Boundary Confusion in Client Work: When Empathy Becomes Rescue
- Tanya Master
- Oct 23
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 26
You’ve probably felt it: that moment when a client expresses pain or longing, and some part of you rushes in to fix, to soften, to save. It might seem like compassion; but often, it’s not. What’s actually happening is a subtle form of boundary confusion in client work: a shift from empathy into rescue that reshapes your entire container.
In this article, we'll explore how it happens, what it costs, and how to build safer, more sustainable trauma-informed spaces — without collapsing into rescue or detachment.
What Is Empathy?
Empathy is attunement. It’s the ability to feel with, not for, your client. It’s the capacity to sense someone’s sadness, longing, distress or fear without becoming engulfed by it or needing to remove it.
Let’s say a former client reaches out. She worked with you during a time when your rates were much lower — maybe through an agency or platform. Now, you’re in private practice. Your rate reflects your depth and your sustainability. But when she says she can’t afford it, something stirs in you.
You feel guilt. You feel the pull to make it work.
Empathy allows you to feel that — to witness her disappointment and your own tenderness — without collapsing into a need to fix it. Empathy says:
“I see you. And I can stay grounded in myself while I do.”
What Is Rescue?
Rescue begins when empathy tips into action. When your system can’t tolerate a client’s discomfort, so you try to relieve it. Maybe you discount your rate. Offer extra time. Overfunction in the session. Start doing emotional labour your client hasn’t asked for.
In that moment, you’ve moved from attunement to fusion.
From: “I feel with you.” To: “I’ll fix this for you.”
Rescue bypasses boundaries in the name of care; but underneath, it’s not about the client. It’s about your own internal system.
What’s Really Happening: The Nervous System Mechanism
Rescue is often a nervous system response to intolerable empathy. When your system interprets another person’s pain as a threat — to your identity, your sense of goodness, or your professional role — it activates a survival pattern. You shift into appeasement. Your inner caretaker, fawn part, or over-responsible protector takes over.
In parts work language, this is a protector trying to manage your own discomfort... by managing someone else’s.
One supervisee I supported was a therapist working with a client experiencing persistent anxiety. The client had a complex relational history and frequently spiralled in sessions. The therapist tried everything: breathwork, new grounding techniques, strategies from recent trainings. But nothing stuck.
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During our supervision session, she realised something crucial: She wasn’t supporting the client to feel her own way through the anxiety. She was trying to protect her from it.
Beneath the professional tools, her own over-responsible part was in the room: stepping into a pseudo-parent role, trying to provide the safety the client never had. She knew the client needed to reclaim her own self-leadership. But unconsciously, she was blocking it by trying to be the mother (or 'safe' caregiver) the client didn’t have.
That’s not healing. That’s enablement. And over time, it drains the practitioner while keeping the client dependent.
Why Empathy Alone Isn’t Enough
Empathy isn’t a compass for action — it’s just data. If you act from empathy without integrating boundaries, you end up reacting to your client’s emotional field instead of holding it.
Integrated empathy sounds like:
“I feel your disappointment. And I can stay steady in what’s true for me.”
That steadiness; not rescuing; is what makes the space safe.
The Impact of Rescue on Your Practice
Rescue may seem kind, but over time it erodes your container:
Boundaries blur. You overextend, sessions overrun, policies soften.
Pricing erodes. You start to undercharge or discount from guilt.
Energy leaks. You’re regulating for the client, instead of with them.
Containment weakens. Clients sense the lack of structure and feel more dysregulated or dependent.
The moment you start orienting to your client’s comfort over your own centre; the structure falters.
For more on practitioner burnout, over-functioning, and emotional fatigue, read Why So Many Coaches Burn Out.
Boundary Confusion in Client Work: Clinical Reflection
Empathy without boundaries collapses into rescue. Boundaries without empathy harden into distance.
The art is integration:
Feel with the client — but stay rooted in yourself.
Track your urges to fix. What part of you is being activated?
Pause when you feel urgency. Whose discomfort are you trying to soothe?
Questions for reflection:
Where in your practice does empathy become urgency?
What sensations arise when a client expresses lack or distress?
Are you holding the space... or managing it?
Final Thoughts
Our job isn’t to remove a client’s pain.
It’s to help them build the capacity to stay with it, and we can only model that by staying with our own.
This is the quiet work of trauma-informed practice: showing up with presence, integrity, and containment. And learning to trust that real healing doesn’t come from rescuing; it comes from being witnessed, held, and met.
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If you’re navigating the edges of empathy, containment, and capacity, my 1:1 mentorship helps you build sustainable trauma-informed containers — rooted in clarity, ethics, and nervous system repair.
