Signs that you are going overboard in attending to other people’s stuff

Whilst being attuned to other people, it can be difficult to fully attend to yourself. By the time 100% of your ‘instrument’ is being used to decode or attend to other people’s emotional states, you are at heightened risk of turning a blind eye towards your inner world.

The longer this process goes on, the easier it might become to live engrossed in other people and their problems whilst entirely neglecting yourself.

The purpose of this article is to encourage you to take precautions to ensure that you are not running on empty in the process of helping other people feel better.

The gift of attunement

When we empathically attune to another, we gently tune into, sense, and resonate with their experience. Think of two violins in a room: when the strings on one are plucked, the other vibrates too when tuned to the same frequency

(Rowan & Jacobs, 2002).

Being attuned to others offers several advantages:

• It strengthens relationships by helping you form deep emotional bonds in parenting, romantic relationships, friendships, and even with strangers.
• You can soothe other people’s stress and anxiety and offer responses that ‘hit the mark.’
• Deep connections and human interactions tend to become more effortless with good emotional attunement, as people feel like you ‘get them’ and connect with dimensions that they themselves are unable to articulate.

The negative effects of being overly attuned to others

If you recognise yourself as a “human whisperer,” be aware that you will sometimes feel overwhelmed by absorbing other people’s emotional worlds. Like all good things, the skill has downsides:

Social anxiety and generalised anxiety

Group settings offer endless cues and signals, which can lead to overprocessing and emotional overload. This may create performance anxiety, fear of judgment, or a sense of being inundated by others’ needs.

Overwhelm

The gift in itself does not come with a natural ‘stop button’. Hence, it is your responsibility to learn to protect yourself- something I find that many people struggle with.

Taking responsibility for other people’s reactions and feelings

Overthinking, overprocessing, and caring ‘too much’ can become problematic. In romantic relationships, this can shift into co-dependency, enabling, smothering, or rescuing behaviours.

You may also spend disproportionate energy deciphering others’ signals and moods, leading to emotional depletion and neglect of yourself.

Boundary problems

Since boundaries in a true sense are not hinged upon the validation or approval of others (rather, they are there to protect and safeguard yourself), boundaries can easily begin to blur when you are overly attuned to other people.

The expression of boundaries can at times lead other people to feel dismissed, hurt or inconvenienced- particularly if your modus operandi has been to act as though other people’s wishes are your demands.

Tolerating others’ dissatisfaction is particularly difficult when you register every nuance of their experience. This should not mean that you avoid drawing your lines.

Forgetting oneself

Being in a state of emotional attunement can be so absorbing that you find yourself forgetting to even check in with yourself. If you are not careful, you might end up coming off a bit like an emotional shape-shifter, ready to be of service for everybody else and their needs, but with no sense of self and/or ability to centre, let alone self-soothe at times of personal distress.

Changing this pattern requires facing the difficult feelings that surface when you don’t rush to fix others’ pain.

Self-care: Putting yourself in the spotlight for once

Why should you not have a slice of your own cake?

People with heightened emotional attunement frequently have a long history of operating as emotional soothers, caretakers and a bit of an ‘antennae’ for the needs of those near and dear.

As a result, other people may become overly dependent, needy or even demanding of the emotional caretaking you have been offering up. It might seem natural to think that you ‘don’t have time’ for yourself amongst all the ‘emotional vampirism’ that appears to come out of the woodwork.

People will rarely be this demanding of those who have not themselves been in a pattern of over-assisting others! This is an important fact as it should make you alert to the fact that the patterns in your life has a lot to do with your own style of interaction and amount of (over-)care given to others.

Although it may feel tough to take personal responsibility for your stress, you will need to acknowledge where and to whom you have overstretched yourself and, more importantly, take steps to rein in your behaviours.

Your well-being must be a priority!

Even those that you so passionately want to help can end up feeling like leeches at a time when you have been depleting yourself for too long. This, if anything, should be a direct indicator that you have NOT been providing yourself with the bare minimum of TLC.

Perform a regular emotional MOT on yourself

Self-care requires internal attunement and a willingness to take care of whatever you discover. If you are struggling to find activities that could help you notice yourself or your inner workings, you can try one of the following:

• a simple body scan (yoga nidra)
• a breathing exercise
• a regular meditation session
• journaling

Anything that helps you direct a dedicated moment of attention towards yourself is going to be helpful. If you notice that you are overwhelmed, try to recognise that you will not be effective as a helper to other people either in this state.

Unnoticed needs become unmet needs, and you will bear the brunt of the resulting negative feelings.

Schedule regular mindful/self-awareness practices

This can be a very effective way of creating benchmarks from which you can easily assess your levels of well-being and energy supply if you notice a lot of pent-up unmet needs, difficult feelings, or simply stressed or overwhelmed- try to recognise that you are perfectly permitted to take some time out to look after yourself.

Learning to distinguish between noticing other people’s needs and making yourself responsible for meeting them!

Protect yourself and your gift. Whilst I do not doubt that those of you reading this post come with the best of intentions while assisting those around you, please do not forget that servicing other people’s needs at the expense of your own is a choice that you need to remain accountable for. Everyone has limits, and sooner or later, the body will say stop if the mind fails to.

Stop ahead of time and remove yourself fully from time to time if that is what is required for you to recalibrate your priorities and create a more conscious choice in terms of where you wish to channel your energy.

Handy reminders for those who are doing too much for other people and too little for themselves

# Emotional attunement is powerful in its own right, and other people will benefit from it even without you going out of your way to change their situation, solve their problems or burn out in trying to assist.

# You are not helping other people if you constantly point out how they should solve their problems and emotional conflicts. Giving a prompt is one thing, but taking the lead and ownership of someone else’s emotional work will never pay off for either of them or you.

#Detachment is a truly important skill that must be practised regularly

If you are finding it hard, try to force yourself to think about the impact of your actions on other people in the long term as opposed to the short term.

Ask yourself if your behaviour towards others is sustainable and truly helpful for them as well as yourself. Just because you detect a need in another human being, it does not mean that it is your job to meet that need.

# People need consequences in life- this is how we all learn. Removing emotional consequences from other people’s lives can feel incredibly tempting. Being present for someone else’s emotional pain can be tough and will easily lead those who are well-attuned to think that they should fire off solutions or try some ways to make things fine again.

This behaviour often leads to imbalance and enables other people to think they have less responsibility for themselves than they do. It will also make you feel resentful, burned and depleted soon enough. Be aware of your responsibility and work on techniques that will enable you to look out for yourself even when nobody else does.

# Eduate yourself about your gift and sensitivity, and learn about how to set boundaries

Do some reading from those who have written a lot on this topic- particularly the writing of Dan Siegel and the literature on attachment psychology, as well as the HSP literature by Elaine Aaron.

It is fascinating and informative, and will help you understand your gift better. For those of you who struggle in this area and find it difficult to attune to other people, the good news is that you can learn to improve. Skills like active listening, observing other people’s body language, micro-expressions and emotional awareness training can all be useful to increase this skill.

Reading:

https://drdansiegel.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/the-attuned-therapist-dr-dan-siegel.pdf

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