Before I get into the story, I have a language note. "Empath" is one of those words that has multiple acceptable meanings. In a mundane sense, an "empath" is simply somebody who has a great deal of mundane empathy... they are able to put themselves in other people's shoes, and are able to feel the emotions somebody else is feeling alongside them. If I am at a funeral for somebody I've never met, I will likely still feel sad, not because I myself am grieving, but because I have grieved before and empathize with what they are feeling. Many people--especially in psychology--use the term "empath" to refer to people who experience this very intensely, and there is no intended supernatural baggage in that use.
That garden variety, mundane empathy is not what we're talking about today. In the Pagan and Witch community, often when people call themselves "Empaths," they mean a psychic Empath; they are claiming to have a psychic gift for feeling the emotions of others. I was in this category not very long ago. And listen... I'm a Witch. I believe in a lot of non-mainstream things, so I'm not trying to convince you that nobody is a psychic Empath. But I absolutely was not, and I think that it's important for all people who think they are (and people who encounter others who think they are, which you will if you are a Witch for any significant amount of time), to employ some skeptical thinking about it, because without some critical thinking, holding the identity of An Empath has the potential to stunt your spiritual and emotional growth in a lot of ways.
First things first: I found Witchcraft when I was 12 years old. I learned about it on some real sketch websites advertising "free spells," but quickly got into the online scene... stuff like About.com Pagan/Wiccan, MysticWicks, Yahoo! Groups and Chat, and innumerable others I don't remember. One thing about being in any Pagan or Witch context, online or offline, is that people will very casually talk about themselves as having some inherent, supernatural gift or trait. They'll call themselves Indigo Children, or Crystal Children, or Starseeds, or generically psychic, and of course, a lot of them call themselves Empaths.
I, being very eclectic, started getting a lot of information from more New Age sources, and being a somewhat arrogant and pretentious young teen with a budding interest in Witchcraft, I was smitten by these concepts. I knew that there had to be something special about me, I could feel it, I just needed to figure out what that something was. Eventually, after a lot of thought and consideration, I started identifying as an Empath, from my late teens all the way to my late twenties.
Now, I think it's important here to make in clear that I did, sincerely, believe that I was an Empath. I did not consciously take on a false identity because I thought it made me special and mysterious... in fact, it was really rare I talked about being an Empath at all. I might mention it if it came up, and I went to one (1) support group meeting for Empaths, but I largely just used it as a private personal narrative describing the abilities I thought I had at the time. I think this is important to bring up right away, because the last thing I want to do is give you the impression that people who identify as Empaths are all liars who want to be super special snowflakes. I suspect a lot of Empath-identified folks are in the same position as I was, and have come to this conclusion based on actual experiences they have had which brought them to this conclusion.
That said, why did I think I have those abilities? Well, because at the time I was really, really, really good at detecting the emotions of the people around me, even if they were hiding them, and I had no other good explanation for why I was able to do that. I was able to sense when my dad was going to have an outburst of anger, I was able to sense when my best friend was having their PTSD triggered before the actual shutdown would happen, and I remembered all these times that I had predicted that somebody was grieving or upset despite them giving their best poker face.
I took a lot of pride in my alleged Empathy. I used this to do things like direct conversations away from triggering subjects, and to mitigate the fallout when an outburst or trigger event would happen. I thought this was like... a spiritual calling or something like that.
When I was in my late twenties, I had graduated college and moved out of my parents' house. After a while, I realized that my powers had seemingly disappeared. I couldn't read my roommate's emotions very well at all, so I would get tense and think he was mad, scared, or sad when he was actually feeling pretty neutral about what was going on, and there were also times where he was legitimately pissed off at me and I had no idea until he finally told me later. I convinced myself--very stupidly--that going on testosterone as a trans man had somehow caused this, although going off T for a few years didn't bring it back. So I just accepted that, although I didn't know why, I wasn't an Empath anymore.
But eventually, from a Tumblr meme of all places, it all fell into place. I'd never been an Empath to begin with... I had simply developed pattern recognition skills to cope with being surrounded by specific volatile, traumatized people all the time.
When I was sensing that my dad was getting angry, it wasn't psychic Empathy, I was just subconsciously noticing the subtle changes in his behavior that would happen before, because I didn't want to make it worse or get caught in the crosshairs. Or, because so many outbursts were triggered by things like home repairs (we were poor and couldn't afford to fix things), the overall context of a faucet dripping or a light breaking or something would get me on edge because it often would result in an outburst. My body's fight or flight response would kick in early, and I would misinterpret that feeling as the emotions of others.
