Skeptic Spirit

One perception of the empath ability is, that it tends to make the empath highly sensitive, making them overreact in many situations. Although I disagree with most of the words used to explain it, I have to agree with the perception, that empaths do tend to overreact. I’ve put this in the “Empath Issues”, but it could also just be me rather than the ability. The differentiating between the two is impossible.

I would not say, that the empathy makes a person more sensitive than others. I have encountered many, many “non-empaths”, who have been even more sensitive than me. And I myself am not always that sensitive towards others. I can come up with several examples from yesterday alone in which I did not deserve any such definition.

But I still agree to the fact that I do overreact, often, well most of the time actually. I just don’t think it has much to do with being overly sensitive towards others. Instead I believe it has to do with the somewhat alternative way of maneuvering through life. 

I live life through my emotions. I interpret situations through my feelings rather than through my thoughts. I have to do that, I don’t really think I have a choice. I have to be aware of my own feelings all of the time, because if I don’t know what I feel, I very easily risk getting caught up in other peoples emotions instead. And that sucks, to be honest. When I am not connected to my own feelings, I cannot tell, where the feelings I have come from. And so they are just there, circling around me, doing whatever those feelings were supposed to do. But I can’t deal with them. I can’t think my way out of them. And I can’t move, act or make decisions when I find myself in such a situation. 

Wheels Detached, worthlessly in motion...

So I have to be sure that I can always put words to my emotions.  The real challenge however is to organize my emotions in such a way that I can do that. It is actually very similar to building up a proper database structure, not that I want to go into details with that. But basically, there are only 4 pure feelings (joy, sadness, anger and fear) and some instincts (survival and reproduction) and some defense mechanisms to deal with. That’s it! The rest is just combinations of different aspects, with a dash of hormones and chemical reactions to spice it up. 

The same four feelings are related to many, many relationships. There are connections all over the place, and so when ever I have connected to someone else’s feelings, the whole emotional database gets detached. That is why I can’t function when that happens. But this itself does not explain, why I have a habit of overreacting. This is just to give a basic understanding of the following.

I cannot have clutter in my database. I have to know all my relations. I wouldn’t say that I need to know everything about my feelings, but I have to have a clear perception of them. When something doesn’t fit, when I don’t know how to feel in a specific situation or relation, things becomes messy. And I have to deal with that, it doesn’t matter how small the mess is, it is still enough to make the entire database malfunction. 

So even the smallest incidents can haunt me for days, weeks even, if I can’t sort out the connection. That is why, I “overreact”, because I react to something, which would not be worth reacting on normally. And by the “normal” standard this is seen as “highly sensitive”. But it really is just a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. 

…If you believe in that sort of thing.