Telepathy Doesn't Exist, Right?

I was very close friends to a man, I'll call him Jeff, for about three months. By close I mean we were in contact pretty much every day and often the contact involved long phone calls. It was a strong connection for both of us, or so it seemed to us at the time. During that time, for the first time in my life, I experienced telepathy. I would get very specific and strong senses of what he was feeling. When we were together I accepted the information as true but did not think of it as telepathy, I have always paid a lot of attention to body language and facial expressions. It was the information that came when we were apart that gave me trouble. It happened a lot, and when I tried to disconfirm them, they were always accurate("at 7:30 you were bored, but by 9:45 you were fooling around"). I knew when he was emailing me. Often, I knew when he woke up, and when he fell asleep. I picked up on any strong emotions. I could feel when he was frustrated at work. When we talked that night on the phone, he would tell me about something very frustrating for him at work. It was very unnerving.

One thing it did was created an instability in how I felt about him and our relationship. The feeling of connection was so strong that I didn't really know what to make of it, how to process or interpret it. I think I misinterpreted the telepathy to mean I felt more for him than I did, made the relationship more important to me than it was. There are studies showing that when you induce physiological arousal in people using medication, unbenowst to them, they will come up with an emotional reason to explain it. If you expose them to a member of the opposite sex, they think they are very attracted. Do the same and put something scary in the room, they thing they means they are scared. We come up with reasons for what we are feeling. Don't get me wrong, he was a great guy and I liked him very, very much. It felt wonderful to be with him. I just had never had a telepathic connection to anyone before and I did not know how to handle it, and haven't handled it very well at all.

I have been reading some opinions from people who think many schizophrenics have involuntary telepathy. They say the person isn't crazy, but the involuntary telepathy makes them crazy. I have no trouble believing it; I have it with just one person, and its made me a little past sane in my interactions with him. I can't imagine how stressful it would be to be getting this kind of stuff from more than one person.

That was the river running underneath. Other than that, my life went on as usual, and its been a pretty good life for quite a while. My husband and I get along very well, he was fully aware of everything that was happening with Jeff.

I had and have problems with a telepathic connection to Jeff on a number of levels. First, I am a scientist, a professor at a research university. I don't believe in ESP, or should I say I didn't believe in it. Second, if we suspend disbelief and decide I am experiencing true telepathy, I feel as if I was invading his privacy. I mentioned the privacy issue to him, but he didn't seem concerned, even seemed to like it. That was when he still liked ME, of course. Third, while I have had uplifting experiences when he is experiencing something positive, I experience his negative feelings the most powerfully. It can be overwhelming, fill my consciousness.

Please bear in mind that it is very difficult, almost impossible, for me to see anyone suffer without wanting to help, make it better, or at least comfort them. I feel awful and want to help people I don't even like when something bad happens, or they are embarrassed or humiliated.

OK, the big problem:

Background: He stopped talking to me in mid-May, we maintained some email contact, mostly me emailing, which pretty much destroyed whatever was left of his positive feelings for me, and looking back I don't think there were too many positive feelings left even then. That is not the problem here, though, this is:

During the time he was unwilling to even talk to me on the phone, I was still getting strong information about his feelings, especially when negative or, much less often, very positive. Fortunately for me, his goal is to be numb most of the time and he is pretty good at it. Nevertheless, sometimes I would wake up when he woke up, depending on his mood. I would be thinking about something entirely different, even in the middle of very good sex, and I would get a sense from him. He has a particular reaction now and then, something unique to him and that seems like a combination of anger, insult, indignation, and sometimes a chunk of shame, humiliation. The feeling comes through powerfully, but, and this is awful for me, I have no idea what happened to him. It makes me want to rush to his side and defend him. I would be having a really good time in my own very full and rich life, and suddenly be flooded with some feeling of his. If the feeling was bad, anxiety, worry, sadness, all I wanted to do would be to hold him, to tell him everything was going to be OK. In the beginning of our email-only contact, I really wanted to know what was actually happening to him so I could understand the feelings I was getting, both if they were delusional or not, and if not, what was actually happening. I asked him over and over to have a quick phone call to bring me up to speed. He declined. Perhaps I sounded too desperate, and the information I was getting through this (possibly telepathic or possibly delusional) link made it more than idle curiosity.

