I often feel other people's emotions. I can't usually tell them apart from mine. It's the most noticeable when I'm dealing with guys that like me. I often feel weird feelings of attraction towards them. Those guys always end up liking me. When I have real opportunities to do stuff with them I always get turned off and can't even make myself do anything with them.
Yes, whst your describing is a high sense of empathy. I too really feel other people's emotions but over the years have learned no to let them affect me. When I was you get, I used to have problems with this and if some on e laughed, I laughed, if they cried, I cried or if they we angry....well you get the point. Anyway, I've gotten better at not being influenced by others emotions. Happy days
I also notice that I get stressed out around people who are stressed out. Even if I don't know they're stressed out. When I'm not around that person anymore I feel less stressed out.
To tell the truth, I am not really that empathic but I can sense certain things, and know when something good or bad is about to happen. Both of these events happened in one day once. The entire day on the day I went to the nearby town of West Plains, good things were happening, and I felt like something more was about to occur. This sense turned out to be correct as I met a fellow rocker and someone who either used to be goth or had goth family (and she complimented me too.) but that was not the strangest thing about that day. I was sitting on a bench alone in walmart, waiting for my parents in the opticians office. I was just minding my own business, watching the crowd and giggling a bit at the dirty look I was getting. A nearby guy sees me on the bench, pushes his cart over and sits down beside me, not saying a word, but I could tell that he was going to try to talk to me. At that thought, I felt utterly repulsed, angry, frustrated, upset, and just about every negative emotion that could possibly be crammed into the human mind. I sat there, angry at everything and mentally shouting at the man next to me "Don't talk to me! Don't talk to me! Don't talk to me!" and willing him to go away. I know this all sounds so extreme and bizarre but I was just overwhelmed by a sense of wrongness coming from the man. I sat there several seconds longer, every hair on my body prickling, then, to my immense relief, saw my parents at the door of the office and got up from the bench, walking quickly over to them. Later, when I told my mom about it in the car, she began teasing me for being afraid of flirting, and I told her that he was way older than me and it wouldn't go anywhere at all. She told me that sometimes flirting is just for flirting. At this point, my father enters the car, and we tell him what was going on. When I talked about who the guy was, it turns out that dad had seen the guy before, and that he had a swastika tattooed on his arm. So there WAS a reason why my insticts were screaming at me to get away before the nazi started flirting. Also, many times I have felt saddness or anger in advance of catastrophes like shootings, stabbings, terrorist attacks and more. Yet another weird thing about me.
The one good thing about my empathy is that I get to have a gaydar. My gaydar isn't just a gaydar it's also a scepticdar, creepdar, pervdar(I get a lot of pings on this one), boringdar, shallowdar, conservativedar and many other -dars. It's not 100% accurate if someone wants to test me, but it's pretty much 100% accurate if I happen to sense things about people without consciously trying to. I also can get very creeped out by places that don't look creepy to most people. Those places usually are indian burial grounds or places that used to look very sketchy.
Did you take the Meyers Briggs test on the other thread? You are probably are an NF of some sort. INFJs, like myself often have this problem, feeling other emotions.
I sense other people's emotions all the time now. It actually has been pretty difficult to adjust to, but I am gradually getting better at dealing with it. I never used to believe it was possible, but my life got completely turned upside down in the last year. Now it kind of feels like I have an extra sense, always there.
This has happened to me so often its scary. Once my friend introduced me t this Guy she had just met and I go that feeling you described like every bad emotion at once and then a while later on I found out he was arrested for beating someone nearly to death...thar freaked me out
I'm an INTJ and have this same problem. The only thing is I'm not sure I put much in to my results in the Meyer Briggs Test. It claims there are only 16 types of people, and is based in Jungian Psychology. Carl Jung was also an alchemist who wrote an entire book on the sacred marriage between the sun and the moon. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I'm willing to bet it's all kinds of ridiculous.
I'm fairly empathetic as well, but not to the point where I feel other people's emotions as my own. It's more of an intuition (I'm an INFJ). My mother, on the other hand, is just like you described. Sometimes other people's emotions are "impressed" onto her. She also gets negative feelings around otherwise perfectly normal places.
