Am I excessively empathetic?

[candyflossandme]

I’m really poorly, and my boyfriend attempted to make me my favourite takeaway side (Bombay potatoes). It took him an hour and a half bless him.
He noticed I didn’t eat many and I had to admit they weren’t very nice, a bit strong in a certain spice.
His face dropped and I felt awful. I then cried even looking at the potatoes because there’s so many there and I feel so bad.

I put it down to being poorly; but I remember other instances in the past too.
I cried when I got a D in GCSE history in year 10, purely because my Dad loves history and I felt sad. I remember looking at the picture of a war plane on the textbook and it made me cry. I wasn’t worried that I disappointed him, just really sad for him because I knew he loved it (turns out I re-sat and got an A* haha!)
I also cried on the first day of year 7 because my parents said it’d be great for me to try cross country. I forgot my PE kit so couldn’t go. I watched them all run off and cried because I felt sad for my parents (even though they told me not to be silly and it wasn’t a big deal).

Is there such thing as being too much of an empath? Why do such silly things make me cry?

And yes as a child and young adult I felt other peoples emotions so deeply. I sat with my Nan once for hours during a psychotic episode convinced I could make her better. As a child, this was wishful, magical thinking but an over empathetic response to adults is often a red flag for someone who’s had experiences like this.

As an adult I’m well aware now of the dynamic and in a way I absolutely refuse to take on someone else’s emotions which at times has now made me look/appear cold hearted. I attracted some very, very odd friends along the way who I am no longer friends with etc etc.

God I also hate this website sometimes!! Why is everybody so uptight?
Seems like a lot of you on here are gatekeeping being an empath.
The rude replies really give a bad look don't they!
That said - I do think this is half empathetic and half emotional. I too am sort of like you, and seemingly strange things tend to make me feel upset (for example, sad emojis often make me sad... they always have, and I don't really know why)
But to those saying it's not empathy as you're the only one crying??? You are crying because you're picturing other people's emotions, and don't want to think of them upset.
That sounds pretty empathetic to me OP x

Was just going to say the same. People pleasing trying to manage others emotions for your own ends.

To answer your question OP, no you are not excessively empathetic or even remotely empathetic. Empathy is understanding the feelings of the other person as they are for that person. You don't. You imagine the feelings of the other person, then turn the attention back to you by crying.

god I also hate this website sometimes!! Why is everybody so uptight?
Seems like a lot of you on here are gatekeeping being an empath.
The rude replies really give a bad look don't they! That said - I do think this is half empathetic and half emotional. I too am sort of like you, and seemingly strange things tend to make me feel upset

yes, I think that’s clear.

Just sounds like you cry easily. I don’t think you’re any more empathetic than the next person.

So agree. My late mother was the same. I had to learn to read the room so to speak. It was just me and her for many years.

Her moods would change in a nano second. I am a superb reader of micro expressions and body language as a consequence. It is very annoying. I wish I didn’t notice or care.

It has been useful in my job working with difficult children as I can anticipate easily when they are off kilter the second they walk through the door.

The hyper vigilance is exhausting and I find that ironically the best way I cope is by switching off emotionally- which means my cognitive empathy is often rubbish.

I have ‘friend’ on the other hand who claims to be an empath and a highly sensitive person. She is just utterly selfish and self absorbed though and everything is about her. She is one of the worst emotional vampires I have come across.
she is exhausting to be around so I have pretty well avoided her for years.

The rude replies are largely out of impatience at the self-aggrandising ‘I’m an empath’ stuff, which is pretty much from the school of dipshit nonsense as ‘I’m an indigo child’.

Yes, absolutely there are people who are extremely alert to other people’s emotions because of a childhood that made them hyper-vigilant. I’m one of those people. I am not ‘an empath’. I am not a Betazoid with big hair in a sci-fi show. I recognise that I’m over-attuned to other people’s moods, worked very hard when young to discard my mother’s deeply unhelpful people-pleasing scripts, and I manage my own tendency to be emotional. It is not, and it should not be, anyone else’s issue.

I respond strongly to art, but I have never screamed at the Sistine Chapel ceiling nor gone into hysterics at the Acropolis.

@BigButtons

Yes, nodding away. I wish I didn’t notice too but what is seen cannot be unseen as the saying goes. Yes to the switching off emotionally for self preservation which is the strange paradox of hyper empathy because you can appear quite cold and very in control of emotions.

My friend has a couple of days to live currently (bastard cancer, she’s too young) and I have to make a conscientious effort to allow myself space and time to grieve and then switch off from it entirely. The grief/emotion would quite simply just swallow me whole else. I like to think that’s just a normal response now as I’ve gained insight over the years.

absolutely. My boundaries are better, but I can still be emotionally overwhelmed by other people's issues, so I shut off and can appear to be cold and not caring. It's not that I don't care. I just can't handle the emotional overwhelm.

