I Don't Want to Be an Empath Anymore

by Ora North

  This doesn’t mean that the positive thinking movement is all bad. Alas, that would be yet another binary way of thinking, and the binary is never fully true. While it’s not all bad, it’s not all good either. Like most things, it’s how we can use it for our wholeness rather than our divisiveness that makes it productive. Many spiritual seekers want to bathe in the goodness of it, because they initially search for spirituality to take away their pain. This is how we end up with a handful of happy-Zen-healer folks who seem like they’ve got it all figured out when, in reality, their spirituality is shallow because they won’t acknowledge or entertain the “bad” pieces of themselves. Our core wounds are generally put into the “bad” category, which then furthers the divide between us and our emotional growth. Integrating your “bad” humanness into your positive divineness is the surest way to be the fullest expression of yourself, especially as an empath.

  I think it’s important to remember that we’re all, without exception, sparkly divine mystical beings with the entire power of the universe at our fingertips. I think it’s equally as important to remember that we’re all, without exception, these weird human creatures that fart, make bad decisions, and feel insecure. And it’s even more important to remember that the latter does not negate the former.

  Sacred, Harmful, and Neutral Emotional Messages

  Despite what we’ve been taught about binary emotional landscapes, no emotion is truly all “bad” or all “good.” There are positive and negative things found in each feeling. If you can tune into your own emotions and identify their unique energy signatures, you’ll be able to use each one for your healing.

  Instead of dividing up your emotions into “bad” and “good” columns, let’s instead take each emotion and divide it into three categories: the sacred, the harmful, and the neutral. Every single feeling can manifest in those three ways, and once you’ve identified the energy signatures of each of those feelings, you can discover what those feelings need from you and how to express them using those three categories.

  Every experience and feeling can be turned into a transformative one, which is the sacred manifestation of that feeling. Out of your pain, you can learn truth, wisdom, beauty, and love. Sacred expression of emotions is always a reclamation of something: your power, your independence, your creativity.

  It’s easy to take a “good” emotion and use it as a sacred expression. This is when you feel compassion and volunteer at a homeless organization. This is when you feel generous and donate money to a cause you believe in. This is when you feel selfless and help out your friends and family.

  It’s much harder to take a “bad” emotion and use it as a sacred expression. This takes intention and practice, and to begin, you need to turn to your energy signatures. Once you’ve built up your energy signature for that “bad” emotion, it’s much easier to communicate with it and understand what its message is and what it needs from you. And when you’re fully conscious of the feeling you’re experiencing and what it’s communicating, it’s easier to consciously choose how to react and express it. When you’re feeling angry, if you first sink into the feeling and allow yourself to recognize and build upon the energy signature, you can then choose to channel that anger into an activity which transmutes that feeling into something that heals. For example, if you have just experienced sexism at your job and you’re raging about it, you could turn that anger into an article about sexism that opens people’s eyes. You could use that rage to fuel a vigorous hike you’ve been putting off. You could use that rage to organize a feminist group at your job. If you’re communicating with that energy signature, it will tell you what it needs to do. When you’re feeling jealous, maybe what that emotion needs is for you to plan a trip and fulfill something on your bucket list. Every “bad” emotion has a job that can create good, and opening up that line of communication is how to create a sacred manifestation of it.

  The harmful manifestations of emotions are what most of us are accustomed to. This is when you’re cruel to other people or yourself as a result of your feelings. It usually happens when you’re simply not aware of any other options. It’s not your fault; you’ve been raised to believe that there are only good feelings and bad feelings, so your brain is already wired to avoid your bad feelings. The longer you avoid those feelings, the more those feelings give speed to the harmful manifestations. Many times, we won’t be able to turn toward the sacred manifestations until we realize we’ve wandered into the harmful territory.

  It’s important to realize that even “good” emotions can have harmful manifestations. For example, maybe your happiness in your new relationship affects how you communicate with your friends and family. Maybe you aren’t able to see what your loved ones need because of your new rose-colored glasses, or you’re simply refusing to see because you don’t want them to affect your happiness. This is another reminder that “good” and “bad” emotions aren’t that simple, and that knowing your energy signatures for your “good” feelings are just as important.

  Neutral manifestations of emotion are the hardest to work with. It’s usually not until you’ve delved into the sacred manifestations for a while that neutrality becomes easier. This happens when you experience an emotion and realize that it doesn’t need an expression. This is when the toddler cries out to Mom, and Mom can simply acknowledge the child and say, “Yes, I see!” These are the feelings you can see and validate, and that’s all they need from you. When you make a habit of allowing your feelings the space for sacred expression, your feelings begin to shift, and you’ll need those expressions less and less until they become neutral. Having a neutral reaction to your emotion is similar to watching an annoying commercial on television. You don’t like it, it annoys or disturbs you in some way, but once you’ve seen it and it’s over, it really doesn’t matter anymore. Neutrality is like the master class of emotional expression, and as such, it’s best to focus on the practice of sacred manifestation until you’ve been working with your energy signatures for a while. In the Do the Work section, you’ll have the opportunity to work with your energy signatures and their sacred, harmful, and neutral expressions.

