Empathy is often treated as an uncomplicated virtue. Understand how someone feels. Listen before you judge. Give people space. Try to see things from their perspective. These are valuable instincts, particularly when working with other people. But what happens when understanding someone else’s feelings makes it harder to stand your own ground?
For Janice, that question became real through experience. She has always considered herself an empath. She describes feeling deeply for her friends and family, even crying with them when they share difficult experiences. Over time, that instinct extended into her work, where she naturally tried to understand the people around her and make room for what they were going through. But she discovered that empathy, without boundaries, can have consequences of its own.
In a conversation with Julia Middleton, Janice reflects on the moment she realised that being understanding did not mean accepting everything, and that protecting one person could sometimes mean failing the people around them. Her experience offers a useful reminder: empathy can help us understand people, but it should not prevent us from making the decisions that need to be made.
1. When Empathy Starts Working Against You
Janice had always seen her ability to feel deeply as a strength. But there came a point when someone began using that empathy to influence her decisions.
“They were bombing me with how they felt, these big words and like, how they were feeling and how I made them feel,” she explains. Janice could understand that person’s situation and acknowledge that their feelings were real. At the same time, she knew that their account of what had happened was not entirely accurate.
Eventually, she recognised what was happening. “I was being manipulated. I was being gaslit.”
The difficult part was not recognising that the other person was struggling. It was recognising that understanding their struggle did not require her to accept their behaviour.
“I know you’re feeling this, and I can understand why you’re feeling that way,” she eventually told them. “And I also understand the reason you did all these things. But that was then, and this is now, and I am done.”
That distinction is crucial. Empathy allows us to understand another person’s experience. It does not require us to surrender our own judgement.
For Janice, the lesson came with a difficult realisation: “I can’t let my empathy flow through without having some sort of limitations or boundaries.”
2. When Protecting One Person Hurts the Rest of the Team
The consequences of unchecked empathy rarely stop with the person receiving it.
Janice realised that the situation was beginning to affect the people she worked with. Her tolerance towards one individual was having an impact on everyone else, and that changed the equation for her.
“When something is threatening something bigger than myself, I get to become like a mama bear,” she says. Her instinct to nurture did not disappear when she set a boundary. It simply found another object of protection: the team, the work and the wider goal.
This is where the conversation becomes particularly interesting. Empathy is often imagined as a one-to-one relationship: I understand you, therefore I make space for you. But people rarely work in isolation. One person’s behaviour can affect an entire team, project or organisation.
Janice puts it bluntly: if she allowed one person to dictate her decisions by appealing to her empathetic side, she would be “sacrificing a lot of the relationships and the work” she had built with everyone else.
Sometimes, being empathetic to the wider group means making a decision that one individual will not like.
That does not make the decision unkind.
It makes the responsibility bigger than the individual relationship.
3. When Understanding Someone Becomes an Excuse for Inaction
One of the hidden costs of excessive empathy is hesitation.
Janice knew she was reaching her limit long before she actually acted. She had spoken to the person repeatedly. She had explained what needed to happen. She had given them opportunities to change. Still, she kept extending her tolerance.
“I was already restless,” she recalls. “I was like, I’m so done with this. I’m so done with this. I keep telling myself, I’m so done with this. But I didn’t do anything about it.”
The turning point came when she gave the person one final expectation and they responded with another excuse.
“That was it for me,” she says. “This is me stopping my foot down.”
It was not an impulsive decision. In fact, the problem had been allowed to continue precisely because Janice was trying so hard to understand the person.
That is an important distinction. Empathy can tell us why someone is behaving in a particular way. It cannot decide indefinitely what we should do about it.
There comes a point when understanding needs to be accompanied by action.
4. When Flexibility Stops Being Respectful
Janice’s approach to working with others is not naturally rigid. In fact, she describes giving people considerable freedom.
Rather than imposing deadlines, she often asks people when they think they can deliver something. She wants to understand their workload and give them space to manage their responsibilities. “I always ask others when they think they can finish,” she explains.
But flexibility only works when it is reciprocal.
In the situation that eventually forced her to act, the person repeatedly failed deadlines they had set themselves. There were plans and promises, but not the action that followed them.
Janice began to realise that continuing to accommodate the behaviour was affecting something else: her own self-respect.
“I realized, okay, I am disrespecting myself,” she says. “This person is clearly disrespecting me.”
This is perhaps one of the most useful distinctions in the conversation. Being flexible does not mean having no expectations. Being understanding does not mean allowing commitments to disappear.
Healthy working relationships require mutual respect. If one person continually gives flexibility while the other continually takes it without reciprocating, the relationship stops being balanced.
Empathy should create space for people to succeed. It should not remove their responsibility to do so.
5. When Someone Is Genuinely Struggling
The conversation becomes more nuanced when Julia raises a different situation: what happens when the person isn’t manipulating you or acting disrespectfully, but is genuinely going through something difficult?
This is where boundaries can become much harder.
Janice describes having worked with people dealing with serious challenges outside work. Her response is not to ignore what they are going through. She gives flexibility around working hours, listens to what they need and makes room for negotiation.
But she still makes expectations clear.
“Just because they have a lot of these things doesn’t mean their responsibilities get smaller,” she explains.
This is the difference between compassion and removing accountability.
Someone can be going through an extraordinarily difficult period and still have responsibilities. The answer does not have to be one or the other. We can acknowledge the human being behind the work while still being clear about what the work requires.
It is a much harder form of empathy because there is no obvious villain. There is simply a person struggling, a team that still needs to function and a set of responsibilities that cannot disappear.
Janice’s former boss had a phrase for exactly this balance: “be loving but firm.”
Perhaps that is the balance empathy needs most.
What Janice Leaves Us Thinking About
Janice’s experience challenges the idea that empathy is simply about giving more. Sometimes empathy asks us to listen more carefully. Sometimes it asks us to offer flexibility. And sometimes, surprisingly, it asks us to say no.
There are a few questions worth carrying forward:
- Can I understand someone’s feelings without allowing those feelings to determine my decisions?
- Am I being flexible because it genuinely helps someone, or because I am uncomfortable setting a boundary?
- Is my response to one person’s situation affecting the people around them?
- Have I made my expectations clear, even when I am trying to be compassionate?
- Can I protect my own energy and still remain empathetic?
- When someone is genuinely struggling, how can I offer support while remaining clear about what needs to happen?
The hidden risk of empathy is not that we care too much. It is that, without boundaries, we can become so focused on understanding one person that we lose sight of ourselves, the people around us and the bigger purpose we’re trying to serve.
Empathy and boundaries do not have to compete. In fact, Janice’s experience suggests that one may make the other possible.
If you want to understand how empathy can become a strength without becoming a burden, listen to the full conversation with Janice on the Women Emerging Podcast.