Now, bear in mind that this is all going on in relation to a man who will not talk to me and, later, doesn't want to have anything to do with me.

OK, yada, yada, yada. I went away, to Disneyworld actually, and felt like I got a lot of clarity on the situation. It was clear we were done and we should let go. Now, I think I was free of the telepathic connection there (nothing gets into Disneyworld!). I came back and emailed him a poem basically taking his perspective, in order to let him just cut things off without feeling guilty. But, he emailed he wanted to stay in contact. Later that week I found that he had told a friend (another story, she was playing out her own little "Daddy leaving Mommy" psychodrama during this period, although neither Jeff nor I understood that until recently) something very hurtful about his intentions towards me, something he had not bothered to share with me. I wanted to cut things off completely, and tried to. Oh boy, did I ever try to, emailed him I was going to. He DID cut me off at that point, wrote "I am sorry I can't be a better friend to you", and that was his last contact, just shut off. However, I was still getting incoming emotions. I began to think I might be psychotic, that they were imaginary, but I couldn't seem to keep from wanting to reach out, because I FELT those emotions. So I felt very close to him. Needless to say, he did not feel my emotions and probably couldn't have felt more distant from me.

OK, so here we have, on one side a man who is done with me. On the other side, I was very sad that the friendship is over but ready to move on, except... I would get connected to his emotions, and that made me feel very connected to him. It led me to question what his email silence meant. It made me wonder if it was fundamentally wrong for us to be estranged. I didn't know what to do. I kept sending email, writing down a lot of different feelings, sort of thrashing around trying to make sense of what was happening, to connect on the outside to this person I felt connected to on the inside.

Since this is anonymous I will confess that my IQ scores are over 150. This may or may not be relevant to the telepathy thing, but it is definitely relevant to the way I responded. I process things at about 5 different levels, always, and have a very busy and active mind.

So, at one level I was standing outside of myself, watching, adding up the basic facts, and thought it was pretty pathetic. Rationally, what was the point? There was nothing in the relationship for me anymore. Yet... the telepathic connection felt like an emotional connection I couldn't break. I wondered if maybe I had actually fallen in love with him, what else would explain this inexplicable stuff, these feelings, the trouble disconnecting? I felt pretty apologetic about that, definitely against the rules for me to fall in love. So, sometimes the email I sent him came from my "head", the person who was processing what happened on the surface, who thought I was crazy, or unheathily attached, that I should stop trying to contact him. Some came from another part of me, the "telepathic" part that would be flooded with something that felt like his emotions, that felt extremely connected to him. It doesn't take me long to write anything, so its easy to fit in a busy day. He was essentially getting email from someone he did not want to hear from, but also it must have seemed like I was several different people. Poor guy. Of course, he could have replied and asked me to stop emailing at any time, but chose the silent route. I thought he might have blocked my email address, but I also "knew" he hadn't. When an email I sent made him angry,that came through intensely.

The rest of my life was great, success at work, getting grants, happy with my husband, friends, kids, sex, really a charmed summer. I wasn't thinking about him much except for when I got...the connection. Some time in early/middle July, I think, I sensed something very warm and affectionate coming from him, and it confused me. Was it towards me? Was the estrangement a mistake, a misunderstanding? Well, you guessed it, NO. Not that he answered, no, he did not, leaving me to interpret that as I would. Now, I think it might have been a feeling he was having about a woman in his life, which would be nice, or maybe one of his kids that I picked up.

