I Don't Want to Be an Empath Anymore

by Ora North

  Another client of mine was a man whose inner child felt an oppressive need to be intelligent, which made him feel like he couldn’t enjoy learning for the sake of learning when he was young. At that age, he was diagnosed with a learning disability, which made him feel like he had to prove his intelligence to his family and teachers at every turn. During his session, his inner child came up to me out of curiosity and wanted to be involved in the energy healing I was doing. His requirement to stay was simply to be able to learn new things for the sake of curiosity and fun, without any added pressure to it, and without worrying whether other people thought he was smart or not.

  My own inner child is an animal lover, so part of our deal for her to stay was for me to get a puppy. That puppy ended up being the most healing creature in the entire world for her and for me. We played with him, we cared for him, we snuggled with him. Unfortunately, he was not in this world for very long, but the time we spent with him anchored my inner child within me forever. I can also admit that once she was integrated within me, I naturally took myself less seriously and worked more fun and amusement into my life. Since I work primarily in the shadows, that amusement is absolutely essential for this work to be successful and sustainable for me.

  What are the conditions of your own inner child? What do they need in order to stay with you? Working with your inner child can be like negotiating a spiritual contract, and you have to make sure you can give them what they really need. Ask them what makes them happy, and do your best to provide that for them. How can you mother them? Knowing how to bring your inner child joy is what will anchor them in you forever.

  Joy is the most potent force of manifestation magic available, so you will find that the transformation and alchemy available to you when you embrace your childlike joy is overwhelmingly powerful. This kind of joy is especially powerful because it comes out of the acknowledgment and validation of emotional pain, and that is an empath superpower.

  It takes time to heal the mother wound, but reframing the thought of I don’t have a mother to help me to How can I mother myself? can accelerate that healing.

  I am still constantly working with my own mother wound, learning and relearning how to mother myself and take care of myself. Maybe you’re still constantly working with your own mother wound, or maybe you’re just starting. It’s a long process for any empath, and it involves a lot of trial and error and a lot of communication with the self. It remains a bittersweet practice, always mourning the loss of the love you needed while gaining the strength to provide it for yourself. Working with the mother wound builds a strange foundation within you, one that surprises you in its depth and capability, and one that consistently teaches you how to be a powerful and independent human being.

  Do the Work

  Now it’s your turn to find your core wound and inner child. Although this process can be hard, it can also lead you to deep healing and help you reclaim lost power.

  Remembering Your Core Wound

  When was the first time you remember feeling emotional pain? Sink into that memory. What was the situation? Where were you? How old were you? Describe the experience in your journal. Use as many of your senses as you can. What do you see? Hear? Smell? Taste? Feel? You may have more than one memory, and that’s okay. You can journal about each experience, since each one will be tied to a piece of yourself that you need to retrieve. Try to start with your earliest memory, though—that’s where the foundational wound will be.

  Inner Child Retrieval

  Find a comfortable space where you won’t be disturbed. Turn off your phone and prepare your space. Feel free to burn sage, light candles or incense, do a few rituals or prayers. Play some music in the background. Shamanic drumming works best, but whatever music relaxes you is okay too.

  Sit comfortably or lie down, whichever feels best to you. Start with a few minutes of deep breathing, inhaling through the nose, exhaling through the mouth. When you feel your body relaxing, think back to the time and place of your core wound. Visualize yourself stepping through a clear barrier, like a sheet of glass or a gentle waterfall, into this place. You are stepping into another world and another time. You have entered the place where your inner child is.

  Allow yourself time to let the environment form around you. Explore it if you wish. It may look exactly how it did at the time of your core wound, but it might look a little different. Notice how it feels to be there.

  Now you’re going to find your inner child. They might come right up to you; they might be hiding from you. When you find them, they could be in any emotional state. They might be smiling and happy to see you. They might be cowering and hiding in a corner from the trauma they experienced. They could be angry with you. In whatever way they appear, be gentle and patient with them.

  Spend a few minutes simply connecting with them and letting them get used to your presence. You’ll find that you’ll understand what they want to say to you without them actually saying it. Without any judgment, let them tell you how they feel, and when they finish, explain to them your side of the story. Tell them that you want to take care of them and that they’re safe. They may resist you at first. You may have to lovingly convince them. But hold the connection with your pure intention until you’re both at an understanding and they feel comfortable enough to come back with you. Ask them what they’ll need to be happy and to stay with you, and genuinely promise that you will give it to them. More than anything, make them feel seen and appreciated.

  When you’re out of the meditation, journal about your experience. Now is the time to start fulfilling your promise to them. What did they say they needed in order to stay with you? What did they say they liked? You can go into quiet meditation to ask them questions at any time. It’s good to check in with them often and make sure the connection is strong.

