Ariel Cook

We often confuse different emotional experiences, especially when it comes to how we connect with others. Empathy, rejection sensitive dysphoria (RSD), and emotional enmeshment can all involve intense feelings about other people, but they operate in fundamentally different ways—and lead to very different outcomes in our relationships and wellbeing.

Empathy: The Foundation of Healthy Connection

Empathy is the ability to understand and share another person’s feelings while maintaining awareness that their emotions are separate from your own. It’s like standing beside someone in their experience rather than losing yourself in it.

Healthy empathy involves:

• Recognizing and validating someone else’s emotional state
• Offering support without taking responsibility for fixing their feelings
• Maintaining clear boundaries between your emotions and theirs
• Being able to step back and care for yourself when needed

When you practice genuine empathy, you might feel moved by someone’s pain, but you don’t become destabilized by it. You can hold space for their difficult emotions without making those emotions about you. This creates a safe, supportive connection where both people remain grounded in their own experience.

What makes empathy productive and loving: It allows you to truly see another person, offer meaningful support, and build trust—all while preserving your own emotional equilibrium. Empathy says, “I see your pain, and I’m here with you,” not “Your pain is now my emergency.”

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria: When Criticism Feels Catastrophic

Rejection sensitive dysphoria is an intense emotional response to perceived rejection, criticism, or failure. While not an official diagnosis, RSD is commonly discussed in ADHD communities and describes a very real pattern of overwhelming emotional pain triggered by even minor social disapproval.

RSD typically involves:

• Extreme emotional reactions to criticism or perceived rejection
• Catastrophic thinking about social interactions (“They hate me” rather than “They seemed distracted”)
• Physical pain or intense shame in response to disapproval
• Difficulty distinguishing between mild feedback and actual rejection
• Rumination and difficulty recovering from perceived slights

Someone experiencing RSD might interpret a delayed text response as evidence they’re being abandoned, or constructive feedback at work as proof they’re incompetent and despised. The emotional response is genuine and intense, even when the triggering event is minor or misinterpreted.

What makes RSD unproductive (though understandable): RSD distorts your perception of reality and puts enormous strain on relationships. When you’re constantly braced for rejection, you may withdraw preemptively, seek excessive reassurance, or react defensively to neutral interactions. This isn’t a moral failing—it’s a dysregulation pattern—but it does prevent authentic connection and causes real suffering.

What would be more loving: Recognizing RSD as a pattern that needs compassionate attention, not validation. This means developing skills to pause between trigger and reaction, reality-test your interpretations, and build tolerance for the discomfort of not knowing exactly what someone thinks of you. Therapy, particularly DBT or CBT, can be transformative for managing RSD.

Emotional Enmeshment: When Boundaries Dissolve

Emotional enmeshment occurs when the boundaries between your emotional experience and another person’s become blurred or non-existent. You don’t just empathize with their feelings—you absorb them, lose yourself in them, or make them the center of your own emotional world.

Enmeshment often looks like:

• Feeling responsible for another person’s emotional state
• Inability to separate your mood from someone else’s mood
• Making decisions based primarily on how others will feel
• Feeling anxious or incomplete when apart from certain people
• Difficulty identifying your own needs, wants, or feelings independently
• Believing that love means always feeling what the other person feels

In enmeshed relationships, one person’s bad day becomes everyone’s bad day. One person’s anxiety becomes the family’s organizing principle. Individual identity gets sacrificed for a kind of emotional fusion that masquerades as closeness.

What makes enmeshment unproductive and unloving: Despite feeling like devotion or deep connection, enmeshment actually prevents real intimacy. Neither person can truly be themselves because there’s no space for separate experiences. It creates codependency, resentment, and exhaustion. The person being “cared for” loses agency, while the caretaker loses their own identity and often develops burnout or bitterness.

Enmeshment often develops in families where children had to monitor and manage a parent’s emotions to feel safe. It can feel like love because it’s all you’ve known, but it’s actually a survival strategy that outlived its usefulness.

What would be more loving: Developing differentiation—the ability to remain emotionally connected to someone while maintaining your own separate sense of self. This means recognizing that someone you love can be upset without you needing to fix it, absorb it, or make it your own. It means allowing people (including yourself) the dignity of their own emotional experiences.

The Key Distinctions

Empathy says: “I understand you’re struggling, and I care about you. How can I support you?” It maintains healthy separation while offering connection.

RSD says: “That slightly cool tone in your voice means you hate me and I’m worthless.” It’s a dysregulated response that distorts reality and causes suffering to the person experiencing it.

Enmeshment says: “I can’t be okay unless you’re okay, so I need to fix your feelings or absorb them entirely.” It erases boundaries and creates unhealthy dependence.

Building Healthier Patterns

The path toward healthier relating involves:

Cultivating genuine empathy: Practice sitting with someone’s discomfort without rushing to solve it. Notice when you can feel compassion without taking on their emotional state as your own.

Managing RSD: Work with a therapist to develop skills for tolerating uncertainty in relationships. Practice reality-testing your interpretations and building evidence for alternative explanations before reacting to perceived rejection.

Healing enmeshment: Learn to differentiate your feelings from others’ feelings. Practice identifying what YOU want, need, and feel—separately from what others want you to feel. Recognize that boundaries aren’t walls; they’re what make real intimacy possible.

For everyone: Remember that you can deeply care about someone without being responsible for their emotional state. You can be affected by someone’s feelings without being controlled by them. You can offer support without losing yourself.

The most productive and loving approach isn’t about feeling everything intensely or merging completely with another person. It’s about seeing people clearly, respecting their autonomy, maintaining your own groundedness, and offering genuine support from a place of wholeness rather than depletion or desperation. That’s where real connection lives—in the space between you, where two separate people choose to meet.