Imagine you’re walking around with a backpack.
Inside are your emotions, responsibilities, worries, decisions, needs, and problems.
That’s already plenty. Life apparently did not come with a weight limit.
But somewhere along the way, other people started handing you their stuff too.
Your partner is upset. Into the backpack it goes.
Your mom is disappointed in a decision you made. Better carry that.
Your friend is anxious, and now you feel responsible for making sure they’re okay.
Someone is annoyed with you. Obviously, this requires an immediate investigation.
A family member made a decision you strongly disagree with, and now you’re mentally working overtime trying to figure out how to fix it.
Before you know it, you’re walking around carrying 75 pounds of emotional luggage and wondering why you’re exhausted.
This is what I like to call the emotional backpack. And sometimes, we need to dump everything out and ask: Wait. Is all of this actually mine?
Caring About Someone Is Not the Same as Carrying Their Emotions
Human beings are incredibly social creatures. We notice facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, changes in behavior, and approximately 47 different meanings behind someone responding to our text with “K.”
We affect each other emotionally.
Research on empathy and interpersonal emotion regulation supports the idea that other people’s emotions can influence our own emotional experiences. Empathy can help us understand and respond to others, strengthen relationships, and motivate supportive behavior.
But there is an important distinction between understanding someone’s emotional experience and becoming responsible for changing it.
Research distinguishes between empathic concern—an other-focused response involving care and compassion—and personal distress, which involves experiencing our own discomfort or anxiety in response to someone else’s suffering (Powell, 2018; Yavuz et al., 2024).
In other words: “I can see that you’re hurting, and I care about you.” is different from: “You’re hurting, therefore I need to make this stop immediately or I am somehow failing.”
That second one gets heavy.
How Other People’s Stuff Ends Up in Your Backpack
Most people don’t consciously decide:You know what sounds fun? Feeling personally responsible for everyone’s emotional stability.
Usually, there is a history behind it.
Maybe you learned that keeping other people happy helped keep you safe.
Maybe conflict in your family felt unpredictable, so you became very good at reading the room.
Maybe you were praised for being the responsible one, the mature one, the easy one, or the helper.
Maybe someone else’s disappointment frequently meant you had done something wrong.
Maybe you learned:
If someone is upset, fix it.
If someone is disappointed, change your behavior.
If someone is angry, make it better.
If someone is struggling, help more.
If someone thinks poorly of you, explain yourself until they understand.
Eventually, these stop feeling like rules you’ve learned.
They just feel like facts.
So when someone you care about becomes upset, your brain doesn’t necessarily think:They are having an emotion.
Your brain thinks:🚨 WE HAVE A SITUATION. 🚨
And suddenly you’re analyzing, reassuring, fixing, apologizing, explaining, checking, anticipating, or trying to find the exact combination of words that will make everyone feel okay again.
Unfortunately, humans did not come with emotional remote controls. Extremely inconvenient, I know.
Empathy Doesn’t Require Emotional Absorption
One misconception I hear frequently is that emotional boundaries mean becoming detached or uncaring.
They don’t.
You can be deeply compassionate without absorbing another person’s emotional experience as your own.
In fact, research suggests that empathy and emotion regulation interact in important ways. Greater affective empathy can sometimes be associated with greater emotional distress, while the ability to regulate and reappraise emotional experiences may help buffer some of that distress (Powell, 2018).
Research on interpersonal emotion regulation also shows that empathy influences how we respond when other people are experiencing emotions. People regularly help one another regulate emotions through behaviors like listening, comforting, validating, perspective-taking, and problem-solving (Levy-Gigi & Shamay-Tsoory, 2017; Scheffel et al., 2024).
So the goal isn’t: “Your feelings aren’t my problem.”
The goal is: “Your feelings matter to me without automatically becoming my responsibility.”
There is a big difference.
What Might Be in Your Emotional Backpack?
Take a second and imagine dumping your backpack onto the floor. No organization required.
We’re apparently doing emotional spring cleaning now.
You might find:
- Your anxiety about work.
- Your sadness about something you’ve lost.
- Your frustration with a relationship.
- Your fear about an upcoming decision.
- Your partner’s disappointment.
- Your parent’s expectations.
- Your friend’s relationship problems.
- Your coworker’s stress.
- Your child’s frustration.
- Someone else’s opinion of you.
- Someone else’s decision.
- Someone else’s reaction to your boundary.
- Someone else’s assumption about your intentions.
- Someone else’s belief about what you should do.
Now comes the important part.
Instead of asking: “How do I make all of this go away?”
Try asking: “Which of these actually belongs to me?”
Try the Emotional Backpack Exercise
When you notice yourself feeling emotionally overloaded, write down everything you’re currently carrying.
Then sort each item into one of three categories:
1. Mine to Carry
These are things that genuinely belong to you.
