When I told my therapist, Amy, about Devyn’s shit fit, and my subsequent crying jag (a friend of mine said, “I’m sorry you hit a grief pocket,”), Amy asked me, “So why were you taking on her stuff?”

Six months ago, a friend miscarried, and when I told Amy about it, I was crying so hard I could barely breathe. She said, with slight amazement, “if someone walked in here right now, they’d think you we’re the one who lost a baby. You can’t grieve for her, you know.”

I take on other people’s shit. It’s why I cry at commercials and why reality shows make me uncomfortable. I am way too empathetic — to the point that I don’t have clear boundaries.

I then told Amy about a problem I’m having with a client right now; she disappeared for three weeks and didn’t respond to email so we couldn’t do our work, and now doesn’t want to pay because we didn’t do any work. And I compromised with her, and offered to make up part of what she’d paid for.

And Amy asked me, “Why are her needs so much more important than yours?”

Another running theme in my life, that everyone else’s needs and problems take precedence over my own. I don’t even keep promises to myself very well, yet if I make a promise to someone else, you can bet it will get done.

Finally, I told her my humiliating wedding dream, and we talked about how I’m awfully mean to myself. “You’ve gotten the message from others, when you were a kid, that you weren’t good enough, and you internalized it. That’s made you really hard on yourself. It’s made you get in the habit of putting others’ happiness first, because you felt yours didn’t matter, and because you’re always trying to figure out if people are happy and how to make them happy, you’ve become so attuned to what other people feel, that your boundaries are non-existent and you take on other people’s shit.”

Wow. Ding ding ding. Give the lady a prize.

Now we just have to figure out what to do about it.