Brenda Winkle 00:00:01 Welcome to your yes filled life. I'm Brenda Winkle, energetic leadership guide, psychic, medium and somatic coach for ambitious leaders who know their gifts are real and who want to stand fully in them. Here you'll learn how to trust your intuition, embody your vision, and step into the freedom you've been creating, all without chasing more certifications or carrying stuff that does not belong to you. Every week, I'll share powerful practices and conversations with thought leaders and changemakers that help you transform your vision into embodied confidence. Claim your gifts without apology and lead with both clarity and freedom. Because your gifts aren't cute. They are powerful. They're real, and they're needed. Start today by downloading my free energy audit at Brenda Winkle for audit. It's the exact tool I use to track what's fueling me and what's draining me. It will help you discern between that hit of achievement and true joy, so that you can lead with more clarity and impact. This is your space to stop proving, start embodying and live fully in your gifts.
Brenda Winkle 00:01:16 Welcome to your yes filled life.
Brenda Winkle 00:01:20 Hello and welcome to your yes filled life. I'm your host, Brenda Winkle. Today on the podcast, we're going to be talking about what happens when you disappoint someone you care about through the lens of someone with deep empathy and compassion like you. And not only what happens when you disappoint someone you care about? Well, we're also going to be looking at the health impact of having deep empathy and compassion in a way that supports you to over function, over accommodate and over give. You see, most powerful people are not afraid of failure. They're actually afraid of relationship. Tension or even relationship fracture. And so they over explain they over accommodate over function. And sometimes, as we talked about in the last podcast episode, they shrink. Not because you lack confidence, but because your nervous system predicts loss of belonging. And that threat, loss of belonging is coded in the nervous system as something that is quite literally life threatening. So I came home just today from Madison, where I was caring for my mom, who had a hip replacement, and I was there for eight days.
Brenda Winkle 00:02:42 And of the eight days that I was there, including the ninth day pre-travel, I slept an appropriate amount one time. The other nights I slept very poorly and not enough, and part of it was because I was sleeping on the living room, sofa bed, and part of it was there were lots of sirens. she lives in a downtown apartment, and part of it was I was, like, not comfortable. And part of it was I didn't have my earplugs in because I needed to be available to hear. My mom, and I was a little bit hyper vigilant for her anyway. Combination was I didn't sleep well. And this is really important because when I was on about day six, I started to realize that my asthma was beginning to flare. In fact, I thought about not recording this episode today because I know my voice is a little bit different. And then I thought, no, I'm just going to go ahead and do it, because I think it's really important for you to know that I.
Brenda Winkle 00:03:43 I'm still dealing with this, too. I'm not immune to this. I am a very strong empath. I have all of the empathic abilities the somatic empath, the emotional empath, the like, all of the all of the empathic traits that I've talked about in different episodes of the podcast. And so part of my issue also was that I was experiencing my mom's post-surgical pain in my own body. I could tell when it was time for her medication, and she didn't really want to take her big pain medication, and was relying on Tylenol for most of it. And you know, that doesn't really do a whole lot as far as pain management. And so anyway, the bottom line is I wasn't sleeping well enough. And out of those eight days, I only exercised enough three of those days, which is very unusual for me. I'm typically a 2 to 4 mile a day walker and often do some other activity as well. And when I look at my own health, I think of it as a four prong approach nutrition, movement, sleep, and then mindfulness, like meditation or breathwork.
Brenda Winkle 00:04:53 And so two of my four prongs were not on last week the sleep and the exercise. And what I'm noticing is in my own body, the less resource I am, the more prone I am to over accommodating, over functioning and ignoring my own physical needs and ignoring my own stress. I don't even feel it because I feel other people's emotions and physical sensations so strongly in my body that I just feel theirs. And my guess is to a certain extent. You probably relate to this because you're listening to this podcast. So when you think about the idea of potentially disappointing someone you care about, it can feel disproportionately uncomfortable to people like us the empaths, the intuitive, the emotionally intelligent. Because even when you know you're making the right decision, even when you know your boundaries appropriate, even when the ask that is being asked of you is unreasonable. You still feel that pull to explain more, to soften your stance, to roll back the boundary, to really manage their emotions, to make it easier for them.
