Quick answer: You might be, if your ‘empathy’ has become empathic distress—absorbing everyone’s pain while calling it sensitivity. The diagnostic distinguishes bleeding (drowning in others’ emotions) from feeling, and identifies archetypes like the Chaser, the Absorber, and the Dark Empath. Your caring may be frozen terror or validation-seeking. Seeing it clearly is the chance to transform it into something that heals.
The conversation lasted forty-five minutes, and somehow you absorbed her marriage problems, anxiety about her teenage son, resentment toward her mother-in-law, and her creeping fear that she chose the wrong career twenty years ago. You canceled your afternoon plans because you need to lie down. You're replaying everything she said, turning her pain over in your mind like a stone you can't put down. I'm just so empathetic, you tell yourself. I feel everything so deeply.
