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Are You an Empath?
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of someone else. The understanding part is great; it’s the sharing part that can cause issues.
An empath is someone who feels what other people are feeling. I’m one of those people so I can tell you all about it!
Sometimes we feel other people’s feelings so strongly that we can’t tell the difference between their feelings and our own. Or, we might think we are feeling depressed but it’s really a reaction to someone else’s pain and not ours at all.
There are times when I can tell I’m feeling someone else’s stuff. For instance, I feel great and then I talk to a friend who starts crying because they are sad and suddenly I feel sad. In that case, it’s pretty clear that I am feeling their feelings and not my own.
Now sometimes it might be partly my own feelings because their sadness might bring up a sad memory for me so then I’m feeling their feelings as well as my own.
Before I understood this concept I had a really hard time being in crowds. I knew that crowds gave me anxiety and I avoided them, but I didn’t know why.
What I came to understand is that in a crowd I was feeling bombarded by many people’s feelings all at the same time and I would feel so much anxiety I would leave. If it was a family event or something where it…