Being an empath is hard. Most people believe they understand what empathy means, and most can experience it; but oftentimes, it's confused with sympathy. So, let's first separate and define the two. Sympathy is feeling compassion, sorrow, and/or pity for someone's situation. This can even lead to crying with them, or indulging in ice cream and sad movies. Empathy is putting yourself in their shoes; sometimes these situations bring up old memories or feelings of the past. It's essentially the equivalent of walking a mile in someone else's shoes.
However, being an empath takes empathy to a whole different level. Empaths, in essence, feel what everyone around them is feeling. Though this can be a little skewed based off of perception, most of the time it's fairly accurate. For the empath, you may not have had similar experiences to the person you're emulating, but you still feel what they feel, with a new level of confusion.
Where the rubber meets the road is the fact that sometimes, especially around a lot of people that may not handle emotions very well, it can be difficult for an empath to distinguish between the emotions of others and their own.
Empaths are very prone to taking on other people's emotions, and, by extension, their problems and difficulties. This makes it difficult to deal with their own issues, because they're carrying around everyone else's.
This brings us to one of the best and worst parts of being an empath: the holidays. For most empaths, this season is usually looked forward to as an opportunity to love people via food, gifts, and hugs, depending on your level of giving and loving. However, a lot of the times, we empaths forget how hard it is to be in a crowded room of imperfect humans, all of whom have baggage and unresolved issues, with other people present in the room.
This crowded room of thirty, each with at least two or three emotions, turns the exciting holidays into a minefield of emotions. First, we have to be able to identify if this emotion is ours or not. Then, if not, who it's from. Next, we assess why this emotion is being felt and perceived. Once that is known, then usually we can resolve the emotion and move on.
On a normal day, this can be done within the first three minutes of detecting an emotion; but in a compact area with a lot of people, coupled with familial squabbles, it gets a lot more difficult, and we become more susceptible to acting on emotions that aren't our own. And of course, with family get-togethers, there are usually new problems arising every five minutes or so. It definitely takes a lot of energy, so prolonged exposure can be utterly exhausting.
Let's say it's a family dinner, and the food has just been served. Everyone is happy and enjoying the delicious delicacies, all is well. But what we don't see is the five or ten minutes before that, in the process of setting up the flow of morsels from the kitchen via the nice dishes, and coordinating the copious amounts of food equally split on the table(s). Tensions, stress, and sometimes snide comments evoke emotion, and suddenly our empath is swimming in a sea of emotions. There's anger for the comment on someone's pregnancy weight. There's stress from trying to keep 10 children under the age of 10 from breaking any of grandma's antiques whilst simultaneously keeping them occupied. There's the tension from the agnostic cousin mingling with the conservative Christian uncle, and they don't get along. And we empaths perceive all of this, and with the quick succession of said emotions, it's tough to keep up.
All this is to say that we empaths love our family. Though oftentimes it is hard to wade through all of it, we deal because this is a gift God has given us, and He wouldn't give us anything we couldn't handle without Him. So we feel, we distinguish, we process, and move on as much as we're able. We're not always successful in our endeavors to only keep our emotions that drive us to action, but being an empath is still pretty awesome.
