Self-Understanding

When "I'm an Empath" Stops Being a Description

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  6 min read

Six people at a table that seats five, a coat still on a chair from earlier. Tunde has been talking about the restructure, and mentions he keeps waking at four.

Maeve leans in, and her face does the thing it does, which is soften.

“Can I say what I think is really going on?”

Nobody in the history of that sentence has ever said no.

“You’re not burnt out. You’re bored. You’ve been bored since they moved you onto that team, and you won’t say it out loud because you’ve got a mortgage.”

Here’s the trouble, and it isn’t Maeve’s fault: Tunde is somewhat bored, and two people are nodding.

Tunde says, “Maybe.”

What he’d lined up, having twice decided against it, was that he’s frightened he isn’t any good at this any more. He doesn’t say it. The table has an answer, it’s decent, and unseating it would take a speech.

First, and at length, the part where I defend the word

Highly sensitive people exist. Not as a quiz result. As a difference in equipment. Nothing below is worth reading unless that lands first.

Elaine Aron’s research program on sensory processing sensitivity describes a real temperamental trait: a nervous system that takes in more and processes it more deeply. Not a disorder, not a superpower: a different setting on how much arrives and how loudly. People built that way spend their lives being called dramatic by people whose amplifiers run quieter, and getting a name for that is not vanity. It’s relief of a kind hard to overstate to anyone who hasn’t needed it.

Noor books her taxi home before she needs it, because she knows the point in an evening where a room starts costing more than it gives. She can tell you who is upset at the far end of an open-plan office, and is usually right. It isn’t a party trick. It’s a tax.

She calls herself an empath, and is accurately reporting something true and hard about her own body. The word earns its keep in logistics: when to leave, what not to schedule, why the supermarket at six is a mistake.

When somebody says they’re an empath, the likeliest thing by far is that it’s true. This article is not coming for them.

What the word tells Noor is how sensitive her equipment is. What it doesn’t tell her is what her sister is thinking.

The sentence that changes address

I tend to notice other people’s emotions intensely. True, and for some people the central fact of their life.

Now: I know what other people are feeling.

Not the same sentence with the modesty filed off. It has changed address. I feel a lot comes from inside my own skin. I know what you feel claims to come from inside yours, and I have never been there.

The first is a report about yourself. The second replaces somebody else’s experience with your interpretation of it, and the other person becomes something to be read rather than someone to be asked. Nobody has ever felt what you feel, in the way you feel it, for the reasons you feel it.

Sensitivity is a fact about a receiver. Accuracy is a fact about the fit between receiver and signal, and no amount of the first guarantees the second. William Ickes’s research on empathic accuracy found that people beat chance, which is why any of this works, but that confidence is a poor guide to accuracy. Certainty comes from the fluency of your interpretation, not the evidence.

The loneliness of being nearly understood

Being told what you feel by somebody who dislikes you is easy to dismiss. Being told what you feel by somebody who loves you, and who is nearly right, is not, and almost nobody has a word for it. The account is decent, built from years of real attention, and correcting it means making a scene over a near miss. So you say maybe. The room holds a version of your interior that’s good enough, and you’re the only one who knows it isn’t the real one. You aren’t misrepresented. You’re pre-empted, and can’t even be aggrieved, because you were seen, just not by anybody who was looking.

Tunde doesn’t stop being frightened. He stops offering it.

“I’m self-aware” does the same thing to the self

Timothy Wilson’s work argues that most of the machinery producing our behavior runs where we can’t watch it, and that asked why we did something we produce reasons readily, often after the fact.

Introspection isn’t a window. It’s a press office: it answers instantly, at length, and has never said no comment.

Genuine self-awareness is not a state. It’s a nuisance you take on voluntarily, and it sounds like questions. What am I not seeing? How did that land on you?

The identity closes it. When I’m working on being self-aware hardens into I am a self-aware person, a premise installs itself: because I am self-aware, my account of myself must be accurate. Contradicting feedback becomes an error at the other end, and the label protects us from the information self-awareness requires. Self-knowledge that can’t be corrected is a wall with a nice sign on it.

Describing vulnerability without ever being vulnerable

Callum can give you the whole account: his attachment pattern, his two triggers, the way his father’s silences worked, all of it genuine, hard-won and largely correct.

He hasn’t said an unguarded sentence in years: one he hasn’t pre-screened, whose ending he doesn’t know.

Callum can say “I notice some activation coming up around abandonment,” which sounds like an X-ray and works like a raincoat.

He can’t say “I miss you.”

Analysis puts you in the observer’s chair, and the observer is never at risk.

I’ve done this. Once, specifically: I ended an argument by correctly naming my partner’s attachment pattern out loud. Note the verb. Ended, not resolved. I was accurate and calm, and the accuracy is what stopped it: there was nowhere left for her to go that wouldn’t have proved my point.

The problem was never the noun

Labels are useful. They let people find each other, they give language to something carried wordlessly for decades, and stop a person feeling defective. Peter Salovey and John Mayer coined emotional intelligence, Daniel Goleman put it on everyone’s shelf, and we’re better for it. An article telling you never to describe yourself would be useless.

The problem isn’t the noun. It’s what the noun is asked to do.

A description is a summary of experience, held loosely, with room for and I get it wrong sometimes. A credential is issued once and produced thereafter, to settle disputes before they’re heard. Most are earned, which is what makes this hard to catch.

So watch what the word does when somebody contradicts it. A description takes the information. A credential takes offence.

Somebody says your read on them last Thursday was wrong. Count whose Thursday the next two minutes are about. If it goes to them, you had a description. If it comes back to you, and you’re explaining why your inference was reasonable, you had a credential, and you’ll never reach the actual Thursday.

Accuracy is not the variable. (The step beyond it, the label becoming what you’re made of, is its own article.)

The grammar that keeps the door open

The repair is a change of grammar small enough to feel like nothing.

I try to be attuned, and I can misread people.

I think I understand what you’re feeling, and I want to hear it from you.

Say the second half slowly, because the second half is all of it. It’s a transfer of jurisdiction: it names the other person as the authority on their own interior, then waits, which is the only part that costs anything.

Maeve’s whole repair was one sentence instead of the half hour on the restructure. That might be my own thing. What’s four in the morning actually like? It would have got her the fear, which is more interesting than the mortgage.

Tunde, Maeve, Noor and Callum are invented, composites built from patterns that turn up at a great many tables and belonging to nobody in particular.

One note on the harder version of this. If somebody in your life routinely overrides your account of your own experience, to the point where you’ve stopped trusting what you know about yourself, that’s worth taking to a licensed therapist rather than to another article. Being nearly understood is lonely; being consistently overwritten is something else.