Sometimes the world feels just too much. It’s a feeling many of us INFJs can relate to.
We suck up the emotions of others around us as if we were a sponge. Somehow, this often makes us understand people better than they understand themselves.
We often don’t want to see it this way. But there is a reason why people gravitate toward us for advice or when they need someone to listen to. They know afterwards they feel better.
If only the same would be true for the INFJs...
Instead, we feel drained, as if someone sucked life juice out of us. Of course, there is no problem if this only would happen occasionally. But even when no one is coming, we somehow recognise what’s going on at the neighbour table in the restaurant where we try to enjoy our meal.
It’s a bit like our antennas are always on. Not only for one channel but for almost everything our radio can receive.
That’s when things become a problem. Too much input becomes overwhelming. We feel the need to retreat and just be with ourselves to recharge our batteries.
For a long time, I thought that’s just how things go...
Today’s part is about how to find healthier ways to cope with your levels of empathy so that you won’t be overwhelmed so quickly.
But before I come to that, let’s first have a look at the different kinds of empathy.
Emotional and Cognitive Empathy
Most people have empathy; even psychopaths can. This may sound like a surprise. But it’s not when taking a closer look.
Cognitive empathy is judging how someone feels by their facial expressions, how they move, and anything else that is directly observable. When someone is sobbing, they are probably very sad. Slightly shaking hands may indicate that a person is nervous and so on. Sometimes we understand how someone feels from their overall situation.
So this kind of empathy is something you can train. All you need is observation and a somewhat intact memory to connect it to experiences you’ve had before.
Emotional empathy goes way deeper. It’s like putting yourself in someone else’s shoes and feeling what they feel. Like their pain or their joy is yours, too. You can see this with mothers who are deeply connected to their children.
And that’s the kind of empathy many INFJs recognise in themselves.
Empathy itself is not the problem. Losing yourself in other people’s emotions is.
Why Rationalising Emotions Does Not Help
The sum of your own emotions and everything you pick up from those around you can quickly become too much. So, like many INFJs, I tried to rationalise my world to avoid emotional overwhelm. It’s easy to find reasons why an unwanted feeling doesn’t make sense and is just stupid.
By doing so, you fool yourself and abandon parts of yourself.
This can work quite well for a very long time. But the more you bottle up, the more the pressure inside you rises. The funny thing is that it often feels like the opposite. So not like pressure, but as some kind of emptiness you feel inside you. Something that steals your sleep and makes it pretty clear that it wants to be heard and seen.
No way around it...
Now that we have that, we can take an even closer look at the quality of the emotions we tend to pick up too easily.
The One-Sidedness of Emotional Overwhelm
Emotional empathy would go both ways along the spectrum. If people around us are joyful, so would we. So far I have covered mainly the other side of the spectrum, as this is what’s causing all the trouble for INFJs.
Laughing is contagious. Even if we are in a group of strangers and they all laugh from their very hard for minutes, we would join in at some point. But for most other positive emotions, we don’t do that. All that happens is that we are not overwhelmed.
In other words, there is some one-sidedness. We get overwhelmed by the negative, but the positive end doesn’t affect us much, apart from contagious laughter or when your nation wins the soccer World Cup.
So why is it that we tend to have a bias for absorbing negative emotions?
I mean, it doesn’t have to be that way. The mother-child example from above shows that it can go in both directions equally. Happy child, happy mother...
This finally brings me to the point of how to heal overwhelming levels of emotional empathy.