Being an empath is a difficult thing. It can change the way that you relate to others, and even to yourself.
In a way, your heart is just too open for other people’s emotions and sometimes all of that emotional baggage in the air may become too much for you to handle.
While one might expect an empath to have an easier time than others in navigating the emotional terrain of a relationship, the opposite is usually true. Because the mind and heart of an empath work on a higher frequency, their relationships can often follow atypical patterns.
Some of these are healthy, and others are less so. In the end, an empath is more prone to experiencing certain relationship problems than a non-empath might be. They will also respond to these problems in ways that are unusual and not always healthy. Pair an empath and a narcissist and you have a recipe for disaster.
Here are five ways that an empath might sabotage their relationships:
1. They will compromise their boundaries without their partner having asked them to do so.
In most cases, empaths tend to prioritize their partner’s needs over their own. Driven by an overpowering desire to be helpful, they may accidentally invade the other person’s personal space.
When they make this sacrifice without their partner’s knowledge, the empath opens their heart to anger and resentment. Their partner most likely will not understand what has happened. They will feel deeply frustrated and confused as a result.
2. They will stop expressing their own needs in the relationship.
Empaths may become so focused on their partner’s well-being that they may start to neglect their own. An empath is also prone to forget the importance of expressing their own needs and see that they are met.
This can put some dynamics into motion similar to the one described above. The empath will feel unloved and neglected when their needs are not met, and their partner will not understand how to meet them.
3. They will neglect their self-care.
Once again, an empath’s deep concern for others can come at the expense of their own emotional well-being. If an empath becomes too focused on their partner, they may begin to neglect the things that make them who they are.
This might entail spending less time with friends, less energy on hobbies, and less focus on work that they find important and meaningful. As a result, their happiness and self-esteem will suffer. Their partner will wonder why they have changed. This is often the end of the relationship.
4. They will foster a parent-child relationship.
Empaths are nurturers by nature. They will often seek to meet the needs of their partner before they even have a chance to express them. This can result in a situation where one of the partners becomes overbearing and thus threatens the other’s privacy. The empath will become stressed out by all these efforts they’ve been putting in the relationship. Their partner, in turn, will begin to feel stressed out by this encroachment on their personal space. This is not a healthy development of a relationship between two adults.
5. They will solve important problems in their own head.
It is not uncommon for an empath to have a running dialogue in their head, looking at the issue from multiple perspectives at the same time. Often, an empath will resolve the dispute internally, without ever letting the other know about it.
This process of inner discussion may appear to have solved the problem as far as the empath is concerned, but it certainly creates certain complications.
For sure, It is unfair to the empath’s partner, who can’t have known that such a conflict ever took place. It robs them of their autonomy, their chance to defend their viewpoint, and, most importantly, the opportunity to understand where their empath is coming from.
This also runs contrary to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose article 11 reads that “Everyone charged with a penal offense has the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to the law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense.”
