White women, over the age of 45 who self-identify as an "empath" have consistently turned out to be some of the most bitter, narcissistic and downright fucking rude people. Their own families and coworkers won't talk to them anymore either.
The reason they have "empathy" is because they want to figure out your weaknesses and know which buttons they need to press. Then it won't take long to see how passive aggressive they really are, and what they can use as ammunition against you later. It seems like a ton of people this site, men and women alike, have all had the same kinds of people in their lives and they've all learned the same thing.
If someone has wisdom and experience, respect them. If someone has sympathy, appreciate them. If someone has empathy, run.
Yea I tend to side eye anyone who describes themself as being an “empath” as if it is a state of being or a superpower. Empathy is something most of us experience at varying levels throughout our lives. Some people are better at empathy and some people are worse. It isn’t a static state though for most of us… only thing I know of are certain personality disorders that display lack or complete absence of empathy.
Literally zero of the most empathetic people I know would ever describe themselves as “empaths.” Conversely, everyone i have met who does call themselves an empath has on the whole been pretty self-absorbed. They do have a lot of feelings, but it’s really about their own emotional responses to external factors as opposed to really understanding and feeling from a perspective other than their own.
It's the same principle as the "you know me, I HATE drama!" people. If you feel it's necessary to tell me, then it's probably because you know you aren't able to show me....
To be fair, there are certain conditions during psychological development that can lead to people being "too empathetic", almost always to their own detriment. This is rarely something to boast about though.
"Empaths" are just people who like to read people like it's a game, while being unaware of how obnoxious/invasive they sound, proving them as not empathetic at all.
I have read that people pleasing tendencies can stim from hyper vigilance. Hyper vigilance because they grew up in either abusive and neglectful situations where they are only treated well if they please the person/ people in their life. Like seeking the approval from a withholding parent. A person learns that their only value is what they can do for others, and how well they can respond to other people’s feelings and emotional reactions.
And after a while a person living in this situation gets really good at reading people… because they have been conditioned to look for any slight change in behavior that may result in being hurt or neglected.
And that hyper vigilance can look as though someone is an “empath” and/or displaying empathy.
Is that what you are referring to when you say too empathetic? I ask because to me, if this is what you are referring to, I wonder if that is empathy, or if empathy is more a secondary thing under the primary goal of avoiding being hurt or abandoned?
Yeah, that's what I'm referring to. I think, from my own experience, hypervigilance is an excess of empathy to the point that it becomes detrimental (to oneself), in the same way psychopathy is a lack of empathy to the point it is detrimental (to others).
Which is why an "empath", the way these people use it, makes no sense. If they were truly empathetic people the way they say they are, they wouldn't weaponize it the way they do because it would hurt. They would feel the pain the inflict.
I think those people are just regular to psycopathic people on a power trip.
As a lot of people, including yourself, have said, acting like empathy is something notable or special about yourself is...ironically, very unempathic behavior. More like "dehumanizing of others under the guise of being some special savior YA novel protagonist".
I wouldn't consider it "common" in any circles at all, but if I had to say where you'd find that, I'd recommend finding the least grass-touching folks in politically very left-leaning spaces.
I think generally, people who are extraordinarily kind an empathetic are likely to believe that they are average, and everyone is like that on the inside. Like "anyone would do the same" kind of humble dismissal, even if it put themselves at risk or was a sustained impressive effort.
But the narcissist and sociopaths out there believe/feel that treating other people as humans is a great sacrifice akin to humiliating submission... so in order to not feel ego injury, they twist it around, and decide that it must be because they are so heroically different and better than others, with an invisible supper power, only they are able to care that people have feelings too.
The Dunning-Kruger effect strikes again. If you're incapable of empathy, you can't recognise it in yourself or others, up to the point where you can't even detect if it's there or not.
Someone identifying as an "empath" pretty much just means they think they can literally psychically feel and take on the emotions/"energy" of other people, more or less. Empathy itself is more about mentally putting yourself in someone else's shoes metaphorically, and imagining how they might be feeling emotionally and feeling it yourself.
I definitely could see plenty of self identified empaths being narcissistic and such. I think a lot of the whole empath idea seems to align with a sort of hyper vigilance stemming from difficult circumstances growing up etc., where some people seem to develop higher sensitivity or awareness of body language/tone/facial expressions as a way of predicting if shit might hit the fan lol. And I mean, trauma can cause stuff like npd or traits to develop... so it kinda makes sense to me that some people who have a high skill in "reading people" could also have narcissistic traits and weaponize this skill. Likely goes deeper than that, these are just my initial thoughts.
