When empathy hurts

The dictionary defines empathy as the capacity for participating in the feelings or ideas of another. That's a pretty cold and clinical definition, from my perspective. For all intents and purposes, I can be considered empathic. I sense emotions on a high level. Something to do with subconscious reading of speech, body language and other clues that people give off all of the time.

The problem I have been having is large groups of people. It isn't easy to shut it all off. Building defensive walls takes time, and you don't always get it. On some occasions, I've been hit with the full force of what people were really thinking, and believe me, it wasn't pretty.

My wife and I are going to a church function tomorrow evening, and I am really starting to dread it. Due to recent events, emotions will be running high. I just hope the cutlery all stays on the table. Okay, that is exaggeration, but there are a lot of unhappy campers out there just now, and I really don't want to be feeling that from several directions at once.

Real empathic pain comes from when you haven't put up any barriers intentionally, because you want to be of help. It's the mental equivalent of letting somebody beat on you to relieve their frustrations. While I can take a certain amount of that, some people are just mentally very loud projectors. Some I have been known to pick up without being present except by phone or instant messaging. Every now and then, I get hit with a blow that makes me just want to curl up in a corner somewhere and hold my head for a while.

This may sound dumb to a lot of you, like I pulled something out of a science fiction novel. In fact, a lot of the descriptive points do have that source. Until you have experienced it, there is no common frame of reference. It is a very subjective feeling, and unless you can crawl into my mind, you cannot know exactly what it feels like on this end.

I don't mean to complain so much. Empathy is a good thing. It has allowed me to help people deal with grief and loss. It has kept me from falling for traps and cons. With discipline and practice, deep empathic levels can be a good tool. If more doctors and counsellors had the ability born into them, instead of trained, maybe health care would not be in the mess it is.

All I'm really saying here is to be very careful what you are projecting. You never know who is able to "listen" to what you aren't saying.