Empathy is debilitating me?
I feel crippled. I take on everyones pain and hurt, even if i dont know them. Today in the mall i saw a little kid begging for his mothers attention, mom mom mom, and she eventually answered but the kid looked kind of upset. I couldnt handle it i went to the bathroom and bawled my eyes out over something that isnt even my problem. Im studying international relations, so i watch the news a lot, and it deeply depresses me, seeing other people suffer. If someone i know looks or is slightly upset, all i do is hide away and cry for hours. My dad always complains about how hard he works and it causes me so much anxiety. I literally feel crippled and debilitated, i cant do anything without being caught up in other peoples pain, random people on the street who dont seem happy enough. Its causing me to take on responsibilities that arent mine. I am miserable and this overly sensitive empathy is sucking the life out of me. Help
How do empath abilities make someone special?
The ability to empathize with the feelings of another person is always special. Many people are unaware of others and feeling or caring about solely their own emotions. Empathy is important for our relationships with family and friends, as well as in professional situations. Those with empathy know to be kind to those who are hurting. This is a beautiful and necessary ability in our difficult world.That said, however, empathy is not a super power. While it is necessary for healthy relationships, most empaths are much too open to feelings of others which can become unhealthy and lead to codependent behaviors.Many empaths have learned this skill as a survival mechanism to cope with childhood trauma like having dealt with an abusive parent. Tuning into the emotions of others was necessary to know how to avoid some of the abuse by anticipating the mood and jumping through hoops to please the abuser. This sense becomes so finely tuned that the empath is tuned into the dispositions of everyone around them and exhausts themselves with constant people pleasing.It’s exhausting to feel the emotions of others and constantly feel like you should do something about it. Learning to shield oneself from the bombardment of the emotions that an empath feels is necessary for their well-being and in learning to set healthy boundaries.Short and Sweet: Empathy is special in understanding the plight of those around us. In our “me, me, me” environment, those who can understand others are indeed special. However, too much empathy can be debilitating.Johnna White is owner of Pixie Dust Metaphysical Boutique in Sarasota, Florida.Www.pixiedustSRQ.com
Is there anything in a birth chart that could indicate lack of Empathy?
Lack of water signs would indicate a less emotional person. Aries is a sign notorious for their single-mindedness. When they want something, they'll go right after it with blinders on (they can hurt others and be oblivious). An afflicted moon would probably indicate 'damaged' emotions.. especially where saturn is involved. Saturn can turn a planet very 'cold' and immobilize any warm feelings. The placement of Mars and the Sun show the ego... Affliction to these planets can indicate a selfish person. An afflicted Sun=egocentric tendencies.. Afflicted Mars=overambitious, inconsiderate the house associated with empathy would probably be the 12th, it's associated with religion, spirituality, confinement and suffering. (the Piscean house) Chiron is associated with pain and learning... I imagine that any aspect to this body strengthens the subject's knowledge of pain and lessons learned through it. Even a hard aspect. Maybe it's just more of a 'cutting' sort of pain...but at an intuitive level, I don't think that would make someone less sympathetic, because they'd be familiar with these sort of feelings. Good question. I thought about unaspected planets (ie, an unaspected moon)... Unaspected planets indicate a part of the personality that is not as well integrated as the rest. But it doesn't make someone 'lacking' in a quality, it's just harder for them to connect with/express that part of their personality. But it would shed light on why someone's feelings may appear nonexistent.
Do you feel that your empathy is a curse?
Q: Do you feel that your empathy is a curse?No, not at all.Feeling empathy for those that do not warrant is a curse, though. There are a lot of sad stories out there, and you can’t feel sorry for everybody. I don’t feel empathy for someone who has racked up a crippling amount of consumer debt. Or because of their crappy relationship or marriage. Or because they hate what they do but stay at their job anyway, because lotsa $$$$$$. Really—?These are all circumstances that people choose. They were avoidable. Similarly, I don’t expect anyone to empathize with me if I get myself in a similar predicament. I wouldn’t deserve anyone’s empathy.I do feel empathy for those who are in situations that they had no hand in creating. One of my dear friends and mentors is dying of pancreatic cancer—he’s not even 50 years old. He’s one of the most authentic people I’ve ever met. He has influenced my life in countless ways, making me stronger, more resilient, and more authentic myself.He’s fighting this disease like a champ. He deserves my heartfelt empathy, and although it’s painful for me to see him suffer so, I wouldn’t want it any other way.
Why do I feel such empathy for animals?
I cannot really answer straight on this but I can say empathy is usually a trait we develop from the experiences we may have personally encountered ourselves in our lives and thus having experience with these emotions and feelings it’s very easy to understand other living creatures. That is the logical explanation.On another level I too wthink about this. Just today I went to the animal shelter in my area. I was thinking of adopting another cat ( I have 6 … I love cats, and they are all from this shelter and healthy beautiful well cared for and loved) So… I walk in and there are all these cats and everyone of them I found somthing about them that just hit me deep in the heart. It was very different this time though because I could not for the life of me choose…..I became very very upset and started crying. I honestly couldn’t do it and felt even worse for walking out but the I was overwhelmed and it was as if I had absorbed every ounce of energy from all these animals. I was drained and depressed for the rest of my day. It really was horrible and I know the shelter staff thought I was a nut case for crying and because I insisted that they check Check one lone kitten because it was going to be very sick…. I sensed it, I know 100 percent Im right. It’s made life hard for me, having this sensitivity to animals and in a sense it has made me dislike so much of humanity because of how we treat them. But I do everything I can to always use it to do good by them. Trust what you feel and use it for good too.
