How do I care for myself when I've held so much of other people's pain?

You can bond with almost anyone, and that gift has a cost you have quietly been paying. Year after year you have held other people's pain, and to keep steady you learned to put your own aside. That works for a while. But set aside is not gone, and what you have carried is still in there, waiting. You cannot pour endlessly from a cup you never refill. Tending to your own inner life is not selfishness or weakness, it is the thing that lets you keep doing this work without it hollowing you out. The very empathy that makes you good at this is what makes you vulnerable to absorbing too much. Your pain deserves the same careful attention you give everyone else's. Start giving yourself a fraction of what you give others. Your own therapy, a supervisor, a trusted friend, a practice that lets what you have absorbed move through and out. This week, name one thing you have been carrying and say it out loud to someone. You have held so much for so many. It is time some of that holding was done for you.