Little Fire

Empathy Redux

Posted by Boo , Saturday, March 27, 2010 2:50 PM

Another use for this tool acquired by the little girl who was me, called empathy!

This is gonna be some full-on rambling, so beware...

My good friend Tam has invited me to Easter services at her church. It will be hours long. A vigil. I want to go. Sure I do...

But I'm getting this feeling in my tummy about going that is like the feeling I've been having over my Family Interactions class.

Fear.

I'm a church shopper. I want to find a place where I can explore my thoughts feelings about goodness and mercy. I want my daughter to have a sense there is something greater than herself. So I shop. I go for awhile and love it, but then a switch flips and the thought of going to this place again for even one more moment makes me feel as though I'm in the river and someone has tied lead blocks to my feet and I'm going down, down, down...sucking in ragged breaths of nothing but dirty water and seaweed until I've reached the rocky bottom, and all is black. We don't go back.

What is that about?

A friend was talking to me about his own journey with Christianity, and we disagree on many thing (I'll probably have lots to say about that at some point lol), but so much of what he said is so gorgeous, I want to give in to it.

Give in...isn't that a telling choice of words? I think it is. For me, anyway.

This empathy, I think, may also be a shield, for me. If I'm taking on another person's emotional experience, I am protected from my own. Empathy is a wall between me and my roiling emotional self.

I have an idea that nothing is more frightening to me than feeling my own feelings.

When I listened to a recording shared with me by my friend of his church choir, the unfettered joy and freedom I could hear in their voices nearly gave me an anxiety attack. Tears started to leak from my eyes, for reasons I don't understand.

In fact, whenever I have tears about something that has to do directly with me, it never feels like I'm actually crying. It just feels like water is coming out of my eyes. I cry over movies or songs or the pain of those I love.

When it's about me, water comes out of my eyes.

I know this is probably not the optimum way to experience life, you know, through others, but when I start feeling things about my own life and my own experience I am 100% sure I am going to either die or go completely off the rails out of my mind. In that order.

So I find some way to shut down.

What does a person do about that?