Oh yeah, high empathy is correlated with above average anxiety and depression. This is a well known psychological thing and there are plenty of articles and podcasts on it. So your intuition is correct. It's your inner child basically doing this because you want people to like you -- this is something you learned as a child and is now habit. In many cases being highly empathetic was a survival mechanism for the child.. who had to attend to someone else's needs above their own to stay safe.
> In many cases being highly empathetic was a survival mechanism for the child.. who had to attend to someone else's needs above their own to stay safe.
This is 100% the case for me. My parents had children when they were very young, immature, and with major problems of their own, and I had to learn from a very young age to be highly attentive to their (very frequently shifting) emotional state. And then I had to become essentially an extra surrogate parent for my younger siblings in order to fill in the gaps that our parents weren't able to fulfill.
