Irina V. (1) (EIE) - Reading people’s emotional states

In early childhood, I was able to “read” people’s true feelings easily, even if they didn’t show them. I would simply enter a state of absence, “connect” to the person, and become them, feeling deeply the experiences they carried inside. It’s clear that I rarely felt anything good there, so eventually the activity stopped being interesting to me.

<...> I was even scolded for this a few times — when I was in a room with someone, talking to a stranger, and if my partner shifted the initiative in the conversation toward themselves, I would start scanning the person. I would look at them completely thoughtlessly, without thinking anything about them, just looking — yet I had the feeling I was entering the person and seeing their inner world. I could see their relationships with close ones, relatives, some of their problems. Images, images — I would see images: their problems, their dissatisfaction, and then I’d be shown what that dissatisfaction came from. Then I might think, “Why do I need this?” And then — click, click — I’d close it. People around me would say, “Hey, what are you doing? We’re here together!” And I’d be just frozen, sitting there, scanning… This trait has been with me since early childhood and remains to this day.

I remember once riding a bus — I was still preschool age — and a man sat across from me. I stared at him absentmindedly and apparently drifted completely into his inner space. I saw his relationship with his wife, how tired he was of everything, how bored he was, how gray his life felt, like dirty laundry. I saw his dissatisfaction with life and fragments of that dissatisfaction.

I looked, I didn’t feel anything about it, I just understood what was there, and then I came out of it. That’s a vivid example of how I can see.