If you feel the energy of the people around you or of a place, you’re not weird.
If you feel physically unwell when people are yelling or the music is loud, you’re not too sensitive.
If you feel other people’s illnesses or emotions in your body, you’re not crazy.
You’re an empath.
Being an empath is hard. It’s probably the gift I’ve struggled with the most throughout my life – even after I learned that’s what was going on.
Managing and balancing all the extrasensory input, in addition to the regular sensory input of the world, gets overwhelming. Without training or knowledge, it made me physically ill, as I absorbed the illnesses and emotions around me, vainly trying to provide healing to my friends, teachers and strangers on the street.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Help for empaths is here
The Empath’s Survival Guide: Life Strategies for Sensitive People by Judith Orloff, MD, is a useful primer on what’s going on when you’re one of the “sensitive” ones and how to deal with it.
One of the biggest a-ha! moments I had when reading the book was the idea that one way to protect yourself from empathic overload is to truly be present and embodied in your physical body.
Many empaths develop their skills when they’re young, as a result of living in a dysfunctional or abusive family. You learn to breathe in the energy in a room before entering in it. You learn to anticipate how people are going to react before you even say anything. If it wasn’t so otherwise unhealthy, it’s a great training ground for intuitive and empathic abilities.
Abusive or dysfunctional families unfortunately create a great deal of cumulative pain. One way our brain and emotional self deals with that is to disassociate and move away from what’s going on because it’s so incredibly unpleasant and traumatic.
Instead of being in your body, you live in your mind. Or even outside of your mind, somewhere else beyond here and now, where things are easier to deal with. Perhaps that’s in fantasy of some kind – movies, books, video games, daydreams. Perhaps that’s just floating around in the atmosphere. But it’s not in your physical body.
Which leaves you open to empathic overload.
It turns out that really being present in your body generates a kind of protective shield. It allows you to become more aware of what’s yours and what’s not yours, in the way of emotions being generated around you.
Techniques for being a healthy empath
The Empaths Survival Guide is full of insights and techniques like this, to help you live a healthier life, while embracing your gift.
It’s got several quizzes so you can determine what kind of empath you are: physical, emotional, intuitive, telepathic, precognitive, dream, mediumship, plant, earth or animal.
Plus it’s full of useful information about how to stop absorbing other people’s distress, how to protect yourself from addiction, be in healthy relationships and raise children well (as an empath, this can be tricky, especially if your kids are empathic, too. Mine are!).
It’s totally possible to learn to hone your empathic abilities and integrate them into your life in a good and healthy way. The Empath’s Survival Guide can give you some tools to begin to do that.
Disclaimer for full transparency: The links for the book go to Amazon.com. If you purchase it there, my microbusiness gets a small affiliate fee. You can also get the book at your local bookstore, or ask your local bookstore to order it for you, and that’s a totally awesome thing to do.