Standing on the Sidelines

What a soccer tournament revealed about empathy, healing, and learning not to carry other people’s emotions

Over the weekend I found myself exactly where I’ve spent countless hours over the years, one of my happy places, standing on the sidelines of a soccer field watching my daughters play.

Coral is a goalie and Joy is a center midfielder. I played growing up, so I have a deep love for the game.

This particular weekend required a three-hour drive to a tournament with their club team and, if I’m honest, I had a little dread heading into it. A full weekend away means zero downtime (and I really love my weekend downtime!).

But it turned out to be an absolute blast.

The girls played beautifully. And they ended up winning the whole tournament.

And somewhere in the middle of all the cheering, pacing the sidelines, and holding my breath during tense moments on the field, I noticed something surprising.

I was experiencing the games differently.

And I had a sense there was a reason for that.

Just 24 hours earlier, I had been sitting in a therapist’s office doing a half-day EMDR intensive, deep inside old emotional terrain.

A few weeks ago I mentioned in another article that I had been preparing for an EMDR intensive. It was meant to address a very specific challenge in my life: anxiety while driving and some issues with my eyes (binocular vision dysfunction).

What I discovered in the process was that the driving anxiety and eye challenges weren’t the root of it. Underneath was something much older and deeper, a feeling that I was responsible for soothing other people’s difficult emotional experiences.

During the session, we traced that pattern all the way back to the womb.

My mother lost her father one week before I was born (he was shoveling snow to ensure they could get to the hospital and had a heart attack).

The grief she carried at the time was profound, and in the session, I could feel her sadness in my tiny body inside of her. Totally surreal.

As we worked through the session, it became clear that from before I was born, my nervous system learned to feel other people’s emotions very deeply, and then take responsibility for soothing them.

You might call it empathy.

You might call it clairsentience (the ability to feel what’s going on inside other people).

In many ways, it has served me well. As a facilitator and coach, being able to sense what’s happening emotionally in a room is one of my greatest strengths.

But like many strengths, it has a shadow.

Through the course of my life, feeling what other people were experiencing quietly turned into something else.

I didn’t just feel their emotions, I felt responsible for them.

I stopped witnessing people’s experiences and instead merged with them.

That’s why the moment on the soccer field caught my attention.

As my daughters played, I could feel the intensity of the games in my body. The excitement. The nerves. The tension that comes when the score is tied and time is running out.

If you’ve ever watched a game with me, you know I’m not exactly a quiet sideline parent.

I’m into it.

But this weekend felt different (though I’m certain I didn’t actually look any different to the other parents).

I could feel everything happening on the field, but I wasn’t inside it.

Before, I would have been emotionally merged with their experience, almost trying to manage it from the sidelines. My body would tighten with every mistake or missed opportunity. My mind would race with hopes that things would go their way.

This weekend, the emotions were still there, but there was space around them.

I could feel their experience without becoming responsible for it.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how many of us do this.

Especially those of us who are naturally empathetic.

We feel people deeply.

Their anxiety.
Their disappointment.
Their excitement.
Their pain.

And without even realizing it, we step into their emotional world as if it’s our job to manage it, fix it, or carry it for them.

But true empathy doesn’t require that.

Empathy is not emotional merging.

It’s witnessing.

Feeling someone’s experience doesn’t mean you have to carry it.

Interestingly, the same capacity that felt like a wound is also what shaped my life’s work. The whole “pain to purpose” scenario, where our battle scars become our competitive advantage.

The ability to sense what’s happening emotionally with individuals or a group is one of the reasons I’m able to facilitate the kinds of transformational experiences that I do.

The wound and the gift are often two sides of the same coin.

The very thing that challenged me most in life also shaped the work I now do in the world.

But part of growing, healing, and maturing is learning how to hold those strengths in healthier ways.

Feeling without carrying.

Witnessing without fixing.

Loving people without losing ourselves in the process.

On Friday I was sitting in a therapy office processing a lifelong pattern of absorbing other people’s emotional experiences.

On Saturday I was standing on the sidelines watching my daughters play soccer.

For the first time in a long time, I could feel everything happening on that field, the excitement, the tension, the joy of winning, without stepping inside it.

I was still deeply engaged.

Still cheering.

Still holding my breath when the ball came flying toward the goal.

But I was no longer trying to control the outcome from the sidelines.

And in that small but powerful shift, I realized something that felt both freeing and long overdue.

Sometimes the most loving thing we can do for the people we care about is simply to witness their experience.

Just stand nearby and cheer them on while they play their own game.

And maybe, for the first time, let that be enough.