Self Energy as Antidote: Healing Empathy Fatigue From the Inside Out

November 26, 2025— The summer just before I turned 13, I worked hard to earn money to go see a play at the local theatre, one that I had been waiting eagerly to see. I earned the last little bit I needed by washing the family station wagon. 

I can see the scene all these years later as clear as day. A hot summer’s day in Virginia, shorts and a tee shirt, my hair its usual mess, my just-adolescent body still thin and straight. The job complete and the money earned. I was so earnest about everything, so sure about myself and what I had achieved. I announced to my stepmother that I finally had the money and I could go that weekend! 

Clear as day I see it—me, all limbs and that beautiful mess where childhood and adolescence first meet standing before my stepmother, her blonde hair styled, her fingernails painted blood red, dressed in designer jeans and blouse. She raised her eyebrows and asked, “So who do you think is going to take you?” I was taken aback, fumbled over my words, my heart already dropping. “I thought you or Dad could take me.” She smirked, “Well, that’s what happens when you assume—you make an ass out of u and me,” spelling out my fatal mistake of making an assumption. 

I remember the hot anger and frustration, and then the sickening weight dropping into my heart and the pit of my stomach. From that point forward, 12 year old Robin carried the burden of defeat. The message heavy— It doesn’t matter what I do. I have no agency. What I want doesn’t matter.

When Burdens Form

In the IFS model, we understand that when an invalidating or traumatic moment happens, an exile takes on a burden—and almost instantly, another part steps in to protect it. It doesn’t take much for this to happen. Dick Schwartz teaches that exiles often have protectors who appear within seconds of the wound, a twin of the exiled part. The moment my stepmother cut me down, a manager part twinned with my exile: the Bulldog. It took on the job of countering the belief that my younger self absorbed. What had been a normal part of a twelve-year-old suddenly became a fierce drive to work hard—and then harder. A counterattack against the helplessness.

Protector strategies work…until they don’t. We can go years before we find that the the strategy has outlived its purpose.

When the Old Wound Meets the Present Moment

Years later, I taught at a nonprofit serving street-involved youth. My students were caught in systems that cared nothing about them, so my Bulldog part was activated daily:

Work harder. Fight for them. Push.

Yet underneath was the old belief:

I still have no agency. Nothing I do will ever be enough.

My pain met their pain. Their defeats, their scorn from the world, weighed down my heart. My twelve-year-old exile was right there with the students, unseen and unwitnessed. I didn’t have the language at the time, but I now know I had very little access to Self energy. The Bulldog was widely praised but burnout was inevitable. I loved those kids with everything in me, wanted to save them, but I couldn’t. Without Self energy, I couldn’t set the burdens down long enough to let the Bulldog rest. And without Self energy, the burdens got heavier and heavier.

What Self Energy Offers

The Internal Family Systems concept of Self energy is often the antidote to empathy fatigue and burnout—the kind that comes from caring too much without enough internal support. Self energy is experienced and described in many ways. It’s elusive to explain to someone until one has experienced the embodied difference between being resourced by Self energy and feeling utterly alone inside.

Some feel Self energy as the spacious Center—the Ground of Being underneath all our parts and wounds. It isn’t a mood or perfected state, but a widening of perspective, a softening into something larger than the moment. For some, it’s a spiritual hum or sacred presence; for others, it’s when the nervous system returns to its optimal arousal zone of tolerance with liberal doses of compassion and courage. That grounded sense of I’m here. I can breathe myself bigger than this moment.

Self energy appears differently for different people and at different times. It can be calm or compassionate, yes—but also it is fierce clarity, deep knowing, even a cleansing anger. Sometimes it’s simply the space inside that lets our parts relax enough to become Self-led. We feel it when the 8 C’s or 5 P’s show up, when we can witness suffering—our own or another’s—without collapsing. 

Just as important is naming what Self energy is not. It is not an ecstatic high or an intense surge. It is not something we build or strengthen through effort. Self energy is already here—waiting beneath the noise, beneath the burdens—ready to return when there is enough space to feel it.

Healing the Twelve-Year-Old

I eventually resigned from my role at the street youth advocacy center due to emotional and physical burnout. Years later, during my dissertation work, I traced countless threads connecting my childhood pain to the lives of my students. But the deeper healing didn’t happen until I was assisting in an IFS training and found myself as the “client” in a session with participants. 

This was an opportunity for the participants to practice the healing steps of the IFS protocol. During the session I witnessed again that summer’s day scene, stayed fully present to and with my 12 year old part, the moment of my stepmother’s scorn was saturated with Self energy. There, for the first time, my twelve-year-old exile and the burden she carried were fully witnessed.

She had carried this burden of defeated beliefs in her heart and on her back for 52 years: a heavy burlap sack tied tight, filled with black ick. In the unburdening ritual, she threw the sack into a giant bonfire, watching the blackness transform into sparks of light rising into the sky. She took in hope, possibility, and the ability to see new horizons. And my Bulldog—protector of so many exiles—was able to release one of his long-held tasks: the belief that hard work must always pay off.

Conclusion

It has taken decades to understand how a single moment at age twelve shaped so much of my life—my work, my exhaustion, my striving. And it has taken the presence of Self energy to meet those parts with compassion instead of criticism, to give them room to rest. Healing doesn’t erase the past, but it loosens its grip. It gives us back agency we once believed we didn’t have. And in that spaciousness—in that widening perspective—we begin to live from something larger than our wounds, guided not by burdened parts but by the Self that has been there all along.

Photo by: Canva Stock Imagery