Empathy Overload: The Hidden Cost of Being Hyper-Empathetic and Autistic

When Feeling Too Much Hurts: The Secret Pain of Hyper-Empathy - How Being Autistically Super Sensitive Can Be Debilitating

In my "day job" at NeuroDivergent Consulting, I work with organizations that want to be more inclusive of people with invisible differences (NeuroDivergence/Queer inclusion). 

There are a variety of services I provide to my clients:

• Facilitation & training.

• Writing (blogs/articles)

• NeuroDivergent sensitivity readings (for books, blogs, & documents)

• NeruoInclusivity Public Relations Consulting 

• NeuroInclusion consulting (project-based and hourly)

• Leadership and management coaching as part of an organizational ND initiative (teaching leaders how to manage better team members of varied brain types and teaching ND leaders how to lean into their NeuroDivergence as leaders)

Years ago, when I started my consulting business, I did more coaching (because coaching and mentors are precious tools organizations can use to ensure employee success (regardless of brain type). However, I've had to limit my coaching roster over the years and have started referring many coaching projects to other coaches. 

Lyric Rivera, when they had rainbow hair, with matching rainbow eye makeup and black and white bold, winged eyeliner.

Though I'm good at coaching, it can be very taxing on me (because of how personally invested I become in the lives of the people I coach). 

When my coaching clients (or people around me) struggle, I struggle (because their pains weigh on me, and I struggle to shift my mind in other directions). 

To keep myself healthy and safe, I only take on one or two new coaching clients each year - concentrating on leaders as part of an organization's Neruo-Inclusion initiative.

This allows me to focus where I'm most skilled (and on tasks, I'm best suited for) - delivering training, consulting, and helping organizations start conversations around Neruo-Inclusion (so they can gain the input needed to fix their organizational policies and procedures).

I'm also very selective of the clients I work with - because I worked in a workplace where we were expected to take abuse from our clients because they had money, and it was horrible. 

It was so horrific that when I became my own boss, I swore that I would do my best never to work with abusive people or a-holes again. 

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Intense Inner World 

Part of my personal Autistic experience is that I encounter the world around me (as well as my inner world) intensely from my sensory perception, which heightens how I perceive the world around me to my inner emotional experience (which is also intense). 

I have extensive (often overwhelming) feelings that frequently well up in me, catching me off guard. 

To me, little things (that other people can ignore) often feel like big things, causing me to react accordingly. I have intense reactions because I have intense experiences. 

The Pain of Hyper-Empathy

For me, empathy is one of those feelings (that can be so overwhelming it disables me - causing me to shut down, meltdown, and experience other types of emotional overloads). 

There are multiple types of empathy:

Cognitive empathy refers to the ability to identify and understand emotions of others, while emotional empathy (or affective empathy) is the ability to share another person's feelings.

It is a myth that Autistic People don't have feelings or empathy. 

More accurately, empathy is a spectrum, and Autistic People can be found in all places along that spectrum. 

Additionally, our place along that spectrum may not be fixed; for example, as an adult, my empathy has become significantly more overwhelming than it was growing up (possibly because I have more context for the pain and suffering of the world and the creatures living on it). 

Sometimes, I have so much empathy it physically hurts or makes me feel sick - this is one reason I can't watch movies and TV where people or animals are being beaten up, injured, or having medical procedures done to them (even though it is acting) - because I feel their pain as if it were my own. 

I didn't always experience my empathy this way, and not all Autistic People feel this intense, painful empathy.

Some Autistic People have lesser levels of empathy - and much lower emotional experience (like I did growing up), and there's nothing wrong with that. 

In fact, in many ways, I consider my overwhelming empathy to be a disability in the world we live in (because of how frequently I find myself overpowered by this particular emotion).

NOTE: Recommended additional reading on the Double Empathy Problem

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