Empathy

I’ve been thinking about empathy a bit this evening.  I am beginning to suspect that I’m picking up on a loved one’s fatigue.  Man, have I been wiped out the past several days.  Of course, I’ve had quite a bit of my own stress the past couple of weeks, so I didn’t think much of it, but it does seem kind of strange how it seems to be getting worse rather than better as my own stress level comes down.  It seems I still ask, “Is this mine?” far later than I might.

For those unfamiliar, empathy is a heightened ability to intuit the emotions and energies of other people (and animals, plants, the planet, too… but that’s a different post).  It’s really as simple as that.  Some people consider it a “psychic” ability, as there are those of us who receive this information without any traditionally perceivable way of knowing it.  I personally don’t feel there is anything supernatural about it, but then I also don’t feel there’s anything supernatural about any of the “psychic” abilities that I personally have witnessed.  I think there is a great variety of human experience that our Western society does not acknowledge or embrace.  This does not mean it’s supernatural or that it doesn’t have a logical and rational explanation.  And yet, I find I’m less and less interested in those explanations (as a primary focus) as I explore these elements of human experience in greater detail.  It’s nice to have hard data and a way to explain things to skeptics (and I still include myself in that category, at times), but it seems less important as I go along.  The term “seeing is believing” can be extrapolated to a lot of what’s come into my awareness in the past year or so – experience is subjective and perception can most definitely be flawed, but there is certainly value in respecting and trusting your own and others’ experiences.

Empathic ability is something that I think we all have to varying degrees.  Some of us experience it in a more pronounced way.  There is likely quite a bit to explain this phenomenon scientifically, but I find that searching out that information doesn’t help nearly as much as just talking to and reading about the experiences of those who know what it is to be empathic.  It’s not very much on the radar of the general population, however, and this makes it difficult for those of us most affected to know what’s going on.  In my experience, lack of awareness makes this ability pretty painful – and not just for the empath.

One thing I’ve learned pretty dramatically is that empathic people do not just sense and (often) absorb others’ energies and emotions, we also are adept at projecting them.  In my case, before I became aware of what was happening, I spent a lot of years unknowingly taking on painful and uncomfortable “stuff” swirling around me and then just as unknowing spitting it back out at everyone around me.  At times, this took the form of irritable tone of voice, knee-jerk reactions, and going into full-on bitch mode for no good reason.  The part that confused and frustrated me, at times leading to a sense of hopelessness and despair, was that reactions from others around me were often worse when I was able to control my outward behavior.  It seemed that the harder I tried to buffer others from the emotions roiling constantly inside me, the more flak I caught for being a bitch, for behaving inappropriately (when I wasn’t), and for pissing people off.

What I have come to believe is that the reason others’ reactions to me got worse instead of better when I reigned my behavior in without having awareness of the energetic principles underlying it, is that people sense incongruency and find it bothersome, to put it mildly.  Some of us are able to roll with the punches, so to speak, while others get very easily unbalanced.  Without conscious awareness, I believe that many people felt the dissonance, regardless of my outward behavior, and went looking for reasons to be offended with me, to justify the way they felt – to justify the things they were empathing from me.  Whether the person in question was particularly empathic or not didn’t really matter – this is the part I had to learn the hard way.  I, as an empath, have a great ability to project, as well as absorb, emotional energies.  And many of the people I’ve come into contact with didn’t really know what hit them.  Kind of like what I’ve experienced my whole life, ironically…

I always thought it was all mine, although I could never understand why I was so depressed and irritable when my life was really pretty wonderful.  I totally bought into the idea that my “illness” was clinical depression, a verifiable brain chemical imbalance, a medical condition.  What other explanation did I have?  It didn’t make any sense that I was feeling the way I did – and medication did help.  With awareness, I came to know that most of what I felt and experienced wasn’t actually mine.  Sure, the things I sensed resonated with me – otherwise, they wouldn’t have had any effect whatsoever, I suspect.  But I was taking responsibility and personally owning every random emotion and energy I sensed in the world around me, not having any clue that very little of it was based in my own direct experiences and history.  As I learned to understand what was happening, I found ways to reduce the feelings of chaos as everything hit me.  I learned to recognize that I could let things go fairly easily when they belonged to other people.  I learned to recognize when something uncomfortable was truly my own.  And this process is ongoing with a very steep learning curve – I’m not sure the learning will ever be done.  I have a feeling this is a lifelong process.

As I become more centered and balanced (it varies by the day, as I’m sure it does for most of us, but I can say that I’m much better at it than I was before coming to awareness), I find it easier to avoid taking on what isn’t mine.  I find it easier to release what isn’t mine.  I find it easier to recognize what is mine.  But I still mess up a lot.  I still tend to go straight to thinking that everything is mine.  It’s too ingrained in me that this is the way the world works – we don’t feel other people’s feelings.  We don’t sense what we have no “rational” way of sensing.

As I gained understanding, I came across another empath and discussed this issue with her.  We had worked together briefly prior to my coming to awareness of my empathic nature, and she most definitely sensed the chaos.  We came back together years later, after I had become aware and started to get a handle on things, and she sensed the difference in a pretty significant way.  She had been taught, as a child, how to effectively manage her energies by an aware mother (oh, what I wouldn’t have given for that gift… but it’s not something most of us get and apparently not what I was meant to have on my path), so what I was learning seemed elementary to her.  The interesting thing is that no matter what I projected, this person never did respond to me reactively, as most others had to varying degrees.  I openly discussed this with her, and it came down to the fact that my energies did not affect her the same way they did others – because she was aware and had learned skills to manage what she allowed to affect her.  Really, this is a great lesson for us all.  Whether you have great empathic ability or not, learning to manage your own energies and maneuver through environments thick with emotional energies (which include, well, most places where people come together for any reason!) gives you a measure of freedom from being unduly affected by others’ shit.  Whether that is native to the person in question or simply reflected by an unaware empath, it’s a good thing to understand and know.  Once I became aware, I found it interesting to watch which people reacted poorly to me when I felt agitated (it happens – and will continue to happen as long as I am human!) and which let it slide right off them without a second thought.  Most people seem somewhere in between.  I’m sure most people are not conscious of what is happening, regardless of their reaction.  The dynamics are endlessly varied and interesting, but it gives me a lot to think about!

So next time you find yourself inexplicably irritated or suddenly in the grips of any strong positive or negative emotion for reasons you can’t fathom, maybe think a little about what I’ve said here.  We are connected in ways that the vast majority of us have not been taught or made aware of.  Being blind to it does not make it any less so.  For centuries and mellenia before we understood how our own biochemistry worked, it still did work in relatively predictable ways.  Adrenaline still pumped through our ancestors when they got scared thousands of years ago, even though they didn’t know how neurotransmitters functioned.  For me, awareness has been power, and my life has become far more peaceful, far less chaotic.  Here’s to wishing anyone reading along will find their own awareness and greater understanding of who we are and how we tick – in ways that make a difference for peaceful living and serving each other with good will and grace.