the hyper-empath
A long time ago, when I was “working” as a consultant at PG&E and basically did nothing from 7:30 am to 4:30 pm, I was bored enough – and obsessed enough – to read Harry Potter fan fiction. I had just discovered Harry Potter earlier that year completely by accident, and devoured the first 4 books all at once. Unfortunately, that was the time that JK Rowling decided to take like 8 years off between book 4 and 5, and I was dying from the wait.
In any case, HP fanfiction developed the wizardry mythology to a whole different level. I mean, Rowling’s world was rich, but because there were so many fanfic writers out there, the imagination was endless. One of the concepts that one fanfic author or another fleshed out was the concept of the Empath. Basically, its a wizard whose skill was to be able to feel and absorb the pain of others. This wizard was quite powerful, because by drawing away others’ pain into themselves, they were able to heal the injured.
I feel a little like the Empath right now, except I don’t know how much healing I am doing. All I know is that, once my compassion and empathy for others opened up, I have been flooded with not only my own, already-heightened emotions, but the pain of others as well. Its so bad that I am constantly sick and ready to throw up.
Now that I have stopped closing myself off to others, I realize part of the reason why I did so to begin with: survival. I have always been super-sensitive to how other people feel, have always had this “soft heart”, as my family puts it in Chinese. There was absolutely a large component of this wall that was built to protect me from being hurt by those I loved as a child. But I also become somewhat insensitive and intolerant because I could not handle feeling everyone’s point of view. It became almost impossible for me to pick out how I felt.
Well, I feel like I’ve opened myself up to emotions – definitely feeling my own, and letting them run their course – and to feeling compassion with those in my life who have hurt me. And suddenly, I feel like I am bombarded with all the pain and suffering that I may have caused, or what people were going through when they inadvertently hurt me. Its almost intolerable. That, on top of my own grief over J.
My own feelings are a whole other story. For years, I’ve repressed them, and so I’ve recently learned to try and let them take its course. Well, I’m starting to see a distinction between feelings that well up and cry to be released – such as past angst, or hysteria – and feelings that stay with you. I have been trying to “feel” my grief for J whenever it comes up, but unlike those that have been bottled up, they don’t subside after being let out. It ebbs and flows, sometimes stronger, sometimes more tolerable. I only realized today that I cannot continue encouraging myself to face the grief everytime it comes at me. Like Dr. P said, I need to ride the wave, not confront it. I may not be able to control how I feel, but I have to make some effort to either go with it or master it. Otherwise I keep getting sucked in under the tide.
Emotions, I am finding, are a balance, just like anything else. Yes, it is important to be authentic about them and to let them run their course. However, I am also seeing that sometimes, you do need to use distress tolerance skills, distractions, filters. It will continue to be a challenge to me how I do that, without reverting back to the complete suppression-spillover cycle that it was before. I need to continue to learn how to master my emotions and direct them positively, because while it has been educational and honest and brave to experience my grief, it is not something that I can do for the long term.
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What does that mean about what I want to do about J? At some point, I do want to be able to give myself over to making things right with him, even if it means pain for me. Right now, I know that I am not ready to put myself out there yet – I don’t trust my intentions or my ability to control myself, its simply been too soon since I’ve learned this new part of myself. I want to work towards learning how to balance my own needs and being happy, with sacrificing myself to making a relationship right. I want to be strong, and to turn the compassion and pain that I feel into love. I want to learn how to take my connection to other people and make it positive, rather than only feeling their pain and mine.
The connection itself is a tricky thing. I feel like I have been fighting with all of my friends recently in trying to assert myself and my trust in myself. I know that they all mean well, but I want to do things my own way. I’m like a little child that is just starting to separate his own identity from his parents’, and I am tussling right now. How do I balance the protective words of friends with me needing to go out and make those mistakes? How do I say, let me be, without alienating them? I haven’t found that out yet, and I certainly haven’t done a very good job so far.
