Being an Emotional Empath with C-PTSD

I am a strong emotional empath, unintentionally but constantly reading and absorbing the energy of everyone I encounter. I've been like this for as long as I can remember and cannot say whether I was born this way or developed it as a survival mechanism in my emotionally charged home. One of my cousins does this kind of thing as a parlor trick, so most likely it runs in the family. I was the kid with whom no one wanted to play Trivial Pursuit, because if you read the answer then I could pick it up from you.

As a small child, I occasionally would identify a person or situation as "not right." I was never incorrect, even if it took decades for there to be objective evidence. I think what I'm sensing is a dissonance between what a person shows the world and what is inside.

• There was an incident with a cousin when we were playing a game where he held my hands and I got a vibe so creepy that I snatched my hands away and told my mother we needed to go home. This was beyond "not right" - it was danger I could not quantify or understand.

• I spotted a female coach grooming a teenage girl. It wasn't obvious and I didn't identify it as grooming, but I knew something was amiss.

• Interestingly, "not right" didn't mean there was something wrong with the person: a gay man with a public image as a family man and several children pinged my "not right" meter. There was nothing wrong with him - I never had a bias toward LGBTQ+ - and I didn't know what upset me. I did know that something was misaligned: Not right.

The peak was a day in college when I walked downtown and could hear people's thoughts as clearly as if they were speaking. It must have been a really bad day, because everyone I encountered was angry. I ran back to campus in tears, convinced that I must be developing schizophrenia. I told my best friend, who nodded and told me she understood and I would be fine... That is not what she was thinking. I marked the date in my calendar and learned many years later that it was the most intuitive day of the century for my Zodiac sign - Pisces. (I don't much believe any of that but also cannot explain the coincidence.)

That was a terrible day. The unusual level of sensitivity faded pretty quickly, and I started doing research to understand what was happening. That's when I learned about and began to practice blocking to protect my psyche. It is rude to be in someone else's mind uninvited, and potentially very upsetting. Strong, sharp feelings and opinions still come through whether I want them or not: I sometimes answer a question that no one asked or respond to a surprising opinion that was not expressed. It can be unsettling if you don't know me well.

Now in the middle of my life, my challenge is that I read and absorb other people's emotions. I am especially sensitive to sadness, experience it as if it were my own and have trouble understanding whether it's me or someone else who is sad. That's strange, right? I should know whether or not I am sad. The tricky part is that I'm kind of sad all the time: my childhood was hard, my first marriage was not good, the world is troubled, and I feel things very deeply. It takes deliberate analysis of my mood and a cleansing ritual to free myself of someone else's sadness.

My CPTSD makes me dread being judged and found lacking. Anger causes me to shut down. Combined with my level of empathic awareness, this limits the people with whom I feel safe.

• If you judge people - anyone - then I cannot trust you not to judge me.

• If you are prone to anger, I cannot be around you. It upsets my spirit.

• Raised voices disturb me to the point of panic: My home was characterized by an angry silence that was louder than any yelling, so I don't know how to interpret raised voices.

• A gathering of people where the energy is off sends me straight home.

• My assigned office has 10,000 people in a cubicle farm. That is an unbearable amount of emotional energy for me, and I had to request an accommodation to work from home.

Is this level of awareness a gift or a curse? It's great to be able to protect myself from people with bad energy. Therapists call this avoidance. For me it's survival. I've had a lifetime supply of judgment and anger, and I utilize the "gift" of being an empath to protect myself from both. On the downside, it's tough to experience other people's sadness or be emotionally overloaded by groups; it's exhausting.

If there were a choice, I'd keep it. Being able to avoid emotional danger is worth the cost of extreme sensitivity.