Brenda Winkle 00:06:13 Which means you're second guessing yourself, or maybe ignoring your own needs. It's not because you don't know better. It's not because you're weak. It's not because you don't have good boundaries. It's because you have these empathic abilities and you care. And caring can quickly become over functioning. Just like I was doing last week. Over functioning, over giving. And, you know, disappointment can feel really activating when we're in that cycle of over giving, over functioning. Because at a certain point, we're doing it not just to protect the people that we care about, although that is true too, but we're also doing it because we don't want to be uncomfortable with their discomfort. Right. And if we look at like biologically, humans are wired for belonging. And historically, a relational rupture would mean a loss of safety. And so we are really finely tuned in to what's going to keep us safe and in relationship. And your nervous system does not know the difference between a tiger chasing you and social rejection risk.
Brenda Winkle 00:07:29 It feels the same to your nervous system. Both of them register as a threat, especially for people like you who are conscientious, high empathy, highly responsible, socially aware, and tuned in to other people's emotions. And so if you even think about disappointing somebody, it can feel like I did something wrong. I might hurt them. I may have hurt their feelings. Am I still a good person? What if I lose the relationship because I finally stand up for myself, or I finally say what I need and I might be misunderstood. All of those things kind of go in our background, in our minds. And so the body tries to repair the potential rupture really quickly, oftentimes by rolling back the boundary, by shrinking just a little bit, by over explaining, because the body is like reading this all as a threat. So your nervous system gets involved, and next thing you know, you're in a fawning response or a freeze response where you just can't do the things you know how to do.
Brenda Winkle 00:08:33 I relate to this deeply. I teach what I most need to know. I'm an empath, am intuitive, I'm a psychic medium. And so when I'm saying this, then it sounds like I've hit the mark. It's because I'm sharing my own experience with you. And last week on the podcast, there was an episode called When the Moment You Stop shrinking. Shrinking does not look dramatic. It sounds dramatic, but it doesn't look dramatic. It looks like adding unnecessary explanations or justification. It looks like softening how you speak, like not being quite as direct as you probably could be, but instead just, you know, softening it, patting it a little bit. It could look like over accommodating, it could look like saying yes when you mean no. It could look like softening the truth or carrying emotional labor. That's not yours. In fact, this one, the carrying emotional labor that's not yours. This is the one that my the vast majority of my clients feel like is the hardest. It's the emotional labor that isn't yours where you try to understand why your husband is doing that thing that's hurting the kids, or you are capable of managing the the tone and the temperature of every room you're in, whether it's your responsibility or not.
Brenda Winkle 00:09:56 And then it becomes becomes your responsibility sort of by de facto. Like, everyone plans on you managing the room because you're the emotionally intelligent one. Externally, you appear very capable, but internally your own signal gets distorted. It feels like you don't have the clarity that you really want, and sometimes it feels like you don't even know what to do next for yourself, because there's such a desire on your part to create relief from the tension that is happening in the relationship. So when we look at the physiology of relational stress, I knew that there had to be research, and sure enough, there was because I came home, I have an asthma flare, which I haven't had an asthma flare in probably four years. And so this is really significant for me and I'm taking it seriously. But I thought to myself, what is the research around what I call the four pillars the sleep, nutrition, exercise, and mindfulness. Is there any research to support that in protecting immunity? And I wondered if there was any research to support that.
Brenda Winkle 00:11:11 This is a unique challenge for empaths and wow. I was not disappointed. There is a large body of research out there about this exact thing. So in one study, higher levels of empathy were linked to higher levels of C-reactive protein in the blood. Meaning you had more inflammation in your body if you have higher levels of empathy. Now, to be really specific, in this study, they found that depression that was caused by this excess empathy increased the possibility of the C-reactive protein in a way that the non depressed empath may not increase the same way. So, and there are also some limiting factors in the research itself because the empathy is self-reported. And so that's just worth saying. But it was really interesting to think about higher levels of C-reactive protein, which made me think, okay, so we've got more inflammation in the body. We know that inflammation causes flares of all types of autoimmune things, from multiple sclerosis to asthma to arthritis to all the things. What is the impact of cortisol and how does that relate to empathy? So I dove into the scientific research and the peer reviewed studies and found that there is a link to higher cortisol in the blood for empaths or people who have high levels of empathy and compassion.
Brenda Winkle 00:12:54 Now, empathy is essential. It would be ideal if all of us in the whole world had empathy. But you and I both know that right now that is not true. And so those of us that have this gift of really deep empathy, feeling other people's feelings, feeling what's happening in their body, feeling other people's emotions is really, really a gift. And it's very important. It is not a problem. And I want to be very, very clear and direct. It's not a problem. But if we don't manage the empathy and we don't take care of ourselves, we are setting ourselves up for long term health ramifications, really serious long term health ramifications. So in the first study, they found more C-reactive protein that inflammation marker in the blood. They found that if they focus on mothers, due to their central caregiving role and the relevance of caregiving related stress for cortisol regulation and empathy, they found that the mothers, whether it was empathy, cognitive empathy, the ability to understand emotions or empathic concern that's compassion for others, or personal distress, meaning self-focused emotional responses to other people's reactions.
