All the HPANWO blogs are set for comments to be hidden until
they are approved by the admin, which is me. This is to stop the trolls infesting
the comments boxes. I also receive a lot of spam, that is comments posted for
the purposes of advertizing. Many of them look normal with words like
"Interesting blog. Thanks.", but the words are actually hyperlinks to
promotions for everything from furniture superstores to cheap rail fares. I broke
a rule the other day because somebody posted a spam link on this HPANWO Voice article,
which I recommend reading for background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-dark-side-of-empath.html.
The comment is in the illustration and I felt it was worth the HPANWO readers
seeing. The webpage it links to appears to be a cache, which is odd because it
was only created in May. You will notice that the comments box on it doesn't
work. The page gives an overview of what empathy is which is fairly accurate. Not
all empaths are shy and quiet. I myself return as "ENFJ- the protagonist"
on the Myers-Briggs personality inventory (Maybe I'll cover that in more detail
in a future article). There are links highlighted on the article for more
information. It then goes on to discuss what the author sees as the different
types of empaths: cognitive empaths, affective empaths and compassionate empaths.
The three sound quite similar really and I expect I am a mixture of them all.
Then the article continues with: "Empathy
can take over someone's mind quite easily, so it's important to practice
setting healthy boundaries." This is similar to the point made in the
background link above about the dark side of empathy. We empaths have learned
to limit ourselves in order to avoid becoming completely overwhelmed by the
characteristic passions of our disorder. Then the article asks whether empaths
are rare. The answer it gives is a simple "yes", but it then
describes empathy as a skill. This is strange because most pop psychology is
geared towards teaching empaths the skills of suppressing their nature as a
survival mechanism in mainstream society. The article then goes on to
contradict itself when it says: "Even
worse, many empaths get taken advantage of so they might try to conceal their
empathic side once they reach a critical burnout point." Empathy
burnout is a personality breakdown caused by the all too familiar trauma of
conformist exploitation, but that's a subject for another time. However, the
gist of the statement is that getting taken advantage of is inevitable and
normal. Conventional ethics sometimes even calls it good. Those who take
advantage are doing nothing wrong, are they? So are we to conceal or nurture
this "skill"? The article is not clear on that. The final paragraph
is straight out of a cheap mass-market self-help paperback: "As you can see, there are many ways
to express empathy. Work to nurture your own innate sense of empathy to
strengthen and deepen your relationships." Source: https://blog.mindvalley.com/types-of-empaths/.
However, empathy rarely does strengthen and deepen relationships. If anything,
it makes them more unstable and difficult, on the rare occasions they get off
the ground at all. This is for a variety of reasons, one of which is that
empaths are generally hated and shunned in this EastEnders world we live in. It is a disorder that this soap opera
urges us to shake off. I still thought the comment linked to an interesting
article and so I'm glad I approved it.
See here for
additional background: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2015/03/being-empath.html.
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