  The Pleasures of a Pity Party

  “Don’t feel sorry for yourself” is something you’ve probably told yourself multiple times. You’ve probably heard it in one form or another from friends and family too. They usually add, “It could be worse!” or “At least you don’t have it as bad as Kathy!”

  In theory, those are the ways we shift our focus from feeling sorry for ourselves to feeling grateful for what we have. If you think about it, though, the fact that there are starving children around the world is not going to make you more grateful for your abusive relationship with your boyfriend. Sure, you might feel more grateful for the food on your table because of it, and that’s a wonderful thing, but how is that going to help you with your boyfriend? And who cares about how bad Kathy has it if that has nothing to do with what you’re actually facing?

  Just because other people have things worse than you doesn’t mean your problem isn’t valid. Gratitude is an incredibly beautiful tool and practice, but you don’t have to feel grateful for your problems. Forcing yourself to feel grateful for the things you want to change isn’t going to actually create the change you want.

  Self-pity is an emotion that comes around for a very specific reason.

  Self-pity says, “You are not listening to me or validating me.”

  Self-pity wants you to slow down and process the experiences you’ve lived through.

  If you refuse to process your own self-pity and victimhood, it will undoubtedly build up inside of you, seeping out into the rest of your life. You may feel slighted by others over and over again, all because you weren’t able to process your self-pity from something that happened years ago.

  I say throw a pity party! Throw yourself a conscious, intentional pity party just for your inner victim. For a specified amount of time, usu
ally just a day or an evening at a time, let yourself be as sorry for yourself as you possibly can. Sink into those feelings. Journal about how awful people have been to you without trying to correct yourself or make yourself more positive. Vent about anything and everything to a friend, as long as they agree not to steer you toward positivity. Be bitter. Eat tons of junk food. Watch Netflix in between bouts of crying and swearing and venting. You may be surprised by how good it feels to simply allow yourself to feel terrible without trying to change it.

  You’ve been a victim. Part of you is still a victim. You get to own that part too. When you’ve truly validated your victimhood and your self-pity, you’ll find that it naturally goes away on its own and reveals the deeper emotions you haven’t been able to work with yet. Owning the feeling of self-pity and letting it happen naturally takes away the desperate urge to not come off as a victim, which removes the barrier in your ability to work with your deeper feelings.

  The secret to the pity party is that you’re not only processing your self-pity. Your self-pity is just a mask that ties together the negative feelings you have that you haven’t been able to express. You may find that once you make space for your self-pity, those other emotions that you’ve been pushing away will rise up again. You may feel your deep-rooted sadness or anger. You may feel suppressed trauma forming a lump in your throat. This is totally normal. The thing about self-pity is that it can’t exist as an emotion by itself; self-pity is just a knot of tangled “bad” emotions that haven’t been allowed to express themselves. By creating the space for shame-free self-pity, you’re also creating the space for shame-free emotional expression in general, and that knot of “bad” feelings needs that space to untangle itself.

  If one pity party isn’t enough to process those feelings, keep going. Schedule another pity party. Try a few different methods to let yourself feel it. It’s okay if it takes a while. I’ve had an intentional pity party that lasted two whole weeks. They were miserable, lazy weeks, but at the end, I had processed an enormous amount of self-pity and the deeper emotions underneath that spanned a couple of years. Once processed, I noticed that those same themes which had plagued me before no longer had the power to seep into my life.

  Throwing yourself an intentional pity party is oddly and incredibly empowering! If you and a friend are both going through this process, you could try making it a group party! You’ll be able to plan a pity party for yourself when you Do the Work below.

  As a rule, if an emotion keeps surfacing, especially self-pity, it’s because you still need to go deep into it.

  The Importance of Clearing Practices

  As an empath, you are incredibly sensitive to energy. And anytime you work with your emotions, you literally move and transmute tons of energy. This is why it’s so important to have effective clearing practices. Clearing practices ensure that your aura, as well as the physical space you inhabit, is clean and clear of any stagnant or excess energy that is hanging around. Clearing the energy is important both for you and anyone else around you, so no one gets stuck in or reabsorbs the energy you’ve been working with. Refer to Energetic Clearing Tools in the resources section for suggestions on how to do this.

  Do the Work

  Mastering emotional energy takes practice, and that practice requires taking a first step. These exercises will help you take that crucial first step.

  Your Emotional Messages

  You’re going to build an energy signature. Pick an emotion, preferably one of your negative emotions that comes up frequently. Allow yourself to sink into that feeling. Breathe deeply, close your eyes, and experience the energy of that feeling. Using your journal, describe that emotion. What color is it? What does it look like? Is there a smell? A taste? What images do you see? Is it a person? An object? Let that feeling become a personality, someone that you can get to know. It’s important to be honest about what you’re feeling, since that will create the most accurate energy signature.

  Once you’ve built up a description of your feeling and can start to recognize the energy signature, you can communicate with it. Does that feeling have a name? What does that feeling want? What does it need?

  Then brainstorm some ways in which that emotion is manifested. How do you express that emotion in a harmful