“Empaths have a tendency to openly feel what is outside of them more so than what is inside of them. This can cause empaths to ignore their own needs.”
John read the passage with a sense of heightened curiosity. Was that him? A large part of him always hated talking about his own feelings, and he was resistant to the idea of therapy for many years because of this personality trait. One of his mentors had always told him that a therapist’s best tool was his own feelings and experiences, and he knew this was true, to a point. He had himself written extensively on the subject of countertransference, which refers to the feelings patients stir up in the therapists who they chose to tell their stories to.
John had always felt a little different about this subject though, and wondered if he wasn’t in a sense missing something that most of his colleagues seemed to get. He usually had a pretty good idea how a therapy session was going to go, simply by picking up on cues his patients were giving off in the initial moments. Often he had to wait for a person to find words to describe emotions that he already knew they were feeling, and part of his success as a therapist was in intuiting these feelings and then helping people find the words to describe them.
Conducting therapy didn’t take the toll on John that it did on many therapists. Many of his friends and colleagues in the field found it exceedingly difficult to deal with the way they felt after multiple sessions in a day, but this wasn’t the case with John. What if he was wrong about this though? What if his drinking, his depression, and his lack of intimacy were all some kind of symptom of feeling things too deeply? Was this possible? If it was it rocked the foundation of everything he believed about himself as a therapist.
Although he was often very wild and undisciplined in his personal life, John was the model of a calm, compassionate therapist in session. He attributed this to many year of working through personal issues, which allowed him to go into the sessions a rationale yet empathic voice of reason no matter what his clients chose to bring into therapy. But part of him knew this was bullshit. No one can really hear about other’s misery and suffering day after day and not have it take a toll, it simply wasn’t possible. John thought about this in his own life and realized that where he was concerned, this idea may go well beyond what happened in the confines in therapy. Thinking about this, he felt he was perhaps on the cusp of a significant discovery.
What if it was John’s relationship with the world that had been the source of so may of his difficulties and personal demons and challenges? It wasn’t a totally new thought to him, but knowing that there were people that had actually researched and written books on this subject was exciting to him. He thought back to his childhood, and how he had always felt things very deeply but also very privately as a way of avoiding being mocked for this heightened sensitivity that he felt.
As he was searching through his memory bank, he thought back to something he had seen when he was about 15. He had been visiting his dad when he was a kid and they had gone to the river for the day for a picnic. It had been a fun day hanging with his brothers and sisters, and at one point he had wandered over to a part of the river where the current was extremely fast. He looked up and saw a kid about his age standing on a rock near the river, and then was hit with an amazing pain in his stomach that nearly doubled him over.
He screamed out in pain and a few people looked over. The boy standing on the rock looked over at him, and the two of them locked eyes for what seemed to John like hours. That was the first time John had felt it. He knew. He felt everything the boy on the rock was feeling, and for that moment the two seemed to be transmitting a powerful unspoken understanding about life, pain, and loss. He could feel that the boy on the rock didn’t want to live anymore, and felt a great sense of urgency to do something to help save him.
But it was too late. The boy hurled himself into the current and was quickly swept away. He watched the boy flail in the water, and literally lost his own breath watching him gasp for air.
The boy had changed his mind about wanting to die, he could fell that too. He thrashed and flailed and tried to swim, and dozens of people in the park had now rushed into the water to try and help him. The boy eventually made it back to the shore with the help of these people, but he was unconscious and not responding to CPR. Eventually an ambulance came and took the boy away, but John knew the boy would never be the same again.
As he sat remembering this story he noticed he was crying, and was surprised at how powerful this memory was for him. He hadn’t thought about the boy in a long time, but now looking back wondered if that wasn’t a significant turning point in his life. He had started drinking shortly after that incident, and hadn’t really stopped since. Why had he blocked this out? What was it about this incident that seemed to propel him into the life he had now inhibited? He wanted to read more.