“A what?” he asked, still groggy from the night before.
“An emapth,” she explained, drawing closer to his face. “Someone who has an extremely heightened sense of empathy. My whole life I’ve felt like this but I’m not sure I’ve ever met another one. Until now that is.”
He took a long pause and took this woman in. Who the hell was she? A teacher, yes, he knew that, but clearly also someone who drank too much, would spend the night with a stranger, however platonically, and had absolutely no fear of opening up, at least from what he could see.
“I’m not sure why you’re dropping the y off of the term empathy.” Yes, I feel that I have a lot of empathy for people, it is why I became a therapist. I’m not totally sure what you mean by empath though. How is this different than a person with a great deal of empathy? It sounds kind of like science fiction to me.”
“You’re cute,” she said, slowly patting his cheeks.
And with that she threw a ten dollar bill on the table and got up to leave. He was as startled by this abrupt departure as he was about everything else about this strange and mysterious woman.
“Wait a second,” he said anxiously. “Will I ever see you again?”
“I’m sure you will,” she said as she whirled out of the restaurant. Extremely puzzled, he looked down at his untouched plate of scrambled eggs. Suddenly he wanted to go home and do some reading.
Returning home he did some googling and found that there was a wealth of information on empaths and their supposed psychic abilities to read other people. He immediately became discouraged when he read some of the claims people made about being able to read the emotions of animals, as well as the tales of being able to heal people simply by touching them. He had studied psychology for a lot of years, worked very hard, and was skeptical of a number of new age philosophies that tried to offer shortcuts to emotional health through empty promises. He knew from personal experience that human change involved a whole lot more heavy lifting.
Yet a part of him was also highly intrigued by what he read. Scrolling through one particular webpage he found this passage which seemed quite familiar to him; “Empaths are highly sensitive. This is the term commonly used in describing one’s abilities (sensitivity) to another’s emotions and feelings. Empaths have a deep sense of knowing that accompanies empathy and are often compassionate, considerate, and understanding of others.
There are also varying levels of strength in empaths which may be related to the individual’s awareness of self, understanding of the powers of empathy, and/or the acceptance or non-acceptance of empathy by those associated with them, including family and peers. Generally, those who are empathic grow up with these tendencies and do not learn about them until later in life.”
This seemed quite familiar to him, especially the “knowing” part which described something he had been trying to pin down about himself for a number of years. It had gotten especially acute since he had been a therapist, and the final line in this passage about not learning about these tendencies until later in life also seemed interesting to him in light of a number of recent developments in his life.
For the first time in several months he went to the gym that Sunday and worked out. A new emotion was welling up inside oh him that he was not able to identify, and he wanted to exercise to ward off the feeling of anxiety he knew he would experience trying to figure this out. Still, something was new and something had changed. What was it? Did it have something to do with the mysterious new stranger in his life? He wasn’t sure, but he did know the feeling wasn’t altogether unpleasant. He went home and made a call to Dr. Paul Culthbert, his longtime mentor and occasional personal therapist.
The next day he sat in the lobby of Dr. Paul’s old school uptown office. His secretary, a 60ish woman who had been there since John was a student, looked over at him disapprovingly. She didn’t like unplanned interruptions in her schedule, and hadn’t particularly liked John when he was a student of Dr. Pauls’.
“Doctor will be with you shortly,” she said curtly to John as she hurried about the office straightening things up.
He laughed silently to himself at her use of the tem “doctor,” which suggested they were in some kind of medical setting as opposed to a second rate academic lair. She had great reverence for Dr. Paul and the work he did, and her use of the term doctor without his name attached signified her great respect for the great healer she was sure he was.
15 minutes later the great doctor appeared, bleary-eyed and in a rumpled suit that made it look like he may have slept on the very same couch where his patients poured out their souls.