You're not anxious. You're running a 24/7 surveillance system. Scanning the room. Reading faces. Monitoring moods. Adjusting yourself before anyone even asks. Because somewhere along the way, you learned that your safety depends on everyone else being okay. If they're calm, you're safe. If they're upset, you're in danger. So you became the peacekeeper. The one who smooths things over. The one who notices the shift in someone's tone before they do. You don't just sense other people's emotions you absorb them. Their tension becomes your head ache. Their anger becomes your racing heart. Their sadness sits in your chest like it's yours. The exhausting part isn't feeling everything. It's that you can't turn it off. You've been on high alert so long you forgot what baseline feels like. And when someone around you dysregulates despite all your effort to keep them okay your system doesn't fight back. It collapses. Freezes. Shuts down. In this case the trap is you can't control other people's emotions. You never could. But your nervous system doesn't know that. It's still running the childhood program that says their mood = your survival. So you keep scanning. Keep adjusting. Keep abandoning yourself to manage everyone else. And you call it love or being sensitive. You call it caring.
It's not. It's a pattern. And it's draining you dry.
0 comments