15 Things You Need To Realize If You’re The Kind Of Person Who Always Takes On Other People’s Problems As Your Own

1. When you try to solve people’s problems for them, you rob them of the most valuable teacher there is: discomfort.

2. It’s hard to watch someone you love go through something hard. But it isn’t the same thing as you going through it. What you’re experiencing is projection.

3. Every time you grew exponentially in life, it was because you were left to figure out your issues for yourself. If you love someone, let them grow on their own terms.

4. All the wisdom in the world doesn’t matter until you’re in the exact situation for which it would apply. Parents and teachers try to tell you from the time you are a kid what to do and what not to do, and it doesn’t resonate until you make the mistake yourself.

5. You are probably less concerned about someone’s well being as much as you are trying to avoid vicariously feeling the discomfort you’ve pushed away and don’t want to experience again.

6. You cannot help someone who does not want to be helped.

7. People who enable don’t think they are enablers. They think they are parents, friends, partners and family who just love someone so much they can’t stand to see them suffer. They are often so blinded by their own “good intentions” that they pave that person’s road to becoming completely dependent on them.

8. It would serve you to ask: “Is there anything I can realistically do about this issue to get them out of this situation or ensure they never get into it again?” If the answer is no, the problem isn’t yours. (Most of the time, the answer will be no.)

9. It is not cold or cruel to not let other people’s issues invade your energy. It’s self-preserving. It’s healthy. It’s necessary.

10. You can empathize with someone’s struggles without believing they are also yours to suffer through in an equal capacity.

11. If you worry about someone’s problems more than you proactively try to help them, you are probably enabling them more than you are actually assisting them.

12. If you think you’re the kind of person who just “attracts” people who have all kinds of issues and that always need help, it’s probably not a coincidence.

13. If you aren’t projecting your own fears, trying to help everyone with their problems is also likely a mechanism of just needing to be liked or loved by everyone. It’s important to clarify that this isn’t making you more loved. It’s making people use you under the guise that it is.

14. You cannot save people, you can only love them.

15. More importantly, the only person you can save is yourself. And the first step to doing so is deciding what you’re going to let into your mind and energy, and what you’re not.