I Am an Empath

I was sitting there with a knot in my throat, a mountain on my chest, a headache, and tears waiting to flow free.

My first instinct was to find a simple, logical reason for why my body felt completely overwhelmed. Maybe I am just ovulating, I told myself. Nothing else.

But hormones can only magnify our emotions so much. What I was feeling was much heavier than that.

It started with a phone call. My partner and I are navigating long distance, and with my birthday coming up, my hopeless romantic brain had convinced me he might be waiting in my room to surprise me. When I realized he wasn’t, I playfully teased him about it over the phone. But he was exhausted from work. His patience was thin, and he sighed, his tone suddenly irritated.

I did the emotionally mature thing. I read the room, realized he needed space, and set a boundary to protect my own peace. I gently told him I didn’t want to talk while he was irritated, and I ended the call. To protect my own peace.

Later, he apologized. He was back to normal, talking about his day and what went on in the exhausting back-to-back meetings he was in.

But I was paralyzed. My mood was ruined, my appetite was gone, and I couldn’t even muster a “yeah” to his excitement. I just sat there wondering: Why do some people not affect me at all, while a simple shift in his mood can literally knock the air out of my lungs?

The internet loves to romanticize being an empath, talking about it like it is a magical superpower, a mystical ability to connect with the universe. But clinical psychology paints a much heavier picture. What we call being an “empath” is often just a trauma response.

Psychologists refer to this as trauma-induced hypervigilance. As one clinical expert writing for Psychology Today recently explained regarding trauma survivors:

“We have an uncanny ability to detect other people’s emotions, using only the slightest cues. This is a skill many of us learned to stay safe during childhood.”

I grew up in an emotionally unpredictable environment. I watched my dad abuse my mom, and in turn for twenty-five years, I became the emotional sponge for her transferred anger. I learned to read the room the second I walked into it, noticing the slightest shift in someone’s tone of voice or facial expression.

I developed this unknown ability of absorbing other people’s emotions so I could adjust my own behavior and brace for the storm.

When you grow up doing that, your nervous system becomes incredibly porous. As researchers point out, unresolved trauma keeps the nervous system in a state of hypervigilance, making it much harder to stay calm and regulated when faced with stress. As an adult, you no longer have a filter between other people’s feelings and your own body.

My partner is safe. But my nervous system doesn’t always know the difference between the past and the present. When he got irritated on the phone, my body heard that tone and immediately sounded the alarm. It went straight into survival mode, trying to protect me from a threat that used to be very real.

That knot in my throat and the crushing weight on my chest? That was twenty-five years of suppressed grief and survival mode finally demanding to be felt. My logical brain heard his apology, but my body was still processing the adrenaline and cortisol from the sudden emotional rupture. You simply cannot logic your way out of a physiological fight or flight response.

Unlearning a lifetime of survival instincts is exhausting work. On the hard days, it makes you want to turn the sensitivity off entirely.

But then I remember the other side of it. Clinical psychologists also note that because trauma survivors have highly adaptable nervous systems that feel things so intensely, we experience the world deeply. This exact same open, porous nervous system is the reason I can love so deeply. It is the reason I can experience art, romance, and joy at a magnitude most people will never even comprehend.

It is the heaviest burden, and the most beautiful lens through which to view the world.

So yeah, empathy sucks. Or maybe not.

Thank you for reading. And by the way, just so you know, you can clap up to 50 times on a Medium story.