When I went to college, I wound up with a lot of friends who had PTSD or were in shitty relationships, so although I didn't need to worry about the same issues, there were still plenty of emotional breakdowns to develop pattern recognition around. My best friend in college, in particular, was an extremely traumatized individual who got regularly triggered by things most people around us weren't triggered by. Being able to tell that somebody is going to suddenly go completely silent like a walking corpse before it happens can feel like a psychic gift when you don't consciously notice all the physical signs that occurred before they get to that point, or the contexts these things always happen in. So I was reacting to things like subtle behavior changes and context that I didn't consciously notice, and that dread that would rise in me as I anticipated an oncoming mental health crisis? I was misinterpreting that as feeling my friend's emotions.
So in effect, I was feeling my own emotions and thinking they were other people's.
When my life context entirely changed, and I started hanging out with people who weren't constantly on the edge of an emotional catastrophe, all of that fell apart. If my roommate broke something, that context would cause emotions to well up inside me as I prepared for an outburst, and I would think he was feeling intense stress, anger, or grief. But he is not my dad and does not have such strong emotions about basic home repairs, so I was not detecting any emotions at all, I was feeling my own emotions that I had developed from years of being in a stress-inducing living situation.
Outside of that context? I'm actually kind of bad at reading people's emotions, like downright oblivious. The reality is that I was over-empathizing with people who either gave me attention I wanted or who punished me for not constantly babysitting their feelings. I was very attentive to my best friend's emotions in college because they gave me a lot of attention and I had a big crush on them... meanwhile, I never really noticed when my other friends were going through their own shit unless they directly told me. One of my other friends once (very kindly) told me to shut up, and I didn't know until hours later that my flippant and oblivious comments about self-harm were actively triggering him while I was standing there. I didn't notice this was happening because I didn't gain anything from developing that kind of pattern recognition with somebody who wasn't going to punish me if I didn't and who I didn't want to sleep with. And again, none of this was intentional, but it does make me sad to think about how many people's emotions I functionally disregarded during this time in my life.
Here's where I get into the more lecture-y portion of this essay: A lot of behavior I see among "Empaths" is deeply problematic, and everybody who identifies as an Empath should be aware of these problems so you can mitigate them. This is true even if you continue to hold this identity. There is no reason that even being a genuine Empath would make you perfect, and on paper I'm sure most Empaths would agree with that, but in practice many don't act like it.
Back when I was doing research on Empathy, before I actually identified as an Empath, I took several surveys and read several articles trying to discuss how to tell if you, yourself are an Empath. One that popped up over and over again always frustrated me, even before I started questioning Empathy in general: So many of them treated feeling the emotions of fictional characters as a sign somebody experiences psychic Empathy.
Now, again, if you're using the term "empath" simply to mean somebody who has a high level of mundane empathy, that's fair. But if you're trying to suss out whether or not you have a psychic ability, the last thing you should be doing is counting the ability to feel the emotions of fictional characters as evidence. The reason for this is not just that fictional characters are not real people, but that they are presented in a way that makes their emotions much easier to read, understand, and empathize with than a live human being's feelings are. An actor playing a character on screen is trying to express themselves in a way that you will understand as a particular emotion, and when it comes to books, you have much more description and often even internal monologue intended to make you feel those feelings.
The point is, being able to empathize with fictional characters is not a psychic power... if anything, it's empathy with training wheels. And OK, of course somebody who has a real gift for Empathy will probably also be good at the mundane empathy required to get the maximum emotional oomph from a work of fiction, but as far as the capital-E-Empathy I'm talking about here, crying over Primrose Everdeen or Mufasa doesn't mean anything. You were supposed to cry over Primrose Everdeen and Mufasa. Doing so does not make you psychic.
Because of the inclusion of such boringly normal things as evidence of being psychic, almost anybody who doesn't have impaired empathy from a personality disorder could be misled into thinking they are Empaths. And if you're just looking for a spiritual model to explain and cope with your experiences, that's not too big of a deal, but unfortunately there are a lot of problematic things that people do when they falsely believe they have psychic Empathy, so this low barrier of entry is not without negative consequences.
This one might hurt a bit if you aren't already aware of it, but it's important: "Empaths" have an actual, honest-to-Gods reputation for being deeply unempathetic. They think they're great at detecting and feeling other people's emotions because they're great at doing it in a few high-stakes contexts, but once they're in a context where those patterns don't apply anymore, they can become quite oblivious to other people's feelings.
Now, having a hard time detecting other people's feelings is not inherently that big of a deal, especially if you are aware that you have that deficit. For instance, now that I know I'm not particularly great at reading people, I can mitigate that by doing things like asking follow-up questions. The problem is that people who identify as Empaths, by their very nature, think they have a psychic gift that makes them naturally good at this, so they often will resist correction when they misinterpret or couldn't detect someone's emotional state or intentions.
As an example, I hang out in some more New Age leaning, newbie-oriented Facebook groups. On multiple occasions, people who identify as Empaths have had lengthy discussions talking about how they seem to attract liars and narcissists all the time and they have no idea why. They eventually came to the conclusion that people like that will often take advantage of Empaths' natural predilection toward self-sacrifice in the interests of helping others, and will flock to Empaths like a magnet. Yeah... it was kind of a circlejerk.
The elephant in the room is that many of these people probably aren't actually surrounded by liars and deceivers at all... they simply won't accept that sometimes their initial assessments of people's emotions are going to be wrong, so they pivot to thinking anyone who contradicts those initial assessments is attempting to deceive or manipulate them.
This is even worse when you realize how selective empathy truly is for most people. Privileged people in particular are likely to empathize more fully with other privileged people, or with people they are attracted to, without as much regard for minorities and members of oppressed groups they aren't a part of. One of the formative moments in questioning self-described Empaths being Empaths at all was related to a white Empath who went to a racial justice workshop and was so bad at reading the room or practicing even mundane empathy outside her own race that it was actually quite laughable that she thought she was an Empath at all. Add to that the confidence so many Empaths have in their "abilities," and what you wind up with is a bunch of people who don't take people's experiences of oppression or even just regular garden variety pain at their word. Like, there are people out there who literally believe that Black people feel less pain than white people do, there are doctors and nurses who believe that, you can find them all over TikTok talking about how they "know" people are lying about pain to get drugs.
This is why self-identified Empaths need to be critical. You need to recognize yourself as completely capable of making mistakes--and of potentially being wrong about your Empathy being psychic to begin with--because belief that you are infallible can have serious consequences for other people. In extreme cases, I've seen "Empaths" decide they are spiritually tasked with using that skill to "defeat" some group of ostensibly bad people--narcissists, sociopaths, liars, manipulators, whatever--which is exactly the kind of bullshit that can put you straight onto the crunchy-to-fascist pipeline.
So, because there's often discourse about this subject, I think it's important to validate that many people (especially neurodivergent people) display empathy by talking about what they feel are shared experiences. There's nothing wrong with this, and I think it's weird that people keep trying to portray it as sinister, self-absorbed behavior. This is not what I'm talking about.
When I say Empaths often make people's emotions about them, what I mean is that people who strongly identify as Empaths often develop the tendency to treat other people's feelings like a burden they are personally responsible for. It's a habit a lot of us develop when we are forming pattern recognition skills (babysitting people's emotions so they don't have an outburst affecting us), and that's a perfectly understandable coping mechanism in such a situation, but if you aren't aware of it, it can get really maladaptive and self-absorbed once you leave that context.
Let's talk about my crush again (embarrassing). When we were in the vicinity of one another, I was constantly curating everything I noticed going on to prevent them from being triggered. Obviously it's reasonable and good to avoid triggering a person with PTSD, but I went to inappropriate lengths to do this. And I certainly wanted them to get better for their own sake, but I also had a huge savior complex... I was very much hoping that if I could successfully establish myself as a safe space for them, they would naturally, you know, fall head over heels in love with me or something. And that, well... it's just not cool. It was manipulative and gross. They didn't need some Empathic Guardian Angel buffering them from their pain at all times, what they needed was therapy and mental health medications.
But there was another level to this, and it's something I see other self-identified Empaths talk about much more often. I would often, after a day of trying to anticipate all my friend's emotions, sit at home and ruminate on their trauma. I'd be in bed, and I'd suddenly get a vivid picture of the thing I knew had given them PTSD, and I'd have an extreme reaction to it. Now, again... not voluntary, and it's certainly not abnormal to think about things you know your friends suffered through and get upset about it. But I would lay there in bed, ruminating, believing that I was feeling this person's emotions as if I'd gone through the same thing, and treating it as some sacred burden I was supposed to bear along with them.
Total main character syndrome. I took this person's trauma and made it about me.
