Like many of the high-masking, I have hyper-empathy. If I'm talking to someone, whether in person, in a video call, on the phone, by text message, email, or on an internet forum, I'm sensitive to what tone, word choice, and body language mean for the person's feelings. And, because I myself have struggled much in life with many kinds of challenging feelings, I can easily, often times too easily, find myself standing in the other person's emotional shoes.

I've known this about myself for a while. But recently, working on Step 9 and examining the idea of connection between myself, other individuals, and communities made me realize that my hyper-empathy has some effects on my self-esteem.

First of all, the fact that I'm picking up so much information on other people's feelings while other people aren't makes me feel out of step with others.

Second, I'm often not in a position to do anything about the information I'm picking up, which makes me feel helpless, like I'm not creative enough, or I'm letting the other person down (when they haven't even asked me for anything to begin with!)

Third, the fact that other people don't seem to be picking up as much information about me makes me feel "less than" for not being worthy of their notice or attention, even when I know that most people don’t have the capacity I do, either for the "detecting feelings" part of hyper-empathy or the "empathy" part. It wouldn't be reasonable for me to hold them to that standard, but unless I'm paying attention, sometimes I still do.

Share questions:

• Do you experience hyper-empathy? Does it have any influence on your self-esteem? Please describe. 
• Whether you have hyper-empathy or not, do ever find you take on too much of other people's emotional or psychological burdens? Does it affect your self-esteem? 
• This share describes hyper-empathy with individuals, but is there a parallel in your life with groups: sensing the group mood and maybe taking it upon yourself? Something else?
• Any tools, strategies, or resources to share?
• Anything else to add?