All of this and also I love the contrast of low empathy Martin who tries his ass off to be a good and kind person and a caregiver anyway, versus hyper empathetic Jon who isolates and repress himself and initially tries to keep people at arms length and is prickly. Cause having too much can be overwhelming instead of practical and doesn’t necessarily make you ‘nice’. (reply from @sirmarsian )
Oh boy this is some MAJOR projection territory, but I have so many feelings about it!!
For one, I love the headcanon for why he sounds so much more emotive when reading statements than any of the others, Martin included–he gets so deep into them beyond the supernatural level that affects everyone. I could imagine hyper-empathy just making that exponentially stronger.
Also the way Jon keeps others at a distance? And HOW MUCH he changes as soon as he allows himself to get close?? It was never a matter of “Jon teaching himself to care,” but rather Jon letting himself care. Which…gets to an extreme that’s downright unhealthy, when he lets it.
Hyper-empathy feels like….having super over-sensitive hearing, but emotionally. I had to change majors from nursing because my entire body would hurt from empathetic pain just hearing about injuries. I cried for three days after a coworker lost her cat. Secondhand embarrassment is like being dunked into lava. Interacting with people going through grief can be so painful there’s a huge urge to just avoid them entirely. In fact, that last one can easily become a lifestyle–just insulate and shut down and not let yourself think about it.
I could totally see that in how Jon responds to the statements he knows are real in season 1–he just finished living through that person’s experience, but the response to being so overwhelmed is to just seal it off and pretend it away (which also ties into the “how coping mechanisms can still hurt other people” discussion!). Jon’s past habits of self-isolating and keeping people at arm’s length also fits this so well, because as soon as he lets go of that, he’s just….a constant raw nerve. I wasn’t able to find a lot of great resources on it, but going down a ‘common symptoms’ list, you got:
- Going to great lengths to avoid provoking strong negative emotions in others (arguing against going with the team for drinks in s4, tiptoeing around asking Questions in s3, sneaking away from Basira to give a statement he feels may upset her in TMA 179)
- Being unable to let go of something happening to someone else, to the point of barely being able to function (fixating on Daisy being trapped or Martin’s isolation)
- Bonding so quickly with someone whose struggle he relates to (becoming friends with Daisy despite being traumatized from her, his entire meeting with Gerry)
- “Allowing others to be unkind to you because you feel sorry for them” (where do I even START)
- Feeling ‘flooded’ with pain for someone else, but being at a loss of how to express sympathy or comfort (the constant stream of apologizing for things he’s not even connected to)
- Difficulty parsing your own emotions/separating them from how you feel about others’ (”I feel……sad. Very sad.” “ It’s hard to know how I feel about anything these days.”)
Like I know this is firmly in headcanon territory since we have so many factors feeding into all of this, supernatural and otherwise, but tbh that just ends up making the whole show feel like a metaphor for hyper-empathy and burnout/compassion fatigue to me.
This is where I got the headcanon from, or somewhere like it, but dathen says it better than me, so…here it is. From last year. I had barely heard of TMA last year. Somehow I found this post, though, in May 2021.