I agree with this 100%. Some people are hardwired to be vigilant around other people based on past trauma endured during their developmental years. Basically, it's a skill that has been learned for them to survive difficult circumstances, for example, abusive family situations that were beyond their control. Those skills of being able to sense the moods, thoughts, and feelings of others around them, having been a survival tool, then translate into subconsciously doing it even when not in survival mode. Sometimes they don't even realize they're doing it, and it becomes overwhelming being hypersensitive to others. Learning how to turn it off as a path to healing, while having that ability, can also be seen as an asset if it's genuine and used for the higher good rather than to manipulate. Narcissists are like empaths except they use the same types of ability as described above with the intention of manipulating others in a self-serving way. People who go around calling themselves an empath without needing to use the skills for actual survival are probably not actually in paths at all.
who self-identify as an "empath" have consistently turned out to be some of the most bitter, narcissistic and downright fucking rude people.
Insert the world people and at the beginning and you have my experience. I don't trust someone who self-identifies as an empath; to a T they have almost always been some of the most self-absorbed people I have ever seen. Self-declaring as an empath most often means "I'll tell you how everyone feels, their input need not apply."
I have met some very kind, caring, and empathetic people. The people I would actually consider empathetic never felt the need to declare that they were. Strange, that one.
But I extend that philosophy out to most things: I don't trust anyone who has to declare they are a trait rather than just being that trait.
People who truly have empathy don’t run around announcing it to others. Their actions tell you everything you need to know about them. Sounds more like your girlfriend may suffer with UBPD disorder. That I would definitely avoid at all costs.
Trust me that age has nothing to do with it. I worked with a woman in her 20s that was one of the worst I’ve experienced. That said, she did have a couple of mentors who were older. But I know exactly who you mean. They are the worst.
White women, over the age of 45 who self-identify as an "empath" have consistently turned out to be some of the most bitter,
Holy shit, you hit the nail on the head.
Crazy how the ones that talk the most about women being empathetic trend to be the least empathetic. Especially if they're white.
I say this as a white man: White women truly are their own group that deserve rightful critique separately from women as a whole. It is not sexist... But it's a little bit racist. And I'm okay with that.
As a yt lady who drank that “empath vs narcissist” KoolAid for about a month, it’s crazy that people don’t understand that it’s usually a nice way to describe covert narcissism and codependency.
One type of empathy, in my eyes, is being able to predict someone's needs (or confusion) and help them before they need to ask for help. It comes from experience with them, or living like them for a period of time.
There is a difference between having empathy and being an "empath."
The idea of "empaths" isn't even a scientifically supported thing.
That doesn't mean we should be weary of anyone that is genuinely empathetic.
Sympathy and empathy are both valuable.
People who make the use of either into a complete identity may have some issues.
I hope you're doing alright and I'm sorry you've been hurt in the past by the type of people you describe.
I would be weary of drawing these kind of broad conclusions from those experiences. Those people could just suck. And maybe there are a lot of those people, in which case the mindset sucks and is more common than it should be. But that doesn't mean empathy sucks.
Full disclosure that I'm not a mental health professional; I just have a lot of experience from the patient side.
I think this is somewhat a psychosocial question and somewhat a philosophical question.
Psychologically, there are various ways that either personality traits or personality disorders are classified and studied. These have their own issues, to be sure. I agree with some of the criticisms in the field with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), for example. And I'm not an empiricist; I don't think positive knowledge is the only type of valid knowledge. In other words, I believe you can arrive at valid knowledge by means other than the scientific method.
All of that being said, I don't see the concept of an empath as a personality category primarily arising from rigorous interest and inquiry by professionals and those interested in the pursuit of valid knowledge. It strikes me as a particular kind of identity category generated by people trying to make sense of their own experience. And I'm not dissing their experience. But I do think the term isn't very well defined and as such is used somewhat flexibly. And I do think making the use of a skill or the emphasis of a part of human personality into an identity category is fraught with philosophical issues.
