I struggled with this for a long time, yes. My whole life actually. And I still do. I used to think I was crazy because my personality would change so much around different people so as to cater to their emotional wellbeing.
There’s something that happened to me eventually though. I broke through to the other side or something. You can be a successful empath, I think, you just have to be brave about it, you have to ALSO fine tune your ability to be honest and bringing out the honesty in others.
The problem with non-empaths is that in fear of having non-genuine relationships they have developed a vocabulary for…(not manipulation, I don’t want to say manipulation…)…presentation. And so genuinely interacting with that, as we tend to do naturally, gets us into trouble, because they aren’t being candid.
Empaths are a mirror, we can’t help it. We take on the sorrow and the excitement of those we interact with and become it, then pass it back to them. But if take some time for introspection, really focus on being alone and figuring out what turns YOU on, what makes YOU happy, what brightens YOU up, the mirror you reflect back to them will highlight the parts of them you want to be with, and they want to be with… You should be as sympathetic to those presenters as possible, but do so because you want to see them at their best, and their best is your best…so take some time to learn to be your best.
:-) !