Your comment (the top one) triggered a memory in me. You are the second empath I've talked to. The other one I met many years ago on reddit. She mentioned she did not have an off button (which incidentally, you just mentioned) and had to live in isolation.

I'm probably fairly easy to talk to, because I try write emotional neutral. Requires relatively low amounts of empathy on your end, I imagine.

Twice I've ran into a destructive person (I suspect it was twice the same person on different throwaway accounts that kept getting blocked) on /r/advice, that was writing subversive messages intended to make the reader feel inferior. It was so intense that I had to actively block it in my mind (I tried to communicate with them, curious why they would behave like that, but they weren't willing and just kept trying to inflict pain, eventually just blocked them). So I'm using that experience to relate to what you call overwhelming.

Then as we mature emotionally, we have to figure out how to turn it back on again. As was the case for me.

I wonder if anyone has ever documented that process. Do you remember The Sixth Sense? What if I'm Bruce Willis? Maybe I'm actually an empath that has had to disable everything, because it was too intense and was then classified Schizoid. Maybe that's true. Maybe that's not true, but I can use it to make it true.

Maybe everyone's a natural empath, but we all had to disable it because there are just too many people. Supposedly we evolved to be in communities of between 30 to 125 people. Such a low number of empaths might be able to work well together, but in our current numbers we can't function and have to disable it. In that version, you are the normal one and we're sick.