Observe, Don't Absorb

Being steady within yourself when someone else's emotions fill the room

A musician I’ll call Hillary was in a chamber rehearsal when one of her colleagues began to come apart. This sounds terrible. I can’t go on stage if we sound like this. Swearing. His energy, as she put it afterward, “flooding the whole room.” By any honest measure she was the most prepared person there. And within seconds she was doubting her own preparation, avoiding his eyes, making herself smaller so that he might feel more comfortable. She had tuned so completely into how he felt that, “it completely overpowered how I was feeling.”

Nothing he said was about her. But she carried it for the rest of the rehearsal and for months after, anyway.

If you’re a sensitive, empathetic person, you know this from the inside. It doesn’t feel like a decision. It feels like weather moving through you. But something specific is happening, and once you can see it, you can do something about it.

What absorption actually is

Here’s the definition I keep coming back to: absorption is the absence of a boundary, allowing another person’s emotional state to become your own.

Notice what that does not say. It doesn’t say you feel too much, or that you should care less, or that you need a thicker skin. Your sensitivity isn’t the problem, it’s the same quality that makes you a fine musician. The real issue is that the boundary which should let you notice someone else’s stress without catching it like a cold just isn’t working. So your colleague’s panic doesn’t stay his. It becomes your verdict on the rehearsal, on your playing, on yourself.

A client of mine once named the correction in three words, and it has traveled through my whole practice since: observe, don’t absorb. You can take in everything the moment is offering: the negative energy, the tension, the difficulty, the other person’s distress, without taking it into yourself.

Observation is information. Absorption is identification. Observation keeps you in your own body; absorption pulls you into theirs.

Why kind people do this

The reason so many of us fall into this trap is that it feels like a virtue. Many sensitive musicians carry a belief that to be a good person, a good friend, a good colleague, you have to feel what the other person feels, take it on, suffer along with them. Hillary called it “the good kid in me.” Another client, Paul, was so committed to it that he kept extending himself to a colleague he found genuinely difficult, someone whose presence made his life harder, because not doing so felt wrong. Setting any kind of limit felt like a failure of character.

For a lot of us this started early. Hillary traced it to a childhood spent managing a parent whose moods set the temperature of the house and the children’s job was to keep things calm. That’s a remarkable skill for a child to develop. It’s also a heavy thing to still be doing, unconsciously, decades later, in a rehearsal room, with a colleague who is not your parent.

What began as survival becomes a reflex: if someone near me is upset, it’s my job to fix it, soothe it, or carry it. Your sensitivity hardens into an artificial sense of responsibility. And it wears you out because other people’s emotions are simply not yours to manage.

The heavy price tag

Absorption is incredibly expensive.

•       It costs you your perspective: Hillary was the most prepared person in the room, but she lost total access to that reality the moment she took on his panic.

•       It costs you time: She recalled how a single sharp comment from her mother used to tank her confidence for days before she realized she didn’t have to let it in.

•       It costs you your effectiveness: This is the ultimate irony. You cannot steady someone else when you’ve lost your own footing.

Paul noticed that his life got instantly less complicated once he stopped trying to carry a difficult colleague’s chaos. The distance didn’t make him a worse person. It just gave him a clearer head.

A boundary is not a wall

That’s the misunderstanding that keeps kind people absorbing: they think the only options are to dive in or to shut the other person out. There’s a third.

In coach training there’s an image I love. If someone is struggling in the pool, you don’t jump in with them because then you both drown. You stay on solid ground at the edge and you reach out a hand, a stabilizing presence.

So many people believe they have to get in the water to be a good friend. You don’t. You can stand at the edge and be the stability, and from there you’re actually able to help precisely because you haven’t gone under.

There’s a companion idea I offer when someone is drowning in what isn’t theirs. There are three kinds of business in the world: your business, other people’s business, and God’s business, with that last one being everything no one controls at all. Most of our suffering comes from wading into the second and the third categories. How a difficult colleague chooses to act is their business. Whether someone else is having a hard day is, finally, not yours to fix. Your business is your own work, your own focus, and the ground you stand on while you do it.

This requires self-trust. It’s the permission to hold your own emotional ground even when someone else completely loses theirs. James, another client working on the same thing with friends and family, said, “Observe, but don’t take it to heart so much; there has to be some levelness.” Even with people you love, even when they’re suffering, you do not have to be in distress to help someone who is. Put your own oxygen mask on first.

None of this means going cold. The fear underneath all the absorbing is that a boundary makes you unkind, that if you don’t take someone’s feeling into your own body, you’ve abandoned them. The opposite is true. From the edge of the pool you can see the person clearly enough to name what’s happening to them: I can see this is really hard right now. That sounds awful. You don’t have to fix it, or agree with it, or carry it. Naming the feeling is enough, and it’s often the thing that helps most. And you can only do it from dry ground.

Absorption blurs the line between their feeling and yours until you can’t tell whose is whose. The boundary is exactly what lets you see their experience as theirs, clearly enough to honor it. You’re naming the feeling, not diagnosing the person, not making them a problem to be solved.

That’s the move: not getting in the water but staying dry enough to reach a steady hand to someone who’s in it.

A small thing to practice

Keep this light, something to consider rather than a protocol to perfect.

Notice the tell, the very moment another person’s feeling lands in you, or your breath catches. (For every musician I’ve done this with, the body knew first: a held breath, a tightening in the gut.)

Then, one sentence: this belongs to them, not to me.

Then come back to something unmistakably yours. Feel your feet on the floor, your own breath, the weight of the instrument in your hands.

Then, and only then, engage from your own center, not from inside their weather.

That’s it. Not a technique to master. A boundary to remember that you’re allowed to have.

A postscript

Some time later, Hillary came to a session and told me, almost in passing, about a conversation she’d had with the very colleague whose panic had once flooded the room — the one whose distress she’d carried for months as if it were her own.

She needed to bring up a difficult issue, but this time she didn’t go under and she didn’t go silent. She stayed on her own ground and said it, in what she called “the most adult way possible.” It moved her to tears; he had tears in his own eyes, and thanked her for trusting him with it.

The boundary she’d once been unable to find hadn’t pushed him away. In fact it had let the two of them actually meet. “It strengthened the relationship,” she said.

That’s the part the absorbing self can never quite believe. Solid ground isn’t where you go to get away from people. It’s the place where you can genuinely connect with them.

To sit with

•       What feeling have you been carrying that was never actually yours?

•       When did you first learn that other people’s moods were your responsibility?

•       What would change in a room if you let the people in it have their own weather?

---

If this resonates...

If you find that you are carrying what isn't yours and would like a steady presence at the edge of the pool while you find your own ground and learn to trust it, that's the core of the work I do. You don't have to do it on your own. That's what a connection call is for. No agenda, just a conversation about what you're carrying and whether working together might help.

Book a Connection Call