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So, I'm an empath. That means I feel other people's emotions as if they were my own. It's similar to how it works for Deanna Troi from Star Trek: TNG. I'm used to it by now. I first started noticing it as a distinct, specific sensory input separate from other ones back in my teens, and it really became clear after I began spending a lot of time interacting with people in online communities, where I could see nothing else about them but plain text.
Just like with anything else that I can see that other people can't, such as any of the -isms that apply to me, it's a matter of having enough individual separate experiences that you can begin observing an overall pattern and see how they're internally consistent with each other and how they fit together. The people who can't see it or haven't seen enough to see the pattern, in this case skeptics with their skepticism, which is an -ism too: will mostly pick apart the details of individual experiences as if they are completely separate and isolated from all the other ones and then insist that nothing is there.
But this post isn't an argument for the skeptics. I just think I should start trying to write some of it down in an organized way. I'm a scientist. I've made a lot of firsthand observations. I should do something with them. I've done my time picking them apart individually to see if they could possibly have alternate explanations, and have come to the conclusion that Occam's Razor eventually must apply.
So to start, I feel all of the incoming emotions as if they were my own. My brain will by default try to come up with a plausible reason for why I might feel what I feel, and I used to spend hours, sometimes days, spinning my mental wheels in pointless circles over emotions that weren't even mine. Like, I feel anger? Well, here's something going on in life that I could plausibly be angry about, so let's just be angry about it now. :p (I must have been real fun in my 20s.) Eventually I figured out how to tell the difference between emotions that are actually mine and emotions that are from somewhere else. Although sometimes I'll go too far in the opposite direction and end up externalizing all of my own emotions too. Emotions are subtle things.
Getting to how it works. I think of things in terms of an emotionscape, which is like a landscape in the physical world but in its own distinct space. In it there are emotions radiating from people, impressions from certain places, etc. Most things coming at me look like waves. Distances in the emotionscape don't directly correspond to distances in the physical world; how "close" someone is depends on two things: how strong the emotion is, and with how much attention they're thinking of me at the time that they're feeling the emotion. It isn't necessarily an emotion about me, just that it's there while they're thinking about me. They don't have to be anywhere near me physically for me to feel what they feel.
So, random emotion wave comes in. By default, I have no idea who it's from or what it's about.
If I have any outside context, I'll be able to infer what the emotion is about. This is pretty straightforward if I'm actively interacting with someone at the time, or I just sent them an email, or I've destroyed their base in a PvP game while they were clearly online. How accurate my inferences are depends on how much context I have.
If it's from someone I know well, I'll know who it's from. Everyone has a unique signature (or sometimes set of signatures), and if we've interacted with each other often enough, I'll learn to recognize theirs, even if we aren't actively interacting with each other at the time that the wave comes in.
If I know someone really well and about everything going on in their lives, I assume I would be able to infer what the emotions are about with extremely high accuracy, and it would start looking like I can read their minds. So far I've not found someone I can reliably test this on, because the problem with emotions is that nobody likes to confirm what they feel out loud for me. Sometimes I can figure it out by asking enough roundabout questions, but not usually.
Most people don't seem to have any idea that the emotionscape exists. They radiate all of their emotions all of the time, as if no one else can see it. They do seem to instinctively know how to cloak, if they get any hint that someone else might be looking, but they generally don't, and it seems to all happen subconsciously rather than consciously. In general, I try to respect people's privacy wherever possible, and not act on any info that I'm seeing that wasn't intended to be presented outside of themselves; I wait for them to say something out loud first and give me something to respond to. The only time I'll say something first is if I can see it might turn into a problem down the road if it remains unaddressed.
And finally, there are wavelengths. How well I can see anything depends on how close we are to the same wavelength. I've only ever known one person who was on the exact same wavelength as me. Whenever we were right next to each other, we were automatically one continuous whole, by default. Not two parts of a greater whole, not parts of each other, but one mind with two brains. It was awesome and I still sometimes miss him, and now I keep looking for someone I can do that with again.
Just like with anything else that I can see that other people can't, such as any of the -isms that apply to me, it's a matter of having enough individual separate experiences that you can begin observing an overall pattern and see how they're internally consistent with each other and how they fit together. The people who can't see it or haven't seen enough to see the pattern, in this case skeptics with their skepticism, which is an -ism too: will mostly pick apart the details of individual experiences as if they are completely separate and isolated from all the other ones and then insist that nothing is there.
But this post isn't an argument for the skeptics. I just think I should start trying to write some of it down in an organized way. I'm a scientist. I've made a lot of firsthand observations. I should do something with them. I've done my time picking them apart individually to see if they could possibly have alternate explanations, and have come to the conclusion that Occam's Razor eventually must apply.
So to start, I feel all of the incoming emotions as if they were my own. My brain will by default try to come up with a plausible reason for why I might feel what I feel, and I used to spend hours, sometimes days, spinning my mental wheels in pointless circles over emotions that weren't even mine. Like, I feel anger? Well, here's something going on in life that I could plausibly be angry about, so let's just be angry about it now. :p (I must have been real fun in my 20s.) Eventually I figured out how to tell the difference between emotions that are actually mine and emotions that are from somewhere else. Although sometimes I'll go too far in the opposite direction and end up externalizing all of my own emotions too. Emotions are subtle things.
Getting to how it works. I think of things in terms of an emotionscape, which is like a landscape in the physical world but in its own distinct space. In it there are emotions radiating from people, impressions from certain places, etc. Most things coming at me look like waves. Distances in the emotionscape don't directly correspond to distances in the physical world; how "close" someone is depends on two things: how strong the emotion is, and with how much attention they're thinking of me at the time that they're feeling the emotion. It isn't necessarily an emotion about me, just that it's there while they're thinking about me. They don't have to be anywhere near me physically for me to feel what they feel.
So, random emotion wave comes in. By default, I have no idea who it's from or what it's about.
If I have any outside context, I'll be able to infer what the emotion is about. This is pretty straightforward if I'm actively interacting with someone at the time, or I just sent them an email, or I've destroyed their base in a PvP game while they were clearly online. How accurate my inferences are depends on how much context I have.
If it's from someone I know well, I'll know who it's from. Everyone has a unique signature (or sometimes set of signatures), and if we've interacted with each other often enough, I'll learn to recognize theirs, even if we aren't actively interacting with each other at the time that the wave comes in.
If I know someone really well and about everything going on in their lives, I assume I would be able to infer what the emotions are about with extremely high accuracy, and it would start looking like I can read their minds. So far I've not found someone I can reliably test this on, because the problem with emotions is that nobody likes to confirm what they feel out loud for me. Sometimes I can figure it out by asking enough roundabout questions, but not usually.
Most people don't seem to have any idea that the emotionscape exists. They radiate all of their emotions all of the time, as if no one else can see it. They do seem to instinctively know how to cloak, if they get any hint that someone else might be looking, but they generally don't, and it seems to all happen subconsciously rather than consciously. In general, I try to respect people's privacy wherever possible, and not act on any info that I'm seeing that wasn't intended to be presented outside of themselves; I wait for them to say something out loud first and give me something to respond to. The only time I'll say something first is if I can see it might turn into a problem down the road if it remains unaddressed.
And finally, there are wavelengths. How well I can see anything depends on how close we are to the same wavelength. I've only ever known one person who was on the exact same wavelength as me. Whenever we were right next to each other, we were automatically one continuous whole, by default. Not two parts of a greater whole, not parts of each other, but one mind with two brains. It was awesome and I still sometimes miss him, and now I keep looking for someone I can do that with again.
