so our therapist thinks I might have too much empathy, and that it might cause me anxiety because I take on other people's emotions.

I always thought I was special. but I'm also a social scientist and so I know from research evidence that most people often think they are special. so I rationalised my feeling special as normal. 

but if she is right - and I do seem to have some 'symptoms' of excessive empathy - then my superpower is real. it might explain my heightened intuition, my ability to read other people's minds (which I earlier thought everyone could but have lately started to realize the contrary).

from a lot of my reading I had understood that low empathy was often the result of the spectrum of autistic issues, or a trait of narcissistic personalities. also that humans had uncanny empathy in the animal world; now I am learning that other animals do too. in a way I always thought empathy was a good thing, and that more was better. but apparently too much empathy is something of a borderline personality disorder. (they aren't wrong when they say give therapy enough time to find a disorder with anyone, because after all 'normal' is just the average across us all). it is because feeling other people's pain and emotions more than is 'normal' can be inefficient for one's own mind, like taking on more burdens than u need. but it's not only possibly bad for one, it can also hurt others because one puts oneself in their spots too much and attributes to them the extent and depth of feeling one feels herself, which might be an over/under estimation; effectively one cannot have the same information as other people about their situation, so one's empathising with them can often be a misjudgement. and using that in one's interaction with them can often create a mess, even hurting them.

this might explain why I have felt misunderstood often in my relationships, and have had expectations from other people that they don't deliver on (other people possibly have less empathy than I expected of them), which not only disappoints me but angers me sometimes, and gives me a feeling of superiority that again feels misunderstood.

I do still feel it doesn't cause me anxiety, because an out of body experience does accompany my empathy. 

a long friend/acquaintance recently lost her husband. I was getting news about his condition from another source as she didn't always feel like communicating when he was in hospital, so I had feared already. when I finally heard from the third person, I felt a physical wave of dread pass through my body, and I still kept wishing there was some confusion about the identity of the person being referred to. I didn't reach out to her because I felt like she wasn't ready, I mean if I was in denial I should respect hers. later I did meet her and also asked my therapist for a grief counsellor for her because I learned from K's colleagues that she had tweeted about it, and because the next few days I found her trying to use social media to come to terms with it, which worried me because I felt it was the wrong place to look for solace.

my therapist worries too much about me, I feel she has grown fond of me. she thinks the demise made me anxious, but frankly it was the use of social media that partly did, and partly it was because her family couldn't travel to her in these times and I was the only one amongst us friends who was within driving distance and thus able to get to her; I was anxious because I wanted to help but didn't know how, especially because I have always found her to be a difficult person and I have never felt close to her, especially because I wanted to meet her in a covid-safe way and she insisted I come into her home because their quarantine was over (she did come down later). I understand that her pain her grief is hers to bear, I understand that I may feel her situation slightly more than would be felt by someone else at my distance, and not just because I listened to her that day, I understand that my feeling that she needs to meet her parents asap is not shared by her and might not be the best advice even though I feel it is. I also understand that many things she said I will never share with anyone but K and maybe my therapist, and that I judged even some of them silently; but all this doesn't cause me anxiety and in fact it might have helped me help her.

too much of anything can be unwanted and inefficient and unbalanced. but it can also be a superpower. and it can be both good and bad. if the therapist is right it might be why I've often found economics and game theory to be so intuitive and natural. it might be why I was the only one to realize that a couple's lesbian au pair had a thing for the guy even before it came out. K didn't believe me then cos of her sexual orientation, even though I insisted that is never absolute, and that most people are somewhere on the spectrum of being bisexual, that the person you feel attracted toward matters more than their gender. it probably explains why, soon after meeting a classmate after years wherein she talked about issues with her husband about her career choices, when I saw she had a new haircut had gotten a new look more like a complete makeover, I knew that she had decided to end her marriage.

my web reading of excessive empathy also tells me that it is often not innate but learned. I think it's all the reading, and even the movies about human emotions. I cry and hurt easily when I read or step into a character or a being, but I've found myself doing more and more of it (I've written before about not knowing another way to live or be). slowly I'm also losing fear of the animals that used to frighten me, and tuning more into their selves.