Empathic Connections: Feeling What Others Feel

Empathy is the ability to share and understand the feelings of others. Everyone has a varying degree of empathic ability. The empathic connections between people are a defining trait of humanity. It is the source of our compassion for others as well as a measuring stick of our morality.

Do You Feel Me?

Have you ever cried while watching a movie or television show? Have you ever felt the emotions of characters as you read a book? These are signs of strong empathic ability. Typically, people with high empathic ability are greatly influenced by external emotional stimuli.

Some people are less susceptible to external emotional stimuli. They are perfectly able to understand the emotions of others but are not as affected by external emotional influences. This is the difference between having empathy and being an empath.

Beings Of Light

Empaths have the ability to help others heal from emotional wounds and scars. When an empath learns how to use their ability, they can help others work through their trauma. They can help others work through their own emotions to ease their pain. This ability tends to draw people to empaths. Often people will randomly start up a conversation with an empath and several minutes, or even hours later, may find that they’ve laid their whole personal history at the empath’s feet.

Because of the connections they feel to others, empaths have to be careful that they do not take on more emotional energy than they can handle. An empath can quickly become overwhelmed trying to help someone deal with trauma if they do not learn how to manage the emotions they feel.

Emotional Overload From Empathic Connections

For empaths, the weight of emotional stimuli can quickly become overwhelming. Sometimes over-stimulation can come from feeling the traumatic experience of someone else. Over-stimulation can also come from just being in a large group of people, feeling all of the varied emotions that they collectively feel.

Empathic connections are not just found in one-on-one personal interactions. A story in a book, a lyric in a song, or a scene in a movie can elicit an empathic response. With so many emotional stimuli in the world, an empath can very easily become overwhelmed if they do not know how to manage those stimuli.

Managing Empathic Connections

Learning how to manage their ability is vitally important to an empath. If you are a struggling empath, here are a few resources that can help:

• How To Stay Emotionally Balanced If You’re An Empath
• 17 Survival Tips For Empaths And Highly Sensitive People
• How To Manage Being An Empath

Learning to manage your empathic connections can lead to a life filled with the joy of helping heal others.

Housekeeping: Since it has been two years since I’ve done any work on my blog, I’ve gone through every prior post to update for search engine optimization. I’ve made some minor content updates, but nothing that impacts the message of each post. Also, on a few technical notes, I created all of my old posts in the “Classic” WordPress editor. I’ve now converted them all to the Block editor for formatting uniformity between old and new posts. I also removed unused and outdated plugins to tighten up site security as well as hopefully increase site performance.

Teaser: Next time, we’ll take a look at what men want in their relationships.