Lachlan Brown
It started, as many insights do, with a moment that felt far too ordinary to matter. I was sitting across from a friend in a café, listening to her vent about work. Within minutes, I noticed a shift in my chest—a tightness, a heaviness I knew wasn’t mine.
Her frustration had become mine. Not in a sympathetic, shared-humanity kind of way, but in a deeply embodied, inescapable sense. And it wasn’t the first time.
For much of my early adulthood, I walked through life like an emotional sponge. Someone else’s anxiety? Absorbed. Their anger? Taken on. Their sadness? Worn like a second skin.
For years, I thought this made me compassionate. What I didn’t realize was that it also left me burnt out, emotionally flooded, and subtly resentful.
In the world of modern psychology, we often label this phenomenon as “emotional contagion,” the tendency to pick up and internalize the emotions of those around us.
However, what I’ve come to understand through both my academic studies and Buddhist practice is that this tendency isn’t just a glitch in our empathy circuits. It’s a window into how profoundly interconnected we truly are—and how easily that interconnectedness can become entanglement.
The myth of emotional isolation
One of the most pervasive illusions in Western psychology is the idea that emotions are fully individual experiences. That my sadness is mine, your anger is yours, and healthy boundaries mean keeping them that way.
But the truth is messier.
Our mirror neurons fire in response to other people’s behaviors, priming our own bodies to feel what they feel. Psychologist Elaine Hatfield’s research on emotional contagion suggests that we often “catch” others’ feelings unconsciously, particularly when we are closely connected to them.
And in today’s hyper-connected, emotionally charged culture—with its relentless news cycle, social media outrage, and performative vulnerability—this kind of emotional transference is no longer an exception. It’s the norm.
But while neuroscience helps explain the mechanism, it doesn’t explain the meaning. For that, I turned to Buddhism.
How interconnection turns to entanglement
In the Buddhist concept of Dependent Origination (Paticca Samuppada), we are reminded that nothing arises independently. Every thought, feeling, or reaction is the result of countless interwoven conditions. Our experiences are not self-contained bubbles but emergent patterns from an intricate web of causes.
What this means on a practical level is that when you walk into a room and feel someone else’s heaviness settle in your body, that experience didn’t arise in isolation. It came through your conditioning—your sensitivity, your past traumas, your unconscious beliefs about being responsible for others. It also came through the other person’s suffering, their unmet needs, their projections. The moment is shared, but it’s not shared equally.
I learned this lesson the hard way during a particularly intense retreat in northern Thailand. One evening, after days of silence and meditation, I found myself overwhelmed by sorrow that didn’t seem to have a source.
As I sat with it, I realized it echoed the unspoken grief of another participant who had recently shared her story. My body had taken it in like a secondhand wind. In that moment, I didn’t need to push it away. I needed to see the web it came from.
The cultural illusion of boundless empathy
We live in a time that glorifies emotional openness. We’re told to be empathic, to listen more, to hold space for others. While these are beautiful intentions, they often ignore the psychological cost of unfiltered emotional merging.
It’s become trendy to speak of “empaths” as if emotional sensitivity were a superpower. But ungrounded empathy can become a form of self-abandonment. As Dr. Marcia Reynolds wrote in a Psychology Today post:
“Unbridled empathy can lead to concentrations of the stress hormone cortisol, making it difficult to release the emotions.Taking on other people’s feelings so that you live their experience can make you susceptible to feelings of depression or hopelessness”
When we constantly attune to others without anchoring in our own presence, we lose ourselves. Compassion without clarity collapses into co-suffering.
The irony is that in trying to connect more deeply, we often end up more depleted. Emotional exhaustion isn’t a sign of sensitivity gone wrong; it’s a sign that we’ve mistaken entanglement for compassion.
Reclaiming the space between
So how do we stay open to others without absorbing their storm?
For me, the shift began when I stopped asking, “How can I avoid negative energy?” and started asking, “How am I participating in the web that gives rise to it?”
The first step is presence. Mindful awareness, or sati, trains us to stay rooted in our own bodily and emotional landscape. When I feel another’s emotions rise within me, I try to pause. I ask: Is this mine? Where do I feel it? What belief is being activated in me? This gentle curiosity helps create space between the trigger and the reaction.
The second step is boundary as clarity, not as defense. In Buddhist psychology, compassion (karuna) is always balanced with wisdom (panna). True compassion doesn’t require you to carry another’s burden—only to witness it with presence and love. That witnessing becomes a boundary in itself: I can see your pain, but I don’t have to become it.
The practice of relational mindfulness
If there’s one practice that changed how I relate to emotional energy, it’s this: bringing mindfulness into relationship. That means not just meditating alone, but noticing how your body contracts during a tense conversation, how your heart opens or shuts in response to a friend’s vulnerability.
One exercise I often share is the practice of “Three Breaths of Awareness.” Before entering a conversation, pause for three mindful breaths. Feel your feet on the ground. Come home to your body. Set the intention to remain anchored, even as you open.
Another is the visualization of interbeing. Imagine your emotions, and others’, as clouds drifting through a shared sky. Some merge, some pass, but none define the sky itself. You are the sky, not the weather.
A final word on freedom
Returning to that café, years later, I still sit across from friends as they share their struggles. But now, I feel the storm pass near me, not through me. I can empathize without drowning, witness without disappearing.
This shift wasn’t about hardening my heart. It was about understanding the conditions that create emotional entanglement—and gently disentangling from them. I began to see that protecting ourselves from others’ energy isn’t about walls. It’s about awareness.
And that awareness, cultivated over time, is what gives us the quiet, powerful freedom to choose how we show up: with presence, with compassion, and with the grounded clarity.
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