Being An Empath
Can Be Overwhelming
What To Do When You Reach The Breaking Point
Being an empath is a beautiful intuitive gift, but it also carries with it many challenges. Overwhelm is a big one.
If you're an energy healer, or interested in energy healing, it's likely you're also an empath--someone who's highly sensitive, with the strong ability to feel the emotion of others. It's a form of intuition. Empaths not only understand what others are feeling, they may often feel it as well, taking on their physical pain and emotional suffering.
Empathic people tend to have porous boundaries that let in a lot of energy and information. They're energetically like sponges, absorbing the emotions and sometimes the physical symptoms of others. Often empaths will be sensitive not just to subtle energetic information, but also to environmental input like scent and sound. Empaths, or intuitive feelers, usually center their energy in the heart (fourth) chakra.
(Learn more about what it is to be an empath here.)
Being An Empath: A Crisis May Come
Empaths often have huge reserves of strength and stamina, so they can go for years lavishly giving their energy to others. But over time this tendency to give and give and give usually catches up with them. They can become increasingly overloaded and depleted from the oceans of emotion they process each day. For some empaths, this overload and depletion eventually, over time, reaches a crisis point.An empath in crisis may feel exhausted, overwhelmed, depressed, and/or emotionally volatile. They may experience health problems, including chronic pain. Eventually, they realize they can't continue living in the same way:
- feeling responsible for other people's happiness and well-being
- feeling other peoples' feelings as a default way of functioning
- processing the pain of the world
- generally feeling so much, so intensely .
They realize that the way they've been living isn't sustainable any longer. Something has to transform.
Responding To Empathic Crisis
So what's an empath in crisis to do? Here are some ideas:- Find someone to help you learn to manage your gift, preferably someone who's successfully navigated the empathic crisis process. Many people in the helping professions are empaths, so start looking there.
- Work with a therapist or counselor to help you learn to set personal boundaries. Boundaries are critically important for most empaths, and at the same time, particularly difficult for them to set. Giving and serving comes naturally to most empaths, while saying "NO!" is a stretch. Get the help you need to exercise your NO muscle!
- Learn what feeds your heart (fourth) chakra. For many people this is nature. It might also be a favorite child, or an animal companion. Whatever it is for you, do it often.
- Repeat a mantra such as "I am not responsible for other peoples' happiness or well-being."
- Develop an "off switch" for your intuition. Remind yourself as often as needed that being a good person doesn't require that you feel other people's feelings. This can be hard for empaths to realize. It often feels very strange and rather cold-hearted at first. But truly, you are not required to or meant to process other people's feelings all the time. It's OK for you to take breaks as needed.
- Learn to recognize depletion when it first starts and change your behavior. Avoid people and situations that "drain your batteries." Do the things that bring you joy.
- Take as much alone time as you need to recharge. Alone-time is critical for most intuitive feelers. Protect it!
- Support and develop your third (solar plexus) chakra , between your navel and your sternum, to help you set boundaries, separate yourself from others in a healthy way, and maintain your own identity and goals.
- Practice pulling your own personal energy back to yourself and keeping it contained within yourself. (Chances are most people will never notice!) Here's a centering exercise to help you do that. Putting your hands in "steeple" position, fingertips touching, can also be a good emergency measure that you can do in public without drawing attention to yourself.
- Once you've centered your energy, visualize pulling your heart energy inward toward your spine. This helps protect, balance, align, and ground your heart energy. (Thanks to a client for this idea!)
- Practice focusing more of your energy in your sixth (third eye) chakra between and slightly above your eyebrows. This allows you to still feel compassion while providing distance and perspective so that you don't actually absorb other peoples' energy into your own energy field. Here's a method for doing that (It's #1 on the list).
When you're able to manage your beautiful gift of empathy--learning to use it selectively and valuing your own well-being equally with others'--being an empath will feel much easier. Not only will you be more stable, you'll have more energy for your own life journey. Start envisioning: how will you use this newly freed energy?
Go from Being An Empath to Empath Self-Care main page.
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You may also be interested in this self-assessment quiz by Dr. Judith Orloff, an expert in empathy.
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