If you have a tender heart, you no doubt know the pain of heartbreak. Sadly, tender-hearted people are often used as doormats for people who take advantage of their kind and generous nature. You must be careful with your heart, as it’s easily broken.
The world needs more people like you who give without questioning and are great friends in your corner. Sadly, there are those folks who will use and abuse you because you’re such a kind soul. Protecting yourself is the key to learning to live with your big heart and not being constantly under stress.
Ten Tips to Protect Your Tender Heart
Some people will see your vulnerabilities as weaknesses, so you always try to stay one step ahead. Here are some ways to protect your tender heart from being broken.
1. Channel Your Sympathetic Side to Guard Your Tender Heart
A tender-hearted person is often sympathetic to the needs and wants of others. Be forewarned that people know who is more apt to give them something. You might feel sorry for someone who’s down on their luck and end up enabling bad behavior.
While you do things from a good and honorable place inside, ensure that you don’t let people take advantage of you. If you’re overly generous, you will have people on your door 24×7 wanting to borrow things and asking for favors. You can quickly run ragged trying to help others.
Always be sympathetic and listen to folks going through challenging situations, but you must know that there’s only so much you can do to help.
2. Someone With a Tender Heart Should Not Give All Their Energy to Others
A tender-hearted person likes to reach out to others. You may help at local charities and give until you have nothing left. Some folks and situations can be energy hogs if you allow them to be.
Another concern is that you can work so hard to give to others that you neglect yourself. You can be left feeling drained and empty if you don’t engage in self-care and ensure your needs are met. Sometimes you must turn off that empathetic side and take care of yourself for a while.
3. Be Careful of Other People’s Negativity and Drama if You Are Tender-hearted
Counselors must shake off all the toxic things they hear in a day and put distance between themselves and their patients. They talk with people in very dark places in their life, and they can quickly bring home all this negativity with them. As a tender heart, you must also worry about not getting too involved in people’s drama.
Have you ever seen a tornado hit the ground? The United States experiences around 1,225 storms each year. The average scale of a tornado is an F-2, with winds between 113 – 157 mph. These potent storms can suck anything around them up into their vortex. Unfortunately, unkind people can be just as dangerous.
Allowing yourself to become too involved in someone’s drama can destroy you and your tender heart. Don’t let people draw you into their troubles, as it can leave you ravaged like a tornado wrecking a small town. Many folks turn hard-hearted because they’ve been hurt so much in life, and you certainly don’t want that to happen.
4. Watch What You Tell Others About Yourself
You’re a kind person who sees someone struggling and automatically thinks back to things you’ve been through in your life. While you want to support others and share how you’ve overcome, you must be careful about revealing too much of yourself to the wrong people. Remember that anything you say can and might be used against you, so you want to weigh your words wisely.
Advise without sharing too many of your intimate secrets with people you don’t know that well. Live by the rule that you should never tell someone something about your life unless you feel safe with it being broadcast.
5. Tender-hearted People Must Avoid Displaying Raw Emotions
As a tender-hearted person, you cry at movies, when someone loses a pet, or even from a story you read on the internet. Your emotions are sometimes raw because you’re very compassionate. Some folks might see your emotional side as vulnerable and can use it against you.
There’s nothing wrong with being sensitive, but don’t let people see this as a door to use and abuse you and your generosities.
6. Never Let People Disrespect You
You have genuine respect for others. You would never say or do anything to deliberately hurt someone. However, other people aren’t so kind. Never let someone disregard your dignity as a human being.
When it comes to the love in your life, make sure they stay within boundaries that you’ve designed to protect yourself. It’s easy to let your compassion take over and be treated in disrespectful ways. You must learn to love yourself enough not to take people’s garbage.
7. Someone With a Tender Heart Must Learn to Say No
One of the biggest follies of a tender heart is that you don’t know when to say no. You will exhaust yourself and give all your resources because you don’t want to let others down by refusing them. It would help if you learned to put your own needs first.
Being tender-hearted allows you to do amazing things. But can it make you overbook yourself. If you want to avoid being upset and stressed and end up broken down and sick, learn how to say no to people.
8. Build A Support Network With Other Tender-hearted People
You’re only as good as your support system. Who do you run to in times of trouble? Some find a counselor on speed dial does the trick, while others visit a wise grandmother who is well schooled in life. It doesn’t matter where you draw your strength from, but your tender heart needs someone that is a source of encouragement for you.
In the Catholic religion, people go to the priest to confess their sins and get things off their chest. The act is not only symbolic but necessary for cleansing. People always feel lighter and refreshed once they lay their burdens down. The same can be said of you and your tender heart once you unload some things weighing on you.
Find friends, relatives, or a counselor who can be your sounding board and let you lay things at their feet. The key is not picking them back up when you leave, as your sensitive nature will dwell on these to the point of madness.
9. A Tender Heart Needs to Find Positive Ways to Decompress
How do you decompress? Life is stressful on a good day, and your tender-hearted self can also feel the pangs from empathy. It would help if you had a way to get rid of it and have fun. Hobbies are a great way to throw caution to the wind and enjoy yourself.
Nothing feels better than busting a golf ball as hard as you can with a putter; talk about some stress relief. Find something that helps you channel some of the energy that you’ve picked up. Axe throwing has become a prevalent sport in this country for this reason.
Ten years ago, there weren’t such venues to allow you to throw axes, but now they’re everywhere. People need ways of getting rid of all the negativity they ingest in a day, and the tender heart you carry needs this decompression.
10. A Tender-Hearted Person Should Learn to Set Boundaries of Forgiveness
This point is controversial because you learn to forgive others if you want to receive forgiveness. It’s the right thing to do as you don’t want to hold grudges either, right? Consequently, there are times when forgiveness isn’t warranted.
Many folks are eager to forgive someone because they want closure. It feels better when you resolve the matter. Did you know that when you forgive someone, situational, individual, and psychological factors come into play?
Sadly, some people don’t warrant your forgiveness. What about a person who shows malevolence and no remorse for their actions? Why would you forgive them when they’re not sorry?
Some folks get satisfaction from your pain, and there’s no earthly reason why you need to forgive them. It’s best to let it go, as you know they’re not going to lose sleep over it. Learn to grieve for what could have been with this person and move forward.
Final Thoughts on Protecting Your Tender Heart
Being tender-hearted is a beautiful gift that the Universe gave you. You’re kind and compassionate and tend to sympathize with those around you. While it’s lovely to give of yourself freely to help others, you can’t neglect your own needs.
You want to keep your heart from being broken, as you know that’s easy to do. The tender-hearted person tends to be fragile and often wears their emotions on their sleeves. By doing a few of the above-listed things, you can learn how to channel all the good in you in the proper direction and avoid getting burned out or hurt.
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