While I love that psychology is beginning to research the roots of empathy, I caution us empaths to be careful of the story we tell. Psychology, like allopathic medicine, is primarily concerned about pathology and making a diagnosis (which is essentially focusing on what has gone wrong).

While I’m not completely in the nature camp, I do believe that HSPs and empaths are BORN with a nervous system that is more finely tuned, we can sense shifts in energy. Since everything is energy, we sense pretty much everything. What can be seen on the surface and a whole lot of things underneath.

Being in a dysfunctional or destructive or relationship dynamic will almost certainly lead us to become hypervigilant, for fear of attracting more narcissistic people, but as difficult as the trauma was, it didn’t create our sensitivity, it only amplified it.

Brain scans of highly sensitive people have shown increased activation in the empathy centers of the brain. Some of this is learned because we develop new neural pathways over our lifetime, but some of this is simply how we are wired.

Just as research has shown that serial killers have fewer neural connections in the brain’s empathy center.

I could see this type of idea going badly, people returning home and accusing their parents of making them into an empath. Not incredibly helpful, in my opinion…