Free The Art of Empathy by Karla McLaren Page B

simply didn’t go to Dad; Mom could help to a certain extent, but Dad seemed entirely perplexed by extreme emotions.
    Extreme emotions were a central feature of my childhood, because we lived across the street from a child molester ( Empath alert: I will not go into detail; I respect your sensitivity). From the age of about thirty months until I was four years old, I was molested by the dad across the street, who also molested many of the little girls in my neighborhood. Although my childhood was filled with normal kid stuff, it was also filled with extreme fear and anxiety about what would happen next. I learned to rely heavily upon rage and intense (often violent) physical activity to help me deal with what was happening to me, to my little sister (who is sixteen months younger than I am), and to the other little girls in our neighborhood. This ongoing abuse was discovered and stopped when our elder sister (who was twelve at the time) found out and told our parents. The police interviewed us, and we eventually went to the district attorney. But the other girls were too ashamed to talk about what had happened (and their parents were unwilling to believe us), so the case was dropped. After the case was dropped, no one ever spoke openly of the situation again, and we continued to live in a neighborhood filled with toxic secrets for another seven years. The molestation stopped, but things didn’t get much better.
    I was an intense kid—fiercely angry, wildly active (I liked to run fast and throw myself off of high things)—and I was filled with a sense of terror that I tried to cover in any way I could. I had a stutter and multiple learning disabilities, and I had so many nightmares that a family friendcreated a monster catcher for me out of an old radio that he painted and decorated. (I could turn the dial to whatever level of monster I wanted to be protected from, and I always turned it all the way up to eleven!) At that time, my hyperempathy was both a survival tool and a burden. I had learned to ramp up my empathic skills and read my molester’s moods carefully so that I could give him what he wanted and avoid excessive harm (though what he wanted was directly harmful, so my relationship with my own empathy became deeply conflicted and entwined with hazardous levels of self-abandonment). But I couldn’t turn off my intense empathic skills, because I didn’t know how I had turned them on. My hyperempathic skills became involuntary, unmanageable survival mechanisms in a human emotional world that was pretty much incomprehensible to me.
    Here’s why: Even when you put aside actual instances of abuse, the following are normal everyday behaviors among humans—lying about our feelings; avoiding sensitive subjects that are glaringly obvious; leaving important words unsaid; pretending to like things we don’t like; pretending we’re not feeling an emotion that we’re clearly feeling; using language to hide, obscure, and skirt crucial issues; attacking people who frighten us without ever realizing we are full of fear (most people think they’re angry when they do this; they’re not); stopping all movement toward change without ever realizing we’re full of anger and grief (most people think they’re being careful when they do this; they are, but they don’t often know why); and claiming that we’re being rational when huge, steamy clouds of emotion are pouring out of us. My experience of human interaction was one of noise, static, emotional absurdity, and continual bewilderment. Humans were emotionally exhausting, and they made me feel confused, afraid, unsafe, angry, and desperately lonely.
    Thank goodness, my home and my neighborhood were filled with cats and dogs. They gathered around me and provided safe, emotionally honest relationships in which I could hone my empathy in understandable interactions. My wonderful dog and cat friends never lied about their