all the highly empathetic people i know in my life have had abusive home lives and that’s because we were trained to read a situation at any given moment in our homes and learn how to react within seconds because if we didn’t and said or did the wrong thing, we’d get fucked up and beat and hurt
but like subconsciously always reading the mood of any atmosphere or space you’re in, always being able to gauge how people feel, it’s not a fucking gift, it’s exhausting. you can’t turn it off, even if you want to. you read the situation and if it’s negative, you freak out because if someone’s angry at you, it’s the end of the world
like we’ve internalized the scars from our childhood when an adult being mad at you was the worst thing ever and it’s carried with us into adulthood. it’s hard to unlearn all that.
so like a lot of us have mental health or anxiety issues because we also start internalizing all the energy from people, be it positive or negative, and so anxiety-inducing and frustrating to the point of tears
#hello this is called hypervigilance#And is a symptom of ptsd#And the fear of fucking up or someone being angry at us if we don’t respond to the emotion correctly#is known as a ‘maladaptive schema’#Which means that when our brains were developing#the constant traumatic or abusive environment wrote some base code into our brains#that influence the way we can filter and assess any infortmation#So all information we receive goes through the panic centre first and then gets viewed through this trauma induced coding#Which is why even when we know theoretically that we are ok and safe#we still go into panic and act instinctively
…..I had no idea this counted as hypervigilance. no idea what so ever.
(via natgoodmans)