  Follow through on your promises. Do the things they wanted to do. Get a coloring book. Cook their favorite food. Take them to the beach. Wear their favorite color. Get a pet. Do the things that bring them joy. Your inner child won’t stay with you unless you can prove that you are a safe and fun place for them.

  Chapter 4:

  Mastering Emotional Energy

  I began personifying my feelings even before I knew what I was doing or why. Since I had so many painful feelings when I was younger, I had to journal about them to feel like I could handle them. There was no one to talk to. Sometimes journaling and personifying my feelings helped a lot, sometimes only a little. But I kept doing it because it was the only thing I could think of to do. Time and time again, I wrote down my feelings—my heartache, my depression, my hope, my longing.

  As time went on and some of the same feelings visited me over and over again, my writing became more descriptive and poetic. I could no longer call upon them only by name. They demanded more space to breathe. They demanded a proper introduction. The same feelings started forming into their own people with their own personalities and quirks.

  Pain became a beautiful woman with eyelashes of needles. She knew she was beautiful, and she wanted to draw people close to her, but she felt like she could only hurt others. She knew that if she ever kissed another, her eyelashes would scrape against their skin. Depression became a used paint palette of blues and yellows muddied together. She was an artist with a macabre sense of wit, and she liked to paint van Gogh replicas while listening to Billie Holiday croon “Gloomy Sunday” on repeat.

  Every feeling had a story, a collection of different characters taking their turn on the stage of my life. They became almost like imaginary friends, though they were nothing close to imaginary. They were living feelings inside of me, revealing themselves to me in intimate and powerful ways.

  Little did I know at the time, I had taught myself one of the most helpful techniques for identifying energy, one that I still use today.

  Feeling all the emotions all the time can make life as an empath incredibly confusing. It can be hard to sort
through all of your emotions, especially since we were taught as children that there are “good” and “bad” emotions. Dividing our emotions into “good” and “bad” makes the empath experience even more painful, since we’re forced to distance ourselves from the “bad” in a way that doesn’t empower our emotional process. Ultimately, this disconnection makes it so we can’t even identify what our feelings are or what to do with them. By realizing that every emotion is an energy, and every energy is unique, like a signature, you can identify, personify, and use each and every emotion for your own empowerment and strength.

  Feelings Are Energy, Energies Have Signatures, Signatures Are Unique

  Journaling extensively about all my feelings gave me a deep knowing of how and when each feeling came up. I became well acquainted with my painful emotions, and in the process, each emotion developed its own unique energy signature. An energy signature is like a designated bar code for each feeling, and once you know that bar code, you can identify and work with it easily.

  Energy signatures are different for each person. My energy signature for anxiety may be completely different from yours, based on each of our personal experiences and intuition. While my Depression might be a witty macabre artist, yours might be someone else entirely. Mine might not feel the same as yours, but if you know exactly how yours feels, you’ll always be able to differentiate between your feelings and the feelings of other people.

  It’s easy to begin identifying an energy signature. When you’re experiencing a strong feeling, sit quietly with that feeling and visualize it. Allow an image to take shape. Use your intuitive senses to describe that feeling and that image as thoroughly as you can. What color is it? What shape? Does it have a smell, a feel? How does it move and where does it sit in your body? Develop that picture of your feeling as much as you can. If you’re feeling strong in the connection, ask it questions. Is it anger? Is it grief? What is it exactly? Is it a person, and if it is, what is their name? What do they like or dislike? The deeper you go with it in the beginning, the easier it will be to recognize later. You’re not only putting a visual to it but also strengthening your connection to the actual energy it represents. You are essentially putting a name tag on that energy so it will be easier for you to identify in a crowd of other energies.

  If you’ve had any trouble witnessing or validating your feelings in the past, this is by far the easiest way to start. Maybe you’ve had the experience where you’ve been completely overwhelmed by feelings and you weren’t even sure which feelings were yours. It may sound counterintuitive to try to describe the details of a feeling when you can’t even name what the feeling is, but by picking out the smaller details in a feeling using creative visualization, even among a slew of different feelings, you will slowly build upon those details to create one unmistakable feeling. Once you know those feelings creatively, you’ll be able to communicate with them. Each feeling has its own message for you, but they can’t communicate their message if you haven’t given them the space to exist and expand.

  When Vanessa told me she was feeling a lump of anxiety in her throat, we decided to acquaint ourselves with it. I asked her to describe how it felt and what it looked like. I asked her to give it a name. As it turns out, Vanessa’s anxiety was an old woman named Pearl.

  Pearl was a sassy broad with her handbag clutched closely to her chest, and she had no fear of expressing herself. Pearl was nervous about the safety of her material things, like the car Vanessa parked down the street, and whether Vanessa locked her apartment, and whether other people were touching her things. When we asked Pearl why her material things were so important, she said, “Because I didn’t have them before this.”

