English: Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Empathy is the ability to emotionally understand the feelings and experiences of another. Another good way to describe it is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. While it’s not as common as the world needs it to be, empathy, or the capacity for it, is present to some degree in most of us.
When pagans or New Age folk talk about Empaths they are describing something different. Empaths directly experience the emotions of others. They can walk into a room and be bombarded with the feelings emanating from the people gathered there. It’s the emotional equivalent of having several radios blaring all at once. Such a person has to learn to “tune out” at will, for sanity’s sake. But first, that person has to know that Empaths actually do exist.
When I was in my late twenties, I worked as an administrative assistant for a small business. In addition to the usual document creation, copying, filing, etc., my main job was to answer phone inquiries and transfer calls. This small business couldn’t yet afford much in the way of high tech, so the phone had six lines coming into it, with each line corresponding to a button under the keypad. If line #1 lit up and it was for Randy, I’d use another button to buzz Randy and tell him he had a call on line #1. When all six lines lit up at once, I had to be super fast, super, polite, and super clear – which was super stressful! Because the staff was so small, I couldn’t step away from the desk until one of them could cover the phone. Most of my fellow staffers were quite willing to answer calls while I made copies or went to the restroom, but there was one who wasn’t – not even when I was bleeding.
This person was in charge of public relations for the business, and had a large upstairs office all to herself. I learned very quickly that I had better not buzz her unless she had calls from a certain list of people. When she came downstairs to copy press releases (she wouldn’t let anyone else touch them), the other staffers in the vicinity would suddenly have errands in another part of the building. Weekly staff meetings were congenial – until she entered the room. She wouldn’t have to say anything; her mere presence was enough to lower the temperature by several degrees. I could only be around her for about 15 minutes before I would feel as if an invisible foam helmet was squeezing my head.
To be continued…