Not Mine to Carry: How I Stopped Absorbing Everyone Else's Energy
For most of my life, I've been an empath — the kind who feels what everyone around me is feeling before I even realize I've picked it up. Someone walks into the room frustrated, and I feel it in my chest before they've said a word. Someone I love is hurting, and it becomes my hurt too, almost instantly, almost involuntarily. It's a gift. It's also nearly broken me more than once.
If you've ever been called "too sensitive," or if you're the one everyone comes to when they're struggling, you probably know exactly what I mean. I have a bleeding heart. I want to help everybody and fix everything — especially my husband, my kids, and the people I work with. And for years, that instinct quietly ran my life in ways I didn't fully see. It felt like love. It felt like being a good wife, a good mom, a good leader. It took me a long time to realize it was actually costing me — and costing the people I loved most — something significant.
Where it showed up in business
In business, it showed up as a ceiling I couldn't seem to break through, no matter how hard I worked or how good my offer was. In network marketing and affiliate marketing, I'd grow a team to a certain size — and then something would give. I'd jump ship, I'd quit, or I'd watch it slowly fall apart, because I had absorbed everyone's stuff right along with my own. Every team member's doubt became my doubt. Every setback someone else was having became a weight I was carrying on top of my own.
It showed up with clients, too, in a way I didn't always connect to the same root cause. I'd cap how many people I could serve at a time — not because I didn't have the capacity to sell or market, but because I could feel myself getting overwhelmed emotionally. I'd start dropping balls. I couldn't show up for people the way I wanted to, because I was so full of everyone else's energy that there wasn't much room left for my own clarity or my own peace. I wasn't just supporting people. I was drowning right alongside them, quietly, in a way that looked like burnout but was really something deeper.
Where it showed up at home
At home, it looked like keeping the peace at all costs. Making sure my husband's emotions were regulated. Making sure he was always happy, always supported, never left to sit with something hard on his own. Making sure my kids never needed a single thing — anticipating what they needed before they even asked, smoothing things over before conflict could even fully form.
It looked like love. And in a way, it was love — but it was love without boundaries, love that had lost track of where I ended and everyone else began. Underneath it was resentment I didn't want to admit to. Frustration I felt guilty for feeling. A kind of overwhelm I couldn't name for a long time, because on the surface everything looked fine. I was just tired all the time, and I didn't understand why, because I was "just" being supportive.
The years of asking
I asked — over and over, for years — how do I untangle myself from other people's emotions without giving up on caring? How do I sit with someone in their pain, love them fully, be present with them, and not carry it home with me like a second skin?
It wasn't a new question. Honestly, I'd been doing this since I was a kid — absorbing tension in the house, managing my parents' moods, smoothing things over with my siblings. It was such an old pattern that I didn't know who I was without it.
The answer
A friend of mine invited me to a conference, and honestly, my first instinct was to say no. It was on a Saturday, which is our family day — the day we clean the house, spend time together, the day my husband would have to hold down the fort without me. I had a hundred reasons to stay home. But I felt this nudge, this quiet you need to be there that I couldn't shake.
The night before, my husband and I had gotten into it — parenting, money, all of it. The same pattern that always showed up: he was stressed and overwhelmed, I was trying to be supportive, and somewhere in the process of trying to hold that for him, I turned angry and resentful instead. I hate that cycle. I was trying so hard to help, and it kept turning into something ugly.
So the next morning, my friend picked me up, and the two of us — plus one more — drove up to the conference together. And in the car, I was just fuming. Frustrated about my daughter, who'd been hard to work with. Frustrated about my husband, irritated by everything. Frustrated with myself, because I couldn't keep it together even though I was the one trying to hold everyone else's feelings steady. I said it out loud in that car: I have been trying and trying and trying to figure this out, and I cannot untangle myself. I've meditated. I've asked people nicely for what I need. I've prayed and prayed for God to show me how to do this. And I still hadn't gotten an answer.
We got to the conference, and I went through the classes. They were good — genuinely helpful — but none of them gave me what I'd come for. I remember feeling that familiar disappointment, like I'd shown up hoping for a breakthrough and it just wasn't going to happen that day.
Then came the last class. It was a marriage class, actually — about being an equal partner in your relationship. And that's where the teacher shared four key things. As I sat there listening, I realized this wasn't just about marriage. It was about every relationship where I was struggling to stay an equal partner instead of an emotional sponge — my husband, yes, but also my kids, my clients, my team, anyone.
The four prayers:
Pray to see the good in them — whoever it is. Your spouse, your sister, your coworker, your child, your client. Not the good you wish they had, but the good that's actually there, even when it's hard to see in the moment.
Pray for the love that makes their mistakes and shortcomings seem small. Not invisible. Not excused. Just small enough that they don't become the whole picture of who that person is.
Pray for the love that makes their joy your own. So that instead of bracing for what they might need from you, you get to genuinely delight in what delights them.
Pray for the love to lessen their load and soften their sorrows. But — and this is the part that changed everything for me — that lessening doesn't come from you pulling their weight onto your own back. It comes from somewhere else.
Why this shifted everything
Here's what stopped me in my tracks: God isn't asking me to carry more. He's not asking me to be a bigger, stronger, more capable version of myself who can somehow absorb everyone's pain without breaking. He's asking me to let Jesus — who already took all of it on — carry it instead of me. That was the piece I had been missing my entire life, through every conversation with my husband in that car ride, through every year I'd been quietly drowning. I thought being loving meant being the one who holds it. It turns out being loving can mean being the one who hands it off, on someone else's behalf, so that I can stay present with them without drowning alongside them.
I don't have to be the one absorbing the frustration, the sadness, the confusion, the anger. I get to be their advocate instead. I turn to the Father and say, this person is struggling, and they need You — not just me. Then I pray those four things on their behalf, specifically, by name, thinking of exactly what they're going through.
I still show up with compassion. I still care deeply, maybe even more freely now, because I'm not bracing against the fear of being consumed by it. I can appreciate what makes someone else happy and let that be a source of real joy for me too, even when I don't share their exact interests or wouldn't choose the same things for myself. But their load isn't mine to carry. It never was — I just hadn't had a framework for putting it down without also putting the person down, without also stepping back from loving them.
What's actually changed
The wildest part? I don't even have to talk to the people in my life about this for it to work. I just do it on my own, quietly, in my own mind and heart before I walk into a hard conversation or a stressful moment, and it changes how I show up with them. It's not a technique I perform in front of people. It's something I carry with me into the room.
In the relatively short time I've been practicing this, it's already shifted things with my husband and my kids in ways I didn't expect. I'm less reactive. I'm less resentful. I can be present with someone's hard day without needing it to become my hard day too. And I'm starting to see, cautiously, what it might look like to grow a team or serve more clients without hitting that same old ceiling — because the ceiling was never really about capacity. It was about how much of other people's energy I was carrying alongside my own.
If this is you too
If you're an empath, a caretaker, a "fixer" — someone who has spent years absorbing everyone else's energy because you thought that's what love looked like — I hope this framework does for you what it's done for me. You can love people unconditionally without taking on what was never yours to begin with. You can be their advocate instead of their emergency response system. You can stay soft and open-hearted without staying overwhelmed.
And whatever your higher power is — God, the universe, source, whatever word fits your belief — you can hand it over and trust that they're held too. Not just the people you love. You, as well.
Your Freedom Connector,
Aly Porter
I'm doing this work for myself inside my community and invite you to do yours right there with me as we create our Millionaire Momentum Life together.
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