Empathy is Good

After my last post, I've talked to friends who have felt the need to apologize for ever telling me they weren't feeling well, or or else they tell me they're not feeling well and then saying something like "Oh no! Did I just hurt you? I'm sorry." (Please note, this is not said sarcastically, or anything.) So I think I should clarify: I have never thought of these little pains as bad. It's kind of like how stubbing your toe hurts and stretching hurts, but stretching is a good thing while stubbing your toe just plain hurts. If you don't feel the stretch, something's wrong and you'll never increase your range of motion. It's just sort of pointless. This is exactly how the empathy pains work. If I don't feel them, something's wrong. (Incidentally, I've known two pathological liars in my time, and while both could tell stories that would make me cry in sympathy, neither could excite these empathy pains... maybe that was my first clue that these people weren't for real.)

Not only do I expect and hope to "feel the burn," that constant connection to the people around me, I have historically sought out that feeling. It's true confessions time. I've only told one other person in my entire life about this stuff, and that was just last night. So rather than step things up gradually I thought I'd just blab to a few million of my closest internet buddies...

So what's this great secret? I used to read passages in books where a character gets sick over and over and over. That part of Oliver Twist where Oliver faints in the witness stand? I must have read that hundreds of times as a kid. Frodo struggling forward with that wraith knife in his shoulder.... ecstasies of agony. Sometimes, I'd peruse our bookshelves at home and read only those passages from each book that twisted my guts the most. Not only that, but I'd copy particularly affecting passages into a little notebook so that I could study them later.

Looking back, I don't understand two things: why was this so important to me, and why was it so private that I've never EVER let on that I'd do this? I'll probably never know.

Hyperempathy Syndrome

I realized sometime in the middle of my college years that I'm weird. Up until then, I'd figured that everyone, when told tales of pain or illness, actually felt pain in sympathy. As it turns out, they don't, at least not usually. As it turns out, only I get to be that lucky.

Today, for instance, a friend wrote that he was coming down with something, and that he'd shivered his way through a meeting. Reading this, the familiar twinge started up deep under my diaphragm and deep inside of the chest space nearest the my right shoulder, just as it always does. It feels like hot electricity, and the main part of it shoots at a slight diagonal between my lower ribs. And that was just for the flu! Things get a lot worse the more suffering is involved for the person who is actually afflicted.

And this works for emotional pain too. In fact, I can usually tell when people near me are upset or angry or stressed simply by paying attention to that line between my ribs, the hollow under my right shoulder, or a little space in the back of my throat that feels heavier the worse the other person's pain. This unseen, unspoken version only works if people are physically near me, though.

I was just learning that this wasn't exactly normal when I read a science fiction novel for a class. It was by Octavia Butler, and it involved a character who suffered from hyperempathy syndrome. If I remember right, this syndrome resulted from having a mother who was addicted to some futuristic recreational drug while pregnant. Kids suffering from this syndrome literally bleed if they saw others bleeding. I remember reading this and thinking, "Yes! I almost know what that's like!" It felt so good to have it described that I later read the other books in that sci-fi series.

And yet, while it's definitely uncomfortable, I wouldn't give this internal sensor up if given the choice. I don't know why, though. Maybe I'm just used to it.