I am a pathetic empathetic. How are you?

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My desire to help other people, understand what they are feeling, give them good advice, make them feel better......

It's f****** overwhelming. I hate to say it, but I need to like people less. I put off important tasks because I'm trying to listen to all my downstairs neighbor's problems.

This is such a dumb problem. Does anyone have the same thing?

And do you need anything? How are things?

I'm an emotional sponge myself. In my mind, if I can suck in someone's emotions, I can take the negative emotions away from them. Makes it hard for me to be around angry, negative people because it is very tiring trying to take in their emotions, even strangers.

And because I'm more of a "speak-when-asked" type person, I become people's sounding board when they need to rant. I'm not sure if they realize how much it affects me, or if they do, they must really not care.

So, I kind of feel what you're feeling. I think.

My problem is that I'm too agreeable. I only want what everyone else wants. If you asked me if I wanted pizza or Chinese, I'd ask you what you want. If I said pizza and you said you wanted Chinese then I'd say okay we'll get that. Not well you know I really want pizza. There's a fine line between being too agreeable and a jerk. I mean I don't have to blow up in people's faces and go look! We're doing things my way or else you can go screw! but I also don't have to give away everything I want for other people every single time. That's what I need to learn. You know like if someone asks me if I want the last cookie and I do then I don't have to say no, no you can have it if you really want it. I should just say politely, yes I would love it thank you. Or maybe even let's split it. So anyways, that's my issue big time!

Yeah. I don't regret it, though.

Neurotypicals can sense each others' feelings easily. Some of them are very compassionate, others just use those feelings to manipulate each other. Most are somewhere in the middle. But for all of them, to some extent, it seems that exposure to others' emotions has gotten them immunized against being overwhelmed by them. They're used to it. A small amount of exposure lets them ignore others' emotions when they want to. (That's a good thing. If it weren't for that, a paramedic could never do his job properly, and a surgeon would flinch away from doing surgery. Being flooded by others' emotions is too much of a good thing.)

But I go through life pretty much unable to copy other people's feelings, and often unable to receive information about others' feelings, especially the more subtle ones. I have very little experience with emotional contagion, so that when emotions do get through to me, I can't block them; it gets to the point that I'm actually afraid of others' emotions, like when I'm in a crowd and it's obvious what they're feeling, it's just overwhelming and I want to run. Being in a cheering crowd at a sports game makes me feel like I might vanish in the enthusiasm of the crowd.

But my own emotions are as strong as anybody's, and it doesn't take too much thought to extrapolate that other people have emotions just like I do; and that means that when I get the information about somebody else feeling something, it affects me in that unable-to-block way that any emotion affects me, once I realize it exists. Add two and two, and you get somebody who is fully able to understand the extent of human suffering, but completely unused to ignoring it. A while back on WP we were talking about how some parents tried to encourage us to eat by reminding us there were starving children in China... well, for me, that would make me forget all about eating.

So... yeah, I volunteer a lot. If you know the world sucks, and you can't ignore it, that's what you do. You try to make it suck less for at least a few people. It's not even some kind of self-righteous charity garbage; it's just that when I try to make things better, I feel like I'm a part of my community. In my ideal world, everybody helps each other; I can depend on others and they can depend on me. I feel a lot better when I work toward that.

I actually think that this sort of mindset is much more common than people think it is; it's just that we're taught to act cynical even if we don't really feel it. Human beings are naturally empathetic creatures. We are designed to live in groups, and with group life comes the need to support each other, read emotions, care about each other, and desire to create joy in other people as well as relieve their suffering. In fact, it's the empathic nature of human beings that really sets us apart from other animals. A dog can read your emotions to understand that you would appreciate it if the dog climbed into your lap and licked your chin. A chimp can put itself in another chimp's shoes to understand that a smaller chimp will need help to cross the gap between two trees. But only a human will empathize with someone they have never met, but only heard about through the abstract medium of language.

I don't think that humans are saints, but I do think we naturally empathize with each other, and I think we should stop being ashamed of it, stop calling it soft and weak not to believe that you've got to claw your way to the top. Clawing our way anywhere has never really been the strength of the human species to begin with--it's always been a matter of specialization, flexibility, and cooperation. When we try to get ahead without bringing others with us, we just tend to drag everybody else down, and it's a net loss.