Brenda Winkle 00:14:13 They found that the maternal hair cortisol level is predicted by personal distress, suggesting that mothers experiencing higher stress levels may also be more emotionally overwhelmed when encountering other people's distress. So that's really, really interesting. Now, they did not find that in general, there's more cortisol in the hair of people that self-described as empaths. But the truth is, there's very little scientific research around empaths or empathy. Elaine Aron is the front runner of that. This is a newer level of science. So there was a study done that was published in the journal Biological Psychology that found the link between empathy and the health that revealed the C-reactive protein. So, you know, there's there's up and coming research around it, but you already know this to be true. And I'm not trying to prove or justify anything, but I am trying to give you some sound science and the fact that you can't continue to do things the way that you've been doing, because it will have long term health ramifications. We know that higher rates of inflammation affect you on a physical level.
Brenda Winkle 00:15:30 They affect your physical health, and long term chronic inflammation causes heart disease. It causes cancers. It causes asthma flares, miss flares and all the things. So this is not just so that you feel better. Although that would be enough. It will make you feel better. But it's also so that you stay well. Chronic relational stress has also been linked to different types of immune function, sleep disruption, digestive issues, fatigue, and increased inflammatory markers like the IL six and the CRP and higher perceived stress load. Now, again, empathy is not the problem. It's the chronic override of your own system of the own signal inside your body. That is the issue. And powerful people, high achievers, high capacity people like you are often the relied upon ones, the trusted ones. You're seen as stable. You're seen as emotionally intelligent, which means that you're the one who's smoothing over dynamics. You're the one who's working things out with people. You're holding the complexity and managing the tension, and you become the regulator for the room, right? But without awareness and real intentionality, that can quickly become becoming overly responsible for other people's emotional states.
Brenda Winkle 00:16:59 And that creates a hidden pressure inside your body. And the truth is disappointing. Someone is sometimes necessary. Disappointing someone is not harm. It's information. And when you disappoint somebody, it could be because the expectations from what happened were different from what they thought it might be that there's a the needs between you and that other person are in tension. It's often linked to growth. So as you begin to grow or work through something or heal through something, it can change relationship dynamics. And this is really where I tend to work with a lot of people that come to me in that transition point where they know they can't continue, and then we start to unpack this. Most of the time an identity shift is happening. It's either in process or it's just completed. And the relationship itself is renegotiating. Whether it's a relationship with your workplace, a relationship with your partner, a relationship with how you're showing up with your kids who are growing up. And the thing is, and I really want to say this, you can care deeply about someone and not be responsible for their emotions.
Brenda Winkle 00:18:16 In fact, you are not responsible for other people's emotions. It's okay for them to have the dignity of their own experience. In fact, I would say it's healthier for them and for you, for them to have the dignity of their own experience. But as empaths, that's something we really have to learn. And I find that getting to that point is often the place where people, when they first come to work with me, are stuck. In fact, so many people that I start working with, they say things like, I know what to do, but something stops me, which is why That's the title I gave to a free masterclass coming up on April 7th, when you know exactly what to do, but something stops you. You can register at the link in the show notes, or you can go to Brendan Winkle Next Level. We'll be talking about the power framework, which I developed to help create some ease for this exact phenomenon. The people with deep empathy and compassion, how you can stay in relationship with people, how you can maintain that deep compassion and empathy and also stop ignoring your own signal.
Brenda Winkle 00:19:35 And I have a few questions for you that you can take with you today, and work through them on the week. You might want to grab a pen and paper if you have, or just come back to this in a minute and listen again. A lot of times, the questions that we're asking ourselves, if you're if you have high empathy or compassion. Are some version of how can I make this easier for them? Right? Instead, try some of these questions. Am I telling the truth about my capacity right now? Number 2 a.m. I over explaining or justifying? To manage perceptions. Because if anything you do has any part of. I'm doing it because I want them to think something, or I'm doing it because I want them to feel something that's not clean energy. So am I over explaining to manage perceptions? Number three, what am I assuming will happen if they're disappointed? And is that real? If so, how do I deal with it? Because I will still tell you that it would be better to have somebody disappointed and have you be telling and living into your whole truth that it would be for you to continue to disappoint yourself and for you to continue to ignore that signal.
