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I'm not sure how to really explain this.

As a child I could feel huge waves of empathy.  If a person, child, or animal was hurt or injured I could feel their pain down to my soul.  It was scary and disturbing for me.

I recall as a youth seeing two handicapped people in a supermarket and feeling terribly internally shaken by the whole thing.  I just can describe how I felt about it.

It occurred to me today... .was it my own pain that I was feeling somehow?  By my youth I was used to pushing my own wants, needs and emotions aside for the greater good (my family). 

Also, I was adopted as an infant.  Could I somehow have been re-experiencing the pain of being removed from my birth mother?

Maybe my empathy for others was just me experiencing my own hurt?

Does anyone have any insight into this?

I would like to add to this, the two handicapped people I saw burned a lasting, haunting memory into me.  I will never forget it.  The younger guy shuffled along while holding a 2 liter of bottle of coke.  He was with an older man.  They both had such vacant looks about them.  I was bombarded with emotions and questions.  What kind of life will these two people have?  Who took care of them?  Did they experience any joy in life?  Were they more content than most people?

Also, my parents told me that I never cried as a baby.  I later read that when babies don't cry it is because they were overly smothered by their parents and never had a chance to cry, or they were totally neglected and crying wasn't an effective means to get attention, so they just gave up.  I know very little about my life as a baby.  I just don't know what the answers are.

That is an interesting question. I can relate to feeling a lot of empathy for other people. I struggle with allowing myself to feel my own pain and my own emotions. I tend to keep my feelings at bay.

I wonder if it could be a form of projecting. If I don't allow myself to feel my feelings, then I can project them onto other people so that I can feel them safely. I don't know if that is the case or not but I can see how it might be the case. If I am helping somebody else with their feelings, then it is safe. I won't be selfish. I won't have to deal with the feelings directly. If I let myself feel something, then I am being selfish and it will be scary.

Hmmmm. . .

Agree with this also. I would empathize with others to the point of tears and wanting to rescue.

Did you have a lot of conflict in your household?

I can't recall much of my childhood from when I was young.  I know my mom was always raging about something.  I remember my brother and I would go into a panic if we spilled kool aid on the floor because our mom would totally freak out about it.  She would yell at us until my dad would get involved then he would whip us.  I recall her ranting while we looked at her helplessly.  We knew she would go on and on until my dad couldn't take it anymore.

My parents are now in their 80's.  I can look back on this and feel a great deal of sympathy for my dad.  He really wanted to please my mom.  If it meant beating us kids to keep the peace, he did it.  I know he had a good heart though.  I recall that my brother and I really liked him.  It was our mom that we didn't care for.

I guess my mom taught me how to walk on eggshells.

Taught me to do nothing but walk in eggshells. And guess what I did in my last r/s?

The abuse doesn't mean they had a good heart. Just because we see a sliver of goodness in ourselves doesn't mean everyone has even that.

I am reading a book right now called If You Had Controlling Parents by Dan Neuharth, Ph.D.  I just posted a review in the book section.

One of the things I appreciate about this book is that it says that in controlling families, contradictory views are often not allowed, but part of healing is being able to accept these contradictions... .for example, that a person can feel sympathy for their parents, but still have been profoundly negatively impacted by their behaviour.  I don't know, for me for some reason a lightbulb went on there, I always thought it was invalidating to tell someone "Your parents did the best they could," - that's true, they did, but you can hold that together with the effect it had on you.

The book also addresses the styles of control, as well as the dynamics between parents (for example an Abusive parent will not always but often tend to pair up with a Childlike parent, where one parent does the abusing and the other tolerates or covers for it, fails to protect the child, or makes excuses for the behaviour e.g. "He's under a lot of stress right now"

In response to the OP, it's possible that you have an inborn sensitivity (as in Elaine Aron's research on the "Highly Sensitive Person", or it's possible that you had to learn to become hypervigilant to others' emotions in order to protect yourself, in combination with developmental deficiencies around the time you were forming your sense of self leading to you feeling you are "walking around without skin" (that phrase is from a book called Healing Developmental Trauma by Heller and Lapierre)

I am reading If You Had Controlling Parents, now.  It is a very good book.  I did the little survey in the front of the book and my parents had 61 of the 64 or so controlling behaviors.

Anyway, I do feel like I am walking around without skin sometimes.