Empaths - Turn Off Your Antennas
I work with many patients who are artists, healers, teachers, and writers. For their work, they use their empathetic abilities to create art or help others. Often what they don’t realize is that their gift of empathy, which makes them good at their work, makes them vulnerable to toxic relationships and to being energetically drained by people. Let me unpack what I mean by that.
Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Not everybody has this ability to feel for others. There is physical empathy where you feel other people’s pain. There is emotional empathy where you feel other people’s emotions. There is cognitive empathy where you know what other people are thinking.
I see empathy as a superpower, but if you don’t know about your secret abilities or you are new to having this superpower, it can be debilitating, confusing, and very draining. You give and give in relationships and wonder why your energy is not returned. Remember that scene in the original “Spider-Man” (2002) movie, where after getting bitten by the spider, Tobeyy Maguire is learning to shoot spider webs and at first fails and then slams into a wall. It’s a process to learn how to manage your empathetic superpowers.
The first step is identifying what kind of empath you are. The next step is learning boundaries to separate yourself from other people. Sometimes you need to dial down your empathy either in a large crowd or when you are in a conflict with someone. It’s hard to connect to your own feelings, if you are busy feeling other people’s feelings.
Another symptom of being empathetic is being a people pleaser. Because you feel other people’s feelings so strongly. you may be afraid to speak up, stand up, and take up your own space in social situations. This can be especially true with narcissists who take advantage of the empaths, they feed off of their energy and weaponize their empathy against them during conflicts. I have also noticed that empaths tend to over explain themselves and look for validation from others. This makes them vulnerable to being manipulated and used by toxic people.
What can empaths do? First, I recommend learning and observing more about your abilities. A good book to start with is “The Empath’s Survival Guide: Life Strategies for Sensitive People” by Judith Orloff, which has a lot of great tips about self-care. A mantra one of my spiritual teachers taught me is, “I feel you, but I don’t receive you”. That way you acknowledge that you feel other people’s feelings, but you don’t need to take on all of that information. Learning boundaries, taking time for yourself in nature, getting off social media, and regularly turning off your antennas from other people’s emotions are all good strategies for surviving and eventually thriving as a empath.
