My Empathy is Not My Character Flaw

Sometimes I can’t sort through my feelings until I write them out. The curse of the INFJ. I can’t talk it out always or it comes out a big fat jumble. But give me a pen (or my phone) and I can write (or text) it out beautifully. 

Tonight my empathy is on my mind. First, let me say that I in NO WAY mean this to come off as boastful. I’m just using this as a method to wrap my mind around my own feelings tonight and perhaps say something that will help someone else who may be experiencing the same.  I’ve challenged myself to live out my blog more boldly and transparently for such a cause, so I guess this is par for the course. 

I’ve always been a highly sensitive person. I have always experienced things to a hyperbolic degree almost. It hasn’t been until my 30s that I had a label for that. Something to call it. I took several personality tests and began reading on love languages and psychology and finally began making sense of myself to myself. 

As a survivor of verbal/emotional abuse and narcissism, I was always under the belief that there was something wrong with me. Namely that I was “crazy” or “too emotional.”  I was broken and I needed to be fixed. It doesn’t take long before that absorbs into your psyche and flavors everything you do, think, and say, especially your self-concept, and as I’ve recently learned, your self-concept when trying to share your thoughts and ideas and feelings with new people in your life.  You can’t help but think other people will think the same thing of your “brokenness” if you let them see too much.  The scars of those wounds run deep... into my very soul. It doesn’t mean I don’t want them to go away, believe me... I’ve tried every day for as long as I can remember. But the problem is conditioning. And the problem is that I want to make those whom I love very happy, and for so long... that meant agreeing with and complying with their belief that I was the one at fault, to be blamed, like I said... I succumbed to the belief that I must be a broken person who needed fixing.  

The more I’ve studied what it means to be an empath, the more I love myself. Not in a narcissistic way, but in the healthy way that I believe I’m supposed to. I am still attacked by insecurities very frequently, but I try to remember the lessons I’ve learned about how special I am. 

My empathy is not my weakness. Despite surviving the abuse, even beyond recognizing the fallacies of your conditioned thinking, society has a way of imposing certain expectations on you. (Don’t even get me started on that...) But there is a stigma surrounding crying, even at healthy and appropriate times, and I resent that. I don’t want to be “the emotional girl” or the “highly sensitive person.”  Can’t I just be the girl who loves so deeply that she feels others’ emotions as her own?  Because that’s what an empath does. Can’t I just be the girl who’s so full of passion and zeal that her sadness takes on the same intensity from time to time?  Because that’s how empaths do.  Can’t I just be the girl admired for being brave enough to feel the world with such huge emotions that they sometimes escape her soul and crawl down her face as tears?  Because that’s admirable. And I’m not less of a person for feeling it. And I’m not wrong for feeling it. 

People need to realize that God designed us all differently, and many of us in complimentary ways. It’s a beautiful thing. My empathy is part of my design, what He knit in me from the womb. I don’t always understand how exhausted it leaves me, especially when the grief I feel is “borrowed” grief from someone else’s tragedy or loss. I don’t always understand why it seems like nobody else “gets it” or why it feels that everyone else judges that part of me... maybe that’s the highly sensitive factor kicking in. 

Maybe I won’t ever come to a complete understanding of myself. But I have a label for it now, a word to call it when I’m experiencing those feelings. I’m an empath. But it’s not my weakness.  Nor is it my character flaw. It is my strength.