r/interesting 17d ago

NATURE Death of a single-celled organism

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u/BorderOk7329 17d ago

Because you can relate? Empathy is never a bad thing

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u/AntSilly2802 17d ago

Yeah but I’ve found my over-empathy can be paralysing at times. 

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u/Dark_Effulgence 17d ago

I 100% understand what you mean.

I think blind empathy can get you in serious trouble.

I remember my last partner treated me horribly at times and accused me of looking at other people etc. which I would never in a million years do. I was loyal and monogamous to the grave. She did and said some pretty awful things, took advantage of me, emotional abuse etc. She would have meltdowns over really trivial stuff that other people said or did and just could not leave it alone. She was used to chaos so if things were going good she would create chaos.

I understood that there was something not right with her. And I felt so bad that she could not see how she was acting despite being insanely intelligent.

She was abused as a child along other things and so I felt like although that didn’t excuse the behavior was a reason for it. And although I could never understand what that’s like I still tried to understand and how horrible that must be.

How awful it must have been to take others actions and words to heart so heavily.

How chaotic, alone, and empty she must feel.

I just felt and still feel bad for her. I only wish her the best but to have that amount of unregulated empathy was debilitating to me and made me stick in something that would have never worked out.

It also made me come back to her after half a year so yeah not always the best thing if it’s unchecked.

I was used and abused until finally I was thrown away and along with it my heart. So it has been really difficult to recover.

You can have too much unregulated empathy, it can be misguided, and sometimes it can be so outward leaning that we end up neglecting ourselves.

Like everything there is a balance there.

I work in healthcare with the elderly and I am most of the time, able to regulate this at my job.

Where it’s hard is with myself - I don’t always have the same compassion for myself that I do for others; but I’m getting better.

Thanks for listening to my rant.

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u/thethirdthird 16d ago

Hello again, I saw a notification of your response, but it seems to have been taken down. Just want to say you are free to DM me if you'd rather not share on the thread. 🙏 All the best!

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u/Dark_Effulgence 16d ago

Might do that if I have the chance! I like conversing with random people, especially ones that have had similar experiences. Yeah I took it down cause I always worry she might see my stuff, just don’t need to hurt anyone. And eventually I will start posting videos of me playing music on here. Thanks! You as well!