Building Your Resilience to Empathic Pain

by Jessica Goodnight, PhD

(note: clinical details are an amalgam of multiple experiences and do not describe a specific client)

Not long ago, I sat in a patch of grass with a client while she shook and sweat, stiff with anxiety. We had walked to the park from my office, and it was warm - breezy - quiet. It was the kind of day that might be called peaceful if you weren’t in the grip of fear.

My client had asked to do this. To sit on the grass, to feel it underneath her, knowing that her mind would rebel against it all the while. And it did. Her OCD raged at her, pummeling her with images of the crawling, biting bugs and microscopic contaminants that could be hiding in every blade of grass.

And still, she stayed.

She sat because she wanted to be the kind of mother who can stretch out on a blanket with her kids in a park and stay present for an afternoon. She wanted to be able to let her daughter take off both her shoes and walk barefoot in the field, carefree and filled with joy. She sat in the grass because she wanted freedom, and she was willing to move through fear to find it.

Here’s what I didn’t do: I didn’t try to calm her down. I didn’t offer reassurance. I didn’t tell her she was safe. I sat with her, a witness to her courage.

Watching someone you care about suffer is hard. For clinicians, parents, partners - this is the crucible. Everything in us wants to soothe, to rescue, to take the edge off. It’s not an impulse to be ashamed of; it’s human. But it’s also often the very thing that gets in the way of healing.

I was lucky to have had great modeling and supervision when I first learned exposure and response prevention (ERP). Watching talented therapists stay attuned to clients struggling with fear, with complete confidence in their ability to handle it, revolutionized the way I understood human suffering. Those therapists did nothing to calm their clients down. They recommended no breathing techniques, they said no reassuring words. I watched their clients look to them for that soothing. Their response was always a kind, "Let's stay a while longer in the fear." I never knew a therapy could work like ERP until I saw it with my own eyes. These clients didn't just get better. Many of them were unrecognizable within weeks of starting therapy.

We are not always meant to relieve others' pain. Sometimes, pain is meant to be felt. But witnessing pain isn’t easy. It requires you to tolerate your own discomfort. It means not shutting down, not rushing in to fix, not turning away. It means staying open-hearted even as your mirror neurons scream.

This kind of witnessing takes practice. It takes building a particular kind of resilience - the resilience to empathic pain.

Here’s the thing that keeps me going - when I am resilient to my own empathic pain, my clients are more willing to face pain in themselves. And when clients are willing to walk fully in to their most challenging inner experiences, they transform. It becomes reciprocal over time - because once you've seen a client transform their lives in this way, you become steadier. You develop the kind of presence that tells your clients: you can do this.

A good exposure therapist isn't cold or detached - quite the opposite - a good exposure therapist is willing to feel. We watch our clients struggle with fear, and notice our own hearts beating faster. We watch our clients struggle with disgust, and notice our own nausea as we bear witness. We stay emotionally connected. We just don’t make their pain about us.

When that client sat on the grass, I sat beside her - not to remove the fear, but to show her that I was with her. To let her know I believed in her, and that I wasn’t afraid of what she was feeling.

That’s the gift we offer, whether we’re therapists, friends, or loved ones. To stay. To witness. To trust in their capacity to face what hurts. And to keep choosing presence over rescue.