OK, time to stop contacting him right? Absolutely. Yet, how do you disconnect from someone you are connected to at the level of emotion? At this point my husband thought I was delusional, an opinion I grew to share. The last weekend in July was awful. I got an overwhelming feeling he was having trouble, felt him being upset, embarrassed, felt nausea, and got a very specific image of police. I kept it to myself, since I was starting to suspect I might be psychotic or have some kind of brain disease. It came and went, but I kept getting incoming feelings of worry, some shame, that felt like they were coming from him.

Part of me wondered if I was getting this powerful stuff because I was supposed to be helping him, that I wasn't doing what I was "supposed to". That's the part of me that thinks there is an actual reason for things. I tried to ignore it. The second week of August (last week), early in the week it peaked again. I wondered if he was in trouble, and decided that if I actually was supposed to be helping him, withholding was worse than humiliating myself by offering. So, already humiliated while I was doing it, I emailed him telling him what I sensed and offering help. I thought he might have blocked my email, even though it didn't feel like it, so I called him too. Doesn't the whole thing sound sick? Yup.

He replied in a way that was very clear, unkind, and direct, which is unusual for him. I would have been OK with all of it except the parts where he wrote that he had made it clear he didn't want to hear from me (?) and didn't want "my kind of help". Bear in mind that he had been in the process of a divorce during the 3 months we were close and I gave him quite a bit of "my kind of help" and he seemed pretty pleased to get it. He didn't directly address my telepathy/delusion, but said he was feeling creeped out and stalked. The creeped out, I could relate to. I assumed that meant I was entirely delusional as opposed to involuntarily telepathic. That is creepy. Even my husband, not his biggest fan, was sympathetic to how it would feel to be the target of some woman's delusions. Yuck.

It sure wasn't very enjoyable to BE that woman. Double yuck.

I had a strange reaction. Part of it was tremendous relief. Obviously, I wasn't "supposed" to be helping him. So, I could stop beating my head on that brick wall. Also, I was very happy that he was not having trouble. That's my crazy river of caring for him bubbling along no matter what happens. Also, I could tell I wasn't in love with him because my main sentiments were sadness and some disgust, and except for a flare of hurt/anger when I first replied to him, not much else. Oh yes, the humiliation, but I expected that. So those things were all good. However, I was pretty freaked out about the "delusions". I have a lot of training in psychology and the causes of such powerful delusions are not fun. I started a series of tests for psychosis, organic brain disease.

Then, I was with a friend who knew the whole story, because I told him I might have an organic brain condition or some unusual and very high-functioning psychosis. He and I were busy one morning, when I suddenly felt Jeff email my husband. 8AM. Low and behold, yup, email. My friend searched the court databases and showed me the records of Jeff's drunk driving arrest on the 28th of July, (with a pretty high blood alcohol concentration if the tests were accurate). He filed a not-guilty plea early last week. So, I guess it was involuntary telepathy. And what did I think when I learned this? I thought, "Thats awful, poor Jeff, I wonder if he hired a lawyer, I hope he did, I wonder if its a good one, hope so, I've met that DA, ... oh shit, how is he going to see his daughter if he is limited to an occupational license, hmm I could give him a field interviewer position so he could drive in the evenings..." STOP. He doesn't want my kind of help. Its none of my business.

So, as impossible as this is to believe, I have involuntary telepathic connection to someone I have no other relationship with. Yet, when he is anxious/worried, as he was for a little bit earlier this week, all I feel is compassion and want to hold him and help ease his anxiety. My husband is disgusted with me, Jeff looks down on me for it, but how can you not care about someone who's emotions you literally feel?

So, here I am, in telepathic contact with someone who despises me. There is a part of me that has no problem understanding his point of view. Neither one of us wanted me to have this telepathic connection, or asked for it, and when you want to be rid of someone, you want to be rid of them. Yet, here I am with no escape from his strong emotions, forced to deal with the consequences of this connection, and there Jeff is, full of contempt for me because of the way I have dealt with and tried to make sense of it.

It sucks.

I can't believe I am writing this, its not a request I ever expected to have to make, but if anyone knows how to get rid of an unwelcome telepathic connection, please write and let me know.