I’ll be deleting this thread

OP spitting her dummy out because people didn’t agree with her being empathetic and pointing it she sounds more self centred/emotional instead 🤣

It's not self-centered to refuse to eat manky potatoes or get a D in History or forget your PE kit.

Honestly, how people can twist a thread about a people-pleasing OP into one where she is labelled as unkind for not eating disgusting potatoes when she's sick is beyond me.

I think you’re missing the point that it’s not those examples making OP sound self centred it’s her reaction to them - thinking it’s having a massive impact on others to the point she is crying when in reality people around her are not that arsed what grade she got or her potato critique 😂

It’s not self-centred to be afraid of disappointing your parents or upsetting your partner.

I think you have a very low understanding of human nature.

If she didn’t want to upset her partner, she didn’t have to. She could have just said the potatoes were fine. She chose to (possibly) upset him and then cried about it. That’s not empathy. That’s oddly self serving.

She’s not unkind for not eating the potatoes. I wouldn’t have. However, not eating them, telling him they weren’t nice and then crying because he might be upset by what she’d chosen to do isn’t empathetic, much less excessively so. An empathetic person would have taken the route least likely to upset the other person.

He noticed she wasn’t eating them. Bizarre that you think she should lie instead of gently telling him they weren’t nice because he overly spiced them.

She didn’t choose to upset him, she told the truth when prompted and then felt bad because his face dropped.

It’s often hormonal.
I was ‘ard as nails until I had kids. When I was breastfeeding, adverts like Save the Children drove me to tears. Even now any mention of child abuse puts me in a protective froth.
Sympathy and maternal instinct combined.

I'm not an emotional person at all - both ways, neither particularly sad or happy but I would say I have a lot of empathy.

I find it really difficult to watch live shows of anything in case the performer messes up and I feel so awful for them thinking what I think they're feeling.

I find it quite easy to read people and am always really aware of any change of mood. I find it really infuriating in a group when someone is in a bad mood as it completely drags me down, I can't ignore it or be blind to it. Would never mention it in an 'im such an empath' way, just an observation.

Similar to your history example, I remember having some toy dogs when at school, my dad used to play with them with me and his favourite was the black one. I took that one to school and lost it, I hate losing things so was upset but what really haunted me was that that was my dads favourite. I know now that he really couldn't care less about the black dog and was just humouring me when we were playing.

If there's a party and everyone is leaving early, I would stay even though I didn't want to because I would know how horrible that is for the host. I am a people pleaser of course but there's something different when you're doing something not to make someone happy, but because you are trying to manage their feelings. Hard to explain.

In your position, I would have just eaten the potatoes because I wouldn't have wanted to hurt DH feelings. Unless they were inedible of course.

Think there's been some odd replies on this post, don't think there's anything wrong with suggesting you are an empathic person. I think it's just a quality like being lazy, funny, stubborn etc.

If you are feeling haunted by how someone else feels/will feel and then discover that in fact that person didn't feel that way at all, can you understand that it was not empathy that was making you feel bad?

You are not trying to manage their feelings. You are trying manage your own feelings because you cannot sit with discomfort (unsurprisngly, it's really not easy after all). This does not make you a bad person but, for example, there is a difference between sympathy and empathy, which we all discover when something terrible happens and people are nice and very sad and shed a tear and give you a squeeze and a sad face... yet it doesn't actually give us even a tiny bit of comfort. On the other hand, someone else, perhaps someone we're not even particularly close to at all, can just look at us, or say something without much emotion and for a moment we feel seen and heard and touched. Empathy is connection, not projection.

I specifically stated that I didn’t think she should lie (and that I wouldn’t have). I said an ‘overly empathetic’ person would have lied.

And, yes, by choosing to tell the truth she chose to upset him. It was an easily foreseeable outcome, she did it anyway and then cried about it. That’s not empathy.

Such a good post and explanation.

I can relate to everything you’ve said. I experienced the same with my father growing up, including developing really firm boundaries as an adult, and having to ditch problematic people in order to protect myself. I’m very LC with my father, with long periods of NC. He’s never met our youngest DC who is nearly 9.

Some people think I distance myself from toxic people too early and that I should give them a chance or more chances. The thing is, I can see what’s coming down the road and I’m usually always right. During an argument, my younger sister berated me for my tendency to cut people out of my life. I had to explain to her that it’s not okay to allow people to treat you badly. She decided to go NC with our father several years ago. She does not recall the same toxic childhood experiences as me, as she was a toddler when we escaped to a refuge. The scars of his behaviour and the subsequent trauma had an affect on us all, and continues to do so. I don’t think one can ever erase trauma, you just have to learn how to manage it.