On 5 July 2008, knowing I had to work that night, I began attempting  to  sleep at about 10:30 AM. I already knew that Kasey (Patty's  daughter) had  started into labor but there was no reason for this  to bother me. Nothing else was on my mind. But I could not sleep.  I kept tossing and turning. I felt  alarmed. Threatened. Very unusual  for me. I knew that this was not my own  feeling but I did not  connect the dots. All I knew was the feeling that  something was  very wrong and somehow pending. It was not until some time in the  mid-late afternoon that I finally drifted off to sleep. At about  6:30 PM, Patty  called. I was 98% asleep but I understood what  she was saying; that Kasey had  delivered a baby boy weighing 7.?  pounds, about two hours earlier, and it was a  troubled birthing  with Kasey's blood pressure going through the roof, and  eventuating  in emergency procedures, and finally an emergency C-Section. I went  back to sleep, only noting that I did not feel alarmed or threatened.  I awoke at  about 8:30 PM and did the usual Ted-stuff. It was not  until about 9:45 PM, while  shaving, that it dawned on me that  my earlier feelings of alarm and threat ...  belonged to Patty  as she responded to the Kasey-crisis.
 
This  is the best of my recent examples to describe the empathic experience  (at my level). Patty's empathic abilities are much more highly  developed than my  own. Patty was directly feeling Kasey's own  alarm and feeling of threat, and  those of the medical people tending  to Kasey. I was lucky; I was only feeling a  dim version of this  crisis. Inside Patty, this must have been purely awful. They  say  that being "an empath" is a gift. My labels for it are not so kind.

The empath feels the angers, fears, obsessions of other people, as if these emotions were her/his own. If you have ever experienced a traumatic feeling which seemed to be totally unnatural for you, then you may be an empath. “This feeling is not mine” - is your only clue. The empathic experience is not well understood, nor well studied, in the psychological community, which continues to diagnose such cases as any one of the catch-all “disorders,” when, in fact, empathic abilities are natural to the human condition. We wonder how many empaths have been confined in the emotional over-load horror-stories of institutions, and what must have happened to them there?

Information is available on Websites, but beware of fakes. Real information will not involve money. See [http://www.imagine-wellness.com/] and take the quiz. Caveate emptor.