Reclaim Your Empathy For The Powerful Weapon It Is

It might have left you susceptible to emotional abuse, but empathy is also your strength. Use it to move forward and heal.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

This might sound strange, but I am grateful for the toxic relationships and emotional abuse I’ve lived through. Not because I enjoyed being someone’s mental punching bag — that was painful and still haunts me. I’m thankful, however, because from these experiences, I learned how to better detect subtle and even unintentional manipulation tactics people use. This knowledge inspired me to dig deeper to understand more about why people engage in emotional abuse in the first place. It also revealed something about me to myself, and this added self-awareness has revolutionized how I conceive of healing.

Here is the TL;DR version of what I’m about to tell you: People with high levels of empathy are often the preferred targets of emotionally abusive people. Manipulative people capitalize on vulnerabilities. In this way, your empathy is a weakness — a soft spot that leaves you susceptible to being preyed upon by abusers. This weakness, however, is also what allows you to care for even the most sadistic person, to seek the reasons and motivations behind their actions, and understand the most fundamental truth at the heart of all the pain they inflict: they are suffering deeply. As the saying goes, hurt people hurt people…