  When Vanessa grew up, she went through a period in her life where her family had next to nothing in terms of material things. Her mother had moved them into a house in a nice neighborhood so they could attend a good school, which took all the money she had. They bought plastic lawn furniture for their living room, since they couldn’t afford traditional sofas at the time. When money began flowing again, her mother emphasized the importance of choosing quality pieces that gave her a sense of pride and accomplishment for her life.

  As a result, Vanessa had a unique relationship to her material things, one that emphasized their importance and her pride in nice things. So when her anxiety came up, it was really Pearl, reminding her of her connection to those material things and her fear of losing them. The more we talked to Pearl and listened to what she said, the less anxious she became. She began to settle into the role of a guide, giving Vanessa all sorts of helpful, albeit sassy as hell, advice. By personifying her negative feeling of anxiety, Vanessa was able to turn that feeling into a learning tool and a helpful guide—one that hilariously called her out when she needed it (like when Pearl scolded her for not drinking her green juice.)

  Sometimes our energy signatures aren’t as flexible in their expressions and how they communicate with us. Sometimes negative feelings want to stay negative, and there’s not much that we can do to change their mind. Anxiety in the form of panic is a good example. Panic is such a raw and hyperadrenalized emotion that it will continue to operate at that same panicked vibration, and working with it is more about subduing it and making sure it doesn’t rule your life, rather than hoping it will turn into something else. In that case, your energy signature for panic might be a large man running around your house, screaming and knocking furniture over and things off shelves, breaking everything and refusing to actually talk to you.

  Building energetic signatures is like discovering little gremlins that have been living in your body for years. Some of them are sassy old ladies who just want to give you practical advice, and some of them are mischievous little jerks who just want to cause trouble. Each feeling is tied to a character of sorts. You’ll have the opportunity to start building on your energy signatures in the Do the Work section. When you get to know these characters, your experience of your emotions becomes a story in itself, and not just a negative feeling. And once you know these characters well, you’ll always be able to recognize and work with them in a productive way.

  The Binary Bind of “Good” and “Bad” Feelings

  Feelings are tricky little beasts. They encompass the whole spectrum of life experience, and it can be incredibly difficult to make sense of them all. Humans have developed a way to make all of this a little bit easier: we’ve divided emotions into “good” feelings and “bad” feelings. Joy, happiness, excitement, peace, and love are all “good” emotions, while depression, anxiety, jealousy, and anger are all “bad” emotions.

  From a very early age, children are taught that the “good” feelings are what we aim for and are positively reinforced, while the “bad” emotions are undesired and are negatively reinforced. As a result, children develop very binary emotional landscapes that don’t leave a lot of space for actually feeling without judging what they are feeling. The more that landscape is enforced, both externally and internally, the more that child develops into a repressed adult with unbalanced empathy. And this happens with everyone to some degree. No one is an exception to this.

  The consequences of binary emotional landscapes are even greater for the born empath. Since the very nature of empathy is to feel everything, and since pain is often felt more intensely than joy, the empath learns that at least half of their entire nature is undesirable and unacceptable. This sets them up for a lifetime of secrecy and shame.

  As a result, many empaths naturally gravitate toward lives in spiritual communities as a way to cope with their struggles. The trend of the positive thinking movement that’s rampant in spiritual communities, however, can potentially cause more harm than help for an empath with a conditioned binary emotional landscape. The positive thinking movement overemphasizes the glorification of “good” feelings as a replacement for feeling the “bad” ones and reinforces the notion that if you feel the “‘bad” emotions, you’re not a “good” spiri
tual person.

  When in the very beginning stages of realizing my emotional pain, I saw a series of healers for treatments in my spiritual development. Some pretty heavy feelings were coming up around some pretty serious themes like rape, eating disorders, and abuse, and I could feel them bubbling up just underneath the surface, waiting to be seen and exorcised.

  As I would begin to express these feelings to my healers, they would tell me that I didn’t have to talk about them. They told me that merely talking about them would bring attention to them and feed the negativity. As I received these sessions, I could feel the energy they were using on me. They were all gifted healers with the best of intentions, and the healing energy was fantastic, but I found that the energy couldn’t land. It couldn’t fully integrate into my body. Now I know that it couldn’t integrate because the places that really needed the healing energy were intentionally closed off.

  Maybe you’ve experienced the same thing in your own spiritual journey. Maybe you’ve experienced some wonderful energy from healers or teachers that never seemed to stick with you. Have you ever felt like, as much as you’ve tried, you couldn’t get fully on board with positive thinking? Were there certain things that were said that didn’t sit well with you, or made you feel secretly ashamed of how much you felt all the time? Do you feel like only half of you can show up to positive thinking because of all the hidden feelings you have from your own binary emotional landscape? This is an indication that you need more than positive thinking. You need to be able to feel all of your feelings, even the “bad” feelings. Until you can feel all of them without shame, the “good” stuff won’t be able to fully integrate into your body.