I am a college junior studying biochemical engineering. My classes give me quite a lot of stress during a semester, but being around people is still many times more stressful than classes that take hundreds of hours of studying. For some reason, I have the ability to feel other people's stress and emotions extremely fluently with or without that person's intentions of sharing those emotions. Everyone expresses emotions and everyone has stress. Different people have different levels of stress, but some people just have the tendency to emit all of their stress all of the time. These are the people I can't stand being around, but they are of course people that are ordinary in other ways and I cannot just avoid from my life entirely.
The number one person that I seem to be having this problem with is my mother. She is a very nice person and has great intentions, but she is constantly both holding in and emitting a fair amount of stress. This week I am on vacation with my family out of state. We started our trip with a long 18 hour drive stuck in a tightly packed car for the entire day. When my mom had been driving for a while and decided that she needed someone else to take over driving and that she needed to find a place for dinner, things started to get a little crazy. She was stressed from being hungry and driving for a while and getting told directions from every person in the car. When she started huffing and puffing, I was instantly feeling all of her stress. She kept saying “I'm okay, I'm doing alright.” Every time she said that, I could feel all of her stress emitting into my head.
After we ate dinner, she was a lot less stressed, but I continued to feel angry for the entire rest of the night. What can I do about this ability to absorb the stress of everyone around me and how can I deal with the few people that emitt the most stress other than avoiding them entirely?
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