Your emotions.
Your behavior.
Your choices.
Your values.
Your boundaries.
Your mistakes.
Your needs.
Your responsibilities.
If you hurt someone, for example, your behavior belongs in your backpack.
You may need to listen, apologize, repair, or change your behavior.
Accountability is not the same thing as carrying someone else’s emotions.
2. I Can Care About This Without Carrying It
This category is incredibly important.
Maybe your partner is stressed about work. You can listen. You can hug them. You can validate how difficult it sounds. You can ask what they need. And then—you can continue existing. You do not have to spend the next six hours also being stressed about their job.
Maybe your friend is going through a breakup. You can love them fiercely and still recognize: This is their grief. Your role is to walk beside them. You don’t have to climb inside the grief with them.
3. Definitely Not Mine
This category can feel uncomfortable.
Someone else’s expectations of you.
Someone else’s assumptions.
Someone else’s choices.
Someone else’s refusal to communicate.
Someone else’s disappointment when you make a healthy decision.
Someone else’s interpretation of a boundary.
Someone else’s belief that you should sacrifice your needs so they don’t experience discomfort.
You can acknowledge these things.
You can care about them.
You can consider feedback.
But you don’t automatically have to put them in your backpack.
“But They’re Upset Because of Something I Did.”
Okay.
This is where emotional boundaries get a little more nuanced. Because sometimes another person’s feelings are related to our behavior. That still doesn’t mean we become responsible for controlling their emotional experience.
Ask yourself:
Did I actually do something that conflicts with my values?
Did I behave in a way that requires repair?
Is there something I want to take accountability for?
Or is this person experiencing an uncomfortable emotion because I made a choice they don’t like?
Those are very different situations.
For example: You forgot something important to your partner.
That might require accountability.
You insulted someone during an argument.
That might require repair.
But:
Your parent is disappointed because you aren’t spending the holidays exactly how they wanted.
Your friend is upset because you said no.
Your partner feels anxious because you asked for some alone time.
Someone thinks you’re selfish because you stopped doing something that was draining you.
Their emotions are real.
Their emotions matter.
And their emotions still belong to them.
Letting Someone Have Their Feelings
This can be one of the hardest parts of boundaries.
Sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is allow another person to experience an emotion without immediately trying to rescue them from it.
They might be disappointed.
They might be frustrated.
They might misunderstand you.
They might wish you had made a different decision.
And your nervous system may be screaming: FIX IT. FIX IT. FIX IT.
Instead, you might practice saying to yourself:
They are allowed to feel disappointed.
I am allowed to make this decision.
Both things can be true.
Or:
I can care about their feelings without changing my boundary.
Or even:
Someone being upset with me does not automatically mean I did something wrong.
That last one may need to be repeated approximately 6,000 times. That’s okay.
Check Your Backpack
The goal isn’t to walk through life carrying nothing.
We need relationships.
We need empathy.
We need accountability.
We need to care about how our behavior affects other people.
Research consistently shows that emotions are social—we help regulate one another, influence one another, and experience emotional connection through our relationships (Avnor et al., 2025; Levy-Gigi & Shamay-Tsoory, 2017).
The goal is simply to notice when caring becomes carrying.
Because if your emotional backpack is constantly overflowing with everyone else’s feelings, expectations, problems, and reactions, there isn’t much room left for you.
So every once in a while, take the backpack off.
Dump it out.
Look at what’s inside.
And ask:
- Is this mine?
- Is this something I can care about without carrying?
- Or have I been hauling around someone else’s emotional luggage because somewhere along the way I learned that loving people meant carrying it for them?
You can hand some of it back.
You can still love them.
You can still support them.
You can still be kind.
You just don’t have to carry everything.
Your back will thank you.
References
Avnor, Y., Atias, D., Markus, A., & Shamay-Tsoory, S. (2025). It takes two to empathize: Interbrain coupling contributes to distress regulation. Emotion, 25(3), 736–754. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001431
Levy-Gigi, E., & Shamay-Tsoory, S. G. (2017). Help me if you can: Evaluating the effectiveness of interpersonal compared to intrapersonal emotion regulation in reducing distress. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 55, 33–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2016.11.008
Powell, P. A. (2018). Individual differences in emotion regulation moderate the associations between empathy and affective distress. Motivation and Emotion, 42(4), 602–613. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9684-4
Scheffel, C., Graupner, S.-T., Gärtner, A., Zerna, J., Strobel, A., & Dörfel, D. (2024). Empathy is associated with interpersonal emotion regulation goals in everyday life. Emotion, 24(8), 1846–1861. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001365
Yavuz, H. M., Colasante, T., Galarneau, E., & Malti, T. (2024). Empathy, sympathy, and emotion regulation: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 150(1), 27–44. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000426
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