No One Can Poop for You

On empathy, boundaries, and the things that can never be delegated

Jul 26, 2026

If you know anything about me, you’ll know that I tend to think a lot. Thoughts weave back and forth and sometimes make unexpected connections and personal aha moments.

The most recent one arrived with both clarity and hilarity: No one can poop for you.

I had to chase that thread a little further.

My social media feed tends to be fairly inspiring — quotes, reels, people genuinely wanting to make a positive change in this world, starting with themselves. I love it. It is also occasionally a little intimidating for someone like me who desires being in the wellness space but doesn’t always show up consistently. There are so many great voices out there already.

One day, scrolling through, some ads and posts were appearing about “becoming a healer” or “being a healer.” I have occasionally been called a healer myself, and it has never quite sat right with me.

Let me be clear: I believe in healing energy. I believe in healing spaces. I believe deeply in people who help other people heal. I have experienced it firsthand and I have witnessed it in others.

What I don’t believe is that healing can be fully delegated to someone outside of us. No one can physically be in our bodies. No one can live our experiences on our behalf. They cannot take on what is not theirs.

They cannot poop for us.

I realize that sounds crude. A little taboo, maybe. But it is the most honest analogy I could find for something I have been trying to put to words to for a while now.

When we are not feeling well, we generally know something is off in our system. We look for help — a supplement, a dietary change, a doctor, some research, have a conversation with someone who has been through it. We find our helpers. We gather our support.

But at the end of the day, whether we choose to follow through or don’t is on us. The process itself is ours alone.

No one else can experience it. No one else feels the pain or the relief. They can empathize, they can relate, they can be present and genuinely useful — but they cannot do the actual thing for you. The release, when it comes, happens in your body, through your body, and it cannot be borrowed, absorbed, or transferred to someone more willing to go through it on your behalf.

This is where us highly sensitive people and empaths tend to get into trouble.

Because we know the feeling so well, we can nearly feel the pain or discomfort of another person in our own bodies, we sometimes believe we can step into the process somehow. That by absorbing the pain, by taking it on, we are helping. We are loving. We are doing what we were built to do.

We are so fixated on removing the discomfort, we forget that can’t poop for others, and trying to doesn’t relieve them. It just depletes us, while leaving them still needing to go through the very thing we tried to spare them from.

Here are some ideas of what we actually can do:

Before: we can help create the conditions. The right environment, the right support, the right information or insight or encouragement. The glass of prune juice, so to speak. Whatever supports their system in doing what it seems to need to do.
During: we can be present without absorbing. There is a difference between feeling what someone is going through and taking it into yourself as though it were yours to process. The most gifted facilitators I know describe this as being a sieve rather than a container. This means what arises passes through them but they do not carry it. Witnessing fully, without collapsing the boundary between their experience and yours.
After: we can show up for the aftermath. Help them stand back up. Reflect back what we witnessed. Sit with them in the relief and the tenderness of having moved through something difficult. I have found that this is where so much of the real work of accompaniment lives. It is not in the doing, but in the being there once the doing is done.

At no point in any of those three phases are we doing the thing itself. Because we can’t.

Think about how we learn this as children.

We are potty trained, and it is a whole process. Those who came before us helped us identify the feeling of needing to go. They celebrated us when we did. They came running when we called out from the other room — Mom! Dad! I’m done! — and helped with the cleanup that came after. They modeled what self-care eventually looks like until we internalized it well enough to do it ourselves.

They did not go for us. They supported the whole process around the thing only we could do.

Eventually, we didn’t need to call out anymore. We had learned. Not because someone did it for us, but because someone was consistently, lovingly, non-judgmentally there while we did it ourselves.

If we try to take away someone else’s process, we take away something essential: their belief in themselves. Their knowledge of what they are capable of moving through. Their lived experience of their own resilience. They have to show up, to process, to let things pass through. There is no shortcut that actually helps, and the ones that seem to help tend to simply delay what the body or the heart was always going to need to do eventually.

Healing, like its less glamorous biological cousins, can be messy, painful, stinky, and occasionally undignified.

Dignity is not the absence of mess. It is what you reclaim on the other side of going through the mess, rather than an uncomfortable performance of composure to avoid it.

I want to be careful here, because I do believe in the energetics of this work. I have felt, during breathwork sessions, what seemed to be someone else’s pain moving through me. In the reflection afterward, I understood it for what it was. There are people with genuine gifts in this space, and I honor that.

But even then, in those extraordinary moments, the person originating the pain is still the one responsible for processing it, for releasing it, for doing the thing only they can do. The most gifted facilitator in the world is still just the sieve. The person on the table, in the circle, in the session, are still the one who has to go through it.

We are all our own healers. We just have to be willing to find the right helpers along the way.

Through my work facilitating conscious connected breathwork, sound meditation, and coaching sessions, my role has always been the same: to provide the space, the support, the conditions for those who felt ready to let something settle or pass through. To be present without absorbing. To show up fully for whatever came after.

Just to be there, in case I was needed.

That is the role, I think. It is quieter than healer.

It is also, I believe, more aligned to where the real work actually lives:

with you.

Where in your life have you been trying to do-the-doing for someone else? What might become possible for both of you, if you handed the power back to them, to allow them to go through what only they can go through?

I’d love to hear what this brought up for you.

Your reflections are part of the medicine, and every voice adds to the remembering of our collective sovereignty.

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