1. Do you think individuals can learn empathy from something like a 1-month CIP experience? Explain why or why?
A. A unique Training Program at UPS Mark Colvard, a United Parcel Manager in San Ramon, California, recently faced a difficult decision. One of his drivers asked for 2 week off to help an ailing family member. But company rules said this driver wasn’t eligible. If Colvard went by the book, the driver would probably take the days off anyway and be fired. On the other hand, Colvard chose to give the driver the time off. Although he took some heat for the decision, he also kept a valuable employee. Had Colvard been faced with this decision 6 months earlier, he says he would have gone the other way. What changed his thinking was a month he spent living in McAllen, Texas. It was part of a UPS management training experience called the Community Internship Program (CIP). During his month in McAllen, Colvard built housing for the poor, collected clothing for the Salvation Army, and worked in a drug rehab Center. Colvard gives the program credit for helping him empathize with employees facing crises back home. And he says that CIP has made him a better manager. “My goal was to make the numbers, and in some cases that meant not looking at the individual but looking at the bottom line. After that one month stay, I Immediately started reaching out to people in a different way.” CIP was established by UPS in the late 1960s to help open the eyes of the company’s predominantly white managers to the poverty and inequality in many cities. Today, the program takes 50 of the company’s most promising executives each summer and brings them to cities around the country. There they deal with a variety of problems from transportation to housing, education, and health care. The company’s goal is to awaken these managers to the challenges that many of their employees face, bridging the cultural divide that separates a white manager from an African American driver or an upper-income suburbanite from a worker raised in the rural South.
Does being an empath mean you have both cognitive and emotional empathy?
The simplest way that I have always explained being an empath is: experiencing people’s emotions as if they were your own. When one is young, it is usually uncontrollable and quite scary because not only do you experience emotions of the people that you are very closely connected to but you also feel the emotions of those who are physically in close proximity to you. Throughout the years you can learn how to almost “turn it off” by tuning it out but there are many empaths(myself included) who avoid going to funerals and hospitals because of the overwhelming amount of negative emotions and debilitating grief that can be found there. I know for me, bars and clubs were also hard because drunk people are overly emotional as well as overly touchy and physical contact does make it a bit harder to tune it out. Hopefully this gives you an idea into my experiences as well as many of the people who claimed they were empaths, as well. I will say, quite honestly, that while I know people who have lied about it but I never understood why because it is not something that I would wish on anyone (well maybe my worst enemy so they’d know the pain they have inflicted on others).
Autistic spectrum "disorders" - is this pathologising masculinity?
Evidence is growing that the brains of autistic people are hyper masculine in character. Do you think that "autistic spectrum disorder" is only considered a problem in a society which values empathy over raw intellect and as such is this a cultural change driven by feminism? It is said that Albert Einstein was almost certainly on the autistic spectrum and the same was probably true of Isaac Newton and the inventor of the electronic computer Alan Turing. Do you think if we were living in a masculinist society it would be over emotionalism that was being pathologised instead? Let me know what you think about the implications of pre natal screening for autism, please. http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090112/hl_afp/healthautismbritain_newsmlmmd "The study highlights for the first time the association between foetal testosterone and autistic traits, and indicates that foetal testosterone not only masculinises the body, it masculinises the mind". Baron-Cohen said this needed to be debated. "If there was a prenatal test for autism, would this be desirable? What would we lose if children with autistic spectrum disorder were eliminated from the population?" he said.
Have you ever achieved complete empathy?
Have you ever achieved complete empathy?No Question Details.TFA2A.No. “Complete” empathy is not actually possible.Empathy is feeling how somebody else feels. You can get a limited amount of information about how somebody feels from reading their “gestalt” including body language, facial expression, voice stress, and all the thousands of clues that everybody broadcasts.The problem is that you don’t actually know how they feel. You only know how you would feel in the same or similar situation. (Specifically, the situation that would cause you to broadcast the same clues that the other person is broadcasting.) Your discrete history is different that the other persons, and therefore complete empathy is impossible.EDIT: Question Details Added: Three summers ago, I went on a camping trip with 5 friends & maybe some mushrooms too. With 1 friend specifically at one point, we both knew what each other had in mind, could finish each other’s sentences or even thoughts, and know what I/he felt after having said sth - complete empathy. Have you?Hallucinogenic mushroom and all other similar drugs don’t actually make you have original hallucinations, they just make you extremely suggestible - that is, little nudges or clues “mushroom” into complete thoughts that seem to be reality. In the case you describe, instead of getting the “clues” from your environment, you get them from your friend, and s/he gets them from you.Psilocybin mushrooms give me auditory hallucinations - I hear things. It was particularly unpleasant because I was listening to music that had some buzzing sounds, and thought I was about to be attacked by giant (invisible) insects. Never again. (LSD usually causes visual hallucinations and pot usually causes tactile hallucinations.)If you take mushrooms with friends, you may share hallucinations or more likely trigger each other into shared hallucinations. In that case, you are having similar thoughts and seem to have a “rapport” that you know each other’s thoughts or feelings. You don’t have empathy, you are just listening to the same music and reacting similarly. You may have the impression that you are reading their mind, but you aren’t. Your thoughts are just being nudged in the same direction and you are giving each other “clues” that keep the illusion going.