I was an empath and I turned into a narcissist

I used to be a deeply empathic person. I felt everything from everyone. I acted in sensitivity and kindness all of the time. My sensitivity was a true gift and a cornerstone of my identity.

A couple of years ago I was working as a counselor for children through a non-profit agency. I was very skilled at connecting with children, very good at identifying the happenings in their development, and pretty good at leading effective therapy sessions. Most of the children I worked with had been through some type of trauma, typically abuse or neglect as the hands of unskilled parents and care givers. I worked with the parents and did training sessions on how they could develop better parenting skills.

The inter generational trauma ran deep and I was working with these issues every day. I was emotionally and mentally exhausted every day. I then went through training with my job to become a forensic interviewer. This meant that I would interview children who had been through abuse and neglect to gather the proper information for law enforcement and the court.

This part of the job broke my empathy. In the helping professions it is called “empathy burnout”. That’s what happened. My deep empathic nature absorbed so much horrific trauma that it caught fire, burned to ash, and was gone.

At first I just felt supremely exhausted, like the type of exhaustion that people take long sabbaticals to address. I wasn’t really feeling anything other than very tired.

I came back from that exhaustion, and the empathy I had before is gone. I actually feel like I might be narcissistic now.

I *can* turn the empathy on, and somatically feel the emotion around me if I consciously choose to, but it’s not my default like it used to be. I don’t want to turn it on anyway. I almost always choose not to because Life feels so much lighter and easier without it. I’m learning what it feels like to be happy and unburdened by the emotions of the people around me. It feels great.

I quit the entire career path and have no intention of ever returning to it. I have no shame in leveraging the more superficial things about myself to improve my life. I now leverage my looks, my people skills, and my ability to charm an ego to get what I want. I would have never done that before as I was all about depth and meaning. I work jobs that help absolutely no one, but that come with zero emotional responsibility.

I feel unburdened now. I didn’t realize that being an empath carried such a heavy weight with it. It’s a bit surprising to me how this happened, but I don’t really feel like I could or would choose to go back at this point.

I think empathy and narcissism have some kind of root commonality, and I haven’t quite figured out what it is. Two sides of the same coin almost.