barukkatharine:

codeman38:

withasmoothroundstone:

aroluna:

I’ve seen very little talk about hyper empathy so here’s some examples of it:

it can feel like the emotions of others are permeating a space and/or spilling into you causing high anxiety even when they’re not directed towards you/you’re not expected to react to them.

some people experience it by not being able to handle world tragedies or negative news reports because they feel a highly personal connection to the pain in those people with no way to help them.

it can also be empathy directed towards objects or animals that seems disproportionate to others.

this is something that a lot of autistic people deal with, so it makes me sad that I’ve seen basically no information about it in the communities on here

I would write a lot about this right now but I don’t have the right words stored in my brain yet.  But this is definitely a thing and I’ve been writing about it for years.  It can be part of being ‘sensing’ which Donna Williams wrote a whole book about.  It can also be part of other things.  The writing is out there, it’s just hard to find unless you know where to look.

…Oh, wow, I had no idea some of these things were a hyper-empathy thing.

I often end up experiencing a feeling similar to sensory overload when I overhear people yelling angrily at each other. Or even, in some cases, when seeing angry back-and-forth conversations on Tumblr. Somehow I never managed to connect this to hyper-empathy, but it totally makes sense in retrospect.

When I was a kid whenever I broke pencil lead I had to rub the tip of the pencil to make it feel better. I still do this, but I’ve also gotten much better at not breaking the lead.