Practical Approaches for Releasing What You Absorb
There was a period in my practice when I was seeing a lot of people in acute distress. Day after day, I was sitting with pain—physical pain, emotional pain, the pain of people whose bodies had become battlegrounds for stress they couldn’t name. I was good at holding space. I was good at staying present. I prided myself on not bringing my work home.
Except I was bringing it home. Just not in ways I recognized.
I started having dreams about my patients, their faces appearing unbidden as I slept. I’d be driving home and suddenly feel a wave of sadness that seemed to come from nowhere, washing over me without warning or explanation. I became hypersensitive to news stories about suffering—I couldn’t watch them anymore, couldn’t even see the headlines without feeling overwhelmed.
I noticed I was pulling back from friends, finding excuses not to engage. After a day of holding space for others’ emotions, I felt like I had nothing left to give to the people I loved. I was irritable at home, snapping at small things. Something was clearly wrong, but I couldn’t see the pattern.
For a long time, I thought the problem was me. Why couldn’t I handle this? Other people managed demanding jobs in caring professions. Other people didn’t seem to fall apart. I must just be weak, I thought, or not cut out for this work.
It wasn’t until I learned about secondary stress that I finally understood what was happening. There was nothing wrong with my character or my resilience. My nervous system was doing exactly what it was designed to do—responding to perceived threat. The problem was that I was perceiving threat all day, every day, through my patients’ experiences. And I had never learned how to discharge that activation. I was absorbing everything and releasing nothing.
The Vessel Metaphor
Think of yourself as a vessel. You’re meant to have things flow through you—not get stuck inside you.
When someone’s pain enters your awareness, when you hold space for their suffering, when your mirror neurons fire and your stress hormones spike—all of that is meant to be witnessed, held, and then released. It’s meant to move through you, not take up permanent residence.
But most of us were never taught the release part. We learned how to hold space. We learned how to be present with pain. We learned how to absorb what others needed us to absorb. What we never learned was how to let it go.
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So we just keep absorbing and absorbing, until the vessel is so full there’s no room for anything else. No room for joy. No room for creativity. No room for our own lives. We become containers instead of vessels—storing everything, releasing nothing, slowly filling up with what was never meant to stay.
The solution isn’t to stop caring. That’s not possible for most people drawn to helping work, and it’s not even desirable. Your capacity to care is precious. It’s what the world needs from you.
The solution is to learn how to care in a way that doesn’t destroy you. To become a clear vessel that can hold pain and then let it go. To understand that you can receive fully and release completely, that compassion and self-preservation aren’t opposites.
Creating Transitions
Your nervous system needs clear signals that the stress is over. Without these signals, it doesn’t know when to downshift from alert mode to rest mode. It just keeps running the stress response, waiting for a completion that never comes.
One of the most powerful things you can do is create deliberate transitions between holding space for others and returning to your own life. These transitions don’t have to be elaborate or time-consuming. They just need to be consistent and intentional.
After a difficult conversation or session, take a moment to consciously close that container. You might wash your hands and imagine the water carrying away what isn’t yours. You might step outside for thirty seconds of fresh air, letting the change of environment signal to your nervous system that the chapter has ended. You might shake out your hands, roll your shoulders, or take a few deep breaths—anything that creates a physical demarcation between “holding space” and “returning to yourself.”
These small rituals might seem insignificant, but they communicate something profound to your nervous system: that chapter is complete. You can release now. You can return to yourself.
Moving the Energy
Stress hormones are meant to be metabolized through physical action. When your ancestors encountered a threat, they ran or fought—and that movement completed the stress cycle. The cortisol and adrenaline were burned off through physical effort, and the body could return to baseline.
But when you absorb someone’s trauma while sitting still, when you hold space for crisis after crisis in a chair, the activation has nowhere to go. The hormones are released but never metabolized. Your body stays in a state of readiness for a physical response that never happens.
Movement helps discharge this trapped energy. It doesn’t have to be intense exercise—though that can certainly help. Even small movements make a difference: shaking your hands vigorously, rolling your shoulders and neck, taking a short walk, stretching deliberately. These movements help burn through the stress hormones that have been mobilized, completing the cycle that was started when you absorbed someone else’s distress.
Many people find that at the end of a particularly heavy day, their body craves movement. This isn’t random. It’s wisdom. Your body knows what it needs to discharge what it’s carrying. Learning to listen to these cues—and honor them—is part of becoming a clear vessel.
The Power of the Exhale
Your breath is one of the most powerful tools you have for shifting your nervous system state. Specifically, your exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system—the rest and digest mode that allows for recovery and restoration.
After a difficult session or conversation, take a few moments for deliberate breathing. Make your exhales longer than your inhales—breathe in for four counts, out for six or eight. This extended exhale sends a direct signal to your nervous system that the danger has passed, that it’s safe to downshift now.
You can even add a sound to your exhale—a sigh, an “ahh,” a gentle release of vocalization. Sound helps discharge stress in a way that silent breathing sometimes doesn’t. It gives the trapped energy somewhere to go, an avenue for release.
Three to five of these completion breaths can shift your state significantly. They take less than a minute. And they tell your body, clearly and unmistakably: you can release now. The holding is done.
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Caring Sustainably
If you’ve been absorbing others’ pain for years without these practices, please be gentle with yourself as you begin to integrate them. You didn’t know. You were doing the best you could with the tools you had. And the fact that you’ve been affected by others’ suffering isn’t a sign that you’re weak—it’s a sign that you’re human. That your capacity for empathy is intact. That you care.
The goal isn’t to stop caring. The goal is to care sustainably. To be the kind of helper who can show up fully today and still be here tomorrow. To learn how to receive fully and release completely. To become a clear vessel—one that holds what needs to be held and then lets it flow through.
Your empathy is your gift. It’s what allows you to be present with pain in ways that others cannot. It’s what makes you good at what you do, what draws people to trust you with their most vulnerable moments. This capacity isn’t something to suppress or regret—it’s something to honor by learning to work with it skillfully.
You can care deeply and still come home to yourself. You can witness suffering and still access joy. You can hold space for others’ pain and still have room for your own life.
Pain can move through you without taking up residence. Your empathy is your gift—you honor it by learning to release what you hold. And when you do, you become what you were always meant to be: not a container slowly filling with what isn’t yours, but a vessel through which care can flow freely, touching others and returning to its source, leaving you clear and ready to receive again.
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