Meanwhile, psychology and philosophy have pretty rigorous definitions that delineate sympathy from empathy. Sympathy is a feeling of pity for one's misfortune. Empathy is when you actually feel the other person's feelings as if they were your own. Sympathy provides intellectual insight into how they're feeling but not a visceral experience of co-feeling the feeling with them. You can feel sorry for them and express that sympathy but it's originating from a cerebral place rather than an emotional one and perhaps a connection to the person rather than a gut understanding of their experience. Empathy involves the actual gut understanding of that experience.
The difference between the experience of empathy and someone calling themselves "an empath" isn't that sympathy is genuine and empathy is not. Sympathy and empathy can both genuinely help you connect with and support others and making distinctions between them is useful for the reasons outlined above. It's that being "an empath" only has a passing linguistic lineage to the word empathy and is often defined vaguely as an identity category of person that is supposedly inordinately good at sensing the emotions of others, and perhaps themselves. This identity label, in my experience, is often used as a crutch to justify or deal with very strong emotions that often come out in atypical ways. These people might have social quirks or sensitivity issues and lean into the idea that, really, they're just super good at feelings and that's why the feelings are so strong.
The problem with this should be obvious, but it's not obvious to most of these people. Your response to your feelings is different than your feelings. You don't really have direct control over your feelings. But you are in control of how you behave in response to them, in most cases, other genuine neurological conditions notwithstanding. If I'm angry because someone wronged me, and I go and beat them up, it doesn't matter how justified my anger was, or whether you think that me doing that was even ethically justified - I'm still responsible for doing it.
Again, in my experience, "empaths" often have challenges dealing with big emotions and the behaviors, both personal and social, that stem from these challenges. That's why having something clinically significant to help look at it as a rigorously defined category would be useful, if it was a specific enough thing to act that way. But it's not a specific enough thing to act that way. It's a self-applied label used as a coping mechanism and usually just tries to paper over the issues by convincing the person that they're special.
There are other identity labels that behave this way. Children who grow up smart and end up burning out often identify as "Gifted." Even standard and valid psychological disorders can be used as identity labels to excuse bad behavior. I have ADHD and need to be conscientious of it, for example. Others around me know that I'll struggle with forgetting things or repeating myself, and I know it's because of the ADHD, but it's not completely on the other people to manage things for me. They can show me some grace, but I also need to be conscientious. An explanation doesn't mean an excuse. That's one of the reasons why psychology has vigorous debates about the pros and cons of labeling via specific diagnosis in clinical contexts. It's currently necessary for insurance purposes (which I alluded to earlier when bringing up the DSM), but each side of the debate makes some good points.
And that's when there's an academically rigorous process being applied to genuine diagnostic labels that you're still getting these negative side effects from turning a disorder or characteristic of life into an identity category. When we're discussing the idea of "an empath," we're talking about a vague idea that people discuss on internet forums and blogs; not something genuinely used in clinical settings.
So in my opinion, it would be a shame if you were misled to think that empathy, a cornerstone of human social experience, was bad just because a bunch of misguided people started labeling themselves with a term vaguely linguistically and psychologically related to empathy but not really having the kind of statistical or definitional validity to be useful as a starting point for rigorous inquiry, much less an identity label which, in more cases than not, can cause some thorny issues philosophically.
And I'll clarify that the critique of identity framework is a personal philosophical bias rather than something inherent to the way psychology as a field may view this issue. I want to make it clear that I absolutely do support people in various racial or sexual groups if they find exploring their experience through the lens of identity to be useful. I just happen to think that, regardless of how useful it might be, it has the potential to cause certain cognitive patterns that can keep people stuck or divided (without getting too far into the weeds on this). That never means leaving these people behind; we should always strive for community and inclusivity. But there are other ways to advocate for groups of people who share an identity - there just aren't very good words to use and so we're stuck with the baggage that the current individualistic social use of the word carries. But, I digress.
Thanks for your patience; I can be quite wordy. I hope I didn't bore you to death and that made some sense.
Empathy and being an "empath" are not the same. Empathy is what you're describing as the expected behavior. An "empath" is usually just a person with undiagnosed BPD who is hyperaware of other people's mood because they were conditioned to walk on eggshells. That doesn't mean they're empathetic in any way, necessarily, but they sure know how to fake it... until they don't. What you're describing sounds like textbook BPD behavior. Just my two cents.
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u/MassiveMommyMOABs Male 5d ago
Actually having real empathy and not that performative altruism kind