Brenda Winkle 00:20:59 And I know it's really scary, especially if you have been the peacekeeper. You've been the one that manages the room. I know how triggering it is to start to pull that back. I really, really get it. And chances are you've been the person who has kind of willingly. There's a part of you that enjoys it over and over function your whole life. And part of it made you feel really good. And so as you begin to pull this back, that same part of you is probably wondering, are they going to show up for me? And the hard truth for many of us is that the people that we have over function for don't always. Sometimes they do, but a lot of times the people we've been over functioning for don't. So I was saying to a client this week that the energy of I have got me and You've Got You is transformative. And so when we can allow people to really have the dignity of their own experiences, they get to be disappointed if they want. But we're not trying to control their emotions or be responsible for them.
Brenda Winkle 00:22:13 There's a kind of freedom that happens there, and it takes practice, and you're not going to get it right every time. Just like I didn't quite get it right this time in Madison taking care of my mom. That's why I'm coming home with an asthma flare. Didn't quite have it right, because I didn't take good care of my body. And one thing I've noticed really, really significantly is that if I'm not resourced, meaning I'm not fed, rested, hydrated exercise, I am so prone to over functioning, to over giving, to over showing up. And it looks like more and more and more and more and more like I won't sit down. I will just hustle from task to task to task, to task. And I'll tell myself I have to add more and more and more to my plate, which is also the fight stress response. And then it can manifest in the font stress response. And by the way, I've talked about this on the podcast over several different episodes. You can go between stress responses.
Brenda Winkle 00:23:12 It's not like you're stuck in one. And so if you're not really aware of what's happening and you're not really listening for that internal signal, it can be really, really challenging. And your identity is going to shift relational patterns. So as you grow, as you evolve, as life changes, of course boundaries are going to change and priorities are going to change, and your tolerance is going to change and your communication is going to change. Of course, all those things are going to happen, and some of your relationships are going to adapt really easily. And others they might require renegotiation. Renegotiation and some disappointment is inevitable because growth is often going to reveal where the roles were unconsciously, without ever talking about it assigned. And if you want to change that growth assignment, you need to be at that masterclass when you know exactly what to do. But something stops you. That's one of the pieces we're going to be talking about, is how to recognize when it's happening, how to recognize when you're giving away your power and what to do next.
Brenda Winkle 00:24:18 And I'm going to go over that power framework with you that I use with my private clients. The power framework is an acronym where each letter of the word power stands for one of the concepts of the pillars that I teach. And I hope you come join me there. It's going to be a really good class, and I just want to say it's okay for you to disappoint somebody. It doesn't make you a bad person. In fact, you can still be a good person and disappoint a lot of people, and you can hold a boundary and still be very caring and warm. You can tell the truth and still belong. The goal isn't to avoid disappointing people, it's to stop abandoning yourself in the process. And one of the toughest things for all of us, especially those of us who have spent a lifetime managing emotional rooms and holding the energetic configuration of a room and caretaking and peacekeeping, is that oftentimes we have over given and over given and over function and over function thinking one day it's going to be our turn.
Brenda Winkle 00:25:24 And sometimes that's true. But what's often true is that we have attracted people in our lives. Or perhaps it was in our family of origin that were willing to take our over giving without ever offering reciprocity. And I just want to name that, because it's come up in several client sessions this last couple of weeks, and there's nothing wrong with you. You're not doing it wrong. If you're in that state and It is probably going to require you to form new relationships where you're paying attention to that reciprocity. Because, you know, the truth is, the people who haven't been treating you in reciprocal ways have been benefiting from you, not requiring them to be reciprocal. The same way that there are only two reasons why people don't want you to set a boundary. Have I talked about that before here? I know I talked about it in my groups and in my my coaching. But the first thing is people get upset with a boundary. When you are setting a boundary, they don't see themselves as being able to set.
Brenda Winkle 00:26:33 And the second reason that they might challenge or take issue with the boundaries because they're benefiting from you not having one. So the question that I have for you is if somebody is going to leave because you stop over functioning, you stop over giving, over giving, you stop over giving, you stop, over managing the room and you start taking care of yourself and then they leave. Were they ever really there? And I know that can be really difficult to think about, but I promise you. Some of the people who are still there are going to surprise you. And if you're looking for community, another reason for you to come join the master class, because a lot of our beautiful community that is part of your life will be there. And I hope you will too. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, would you please share it with three people you care about? Because I promise you, you probably have people in your life who have the deep empathy that you do, and they need this just as much as you do.
Brenda Winkle 00:27:36 And if you really enjoyed it, would you please consider giving the podcast a rating and review based on this episode wherever you're listening? Thanks for being here. Bye for now. Until next time.