On the other side of the coin, it's also really common for people to use Empathy as an excuse to completely shirk their responsibilities toward others. This is the "Good Vibes Only" school of Empathy... when you cut friends and family out of your life for having negative emotions because they make you feel sad. And to be clear, if being friends with somebody makes you completely miserable all the time, you are well within your right to minimize your contact with them or even cut off the friendship, and you absolutely should not be in the position where you feel like the sole person responsible for somebody else's mental health, you are not their therapist. But supporting people through tough emotional times is not "unpaid emotional labor," it's an inherent part of being a good friend.
There's a phenomenon I've often heard called the Crunchy-To-Fascist or Crunchy-To-Alt-Right pipeline. This is when somebody who has an interest in some "crunchy," alternative, "hippie" coded thing is gradually pushed toward right-wing and/or fascist perspectives, especially things like eugenics. For example: You get into herbalism through a more left-wing, punky DIY scene. You consume a lot of resources where people don't really talk about electoral politics, but they seem to have a really similar ethos to you, so you continue engaging. Gradually you get indoctrinated into believing that birth control is bad, that all diseases are curable by medicinal plants or lifestyle changes, that seed oils are killing you, that men are being feminized by a modern diet, and you might not really notice that you are being influenced into believing fascist talking points... no reasonable person, for instance, believes that plants and lifestyle changes will cure all diseases, what they mean is that we should be letting people who can't be cured by them die. When they say that long-term birth control is bad for women, what they mean is that women's main role should be to give birth. When they say that diet is "feminizing" our men, what they mean is that they believe being gay is a disease that needs to be prevented or cured. And so forth.
Empathy is not the same as herbalism, but there are a lot of parallels you need to watch out for. Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, I noticed an uptick in New Age people--specifically those who identified as having some sort of special gift like Empathy--engaging in conspiracy-adjacent behavior. There were people claiming to encounter people who "had no auras" or had gray auras, or who insisted that COVID-19 symptoms were "4D Ascension" symptoms, there were self-described Empaths asking about people whose emotions they couldn't read, and behaved as though this was a sign of some horrible thing going on, like they were NPCs with no agency or consciousness, or potentially even evil. On Tumblr I've seen weird rants from self-described Empaths declaring that they were put on this earth to "defeat" so-called narcissists and sociopaths (meaning people they have a hard time reading). This kind of thinking is a huge sign you are being sucked into an alt-right fascist pipeline, because the conclusions of these beliefs always lead to a worldview in which you are an inherently superior type of human being.
Because people don't often identify as fascists, or even understand themselves to be fascists, this sort of stuff doesn't get called out nearly as much as it should in New Age and Witchy spaces. But if you or people you interact with start expressing weird beliefs like this, you need to at the very least pump the brakes a bit. Even if you never go full fascist, if you never decide that it's your duty to rid the world of "inferior" human beings, you are getting dangerously close to that sort of worldview if you allow this kind of mentality to go unchecked.
Even people who do not go full fascist, or who don't become more right-wing as a result of involving themselves in this community, are at risk of ignoring their own biases. Remember when I said Empaths have a reputation for being un-empathetic? A lot of this has to do with the fact that Empath lore kind of encourages people to immediately trust their snap judgments about other people's feelings and motivations, and those snap judgments are going to be affected by the biases you have developed over time, whether you know and like it or not. You don't have to be a disciple of Hitler to be affected by the racist, misogynistic, or otherwise bigoted messaging we are subjected to every day.
As I said way at the beginning, I'm not here to demand you stop believing you are an Empath, I'm only here to suggest that you really put some thought into it and consider alternative reasons why you have had the experiences you have. But more importantly, regardless of whether you are or are not genuinely Empathic it is, in fact, your responsibility not to use it as an excuse to be a bad person.
You should pump the brakes if you find yourself getting into the weird fashy parts of this community. You should pump the brakes if you start thinking of yourself as your friends' emotional babysitter. You should absolutely pump the brakes if you start thinking people are not human beings anymore if you can't immediately read their emotions. By "pump the brakes" I don't mean "stop considering yourself an Empath," but that you should be backing away from resources that are teaching you toxic things and ideologies that dehumanize others.
But you can still use the resources available to Empaths to help cope with overstimulation and other consequences that can result from becoming too invested in other people's feelings, ruminating on other people's lives, and the other negative pitfalls of being a highly-empathetic person, supernaturally or not. Hell, I don't identify as an Empath anymore, but I still use techniques like cord-cutting visualizations if I start feeling like I'm too invested in people's lives. I still use crystal jewelry intended to ward other people's emotions. Just do those things responsibly.
Happy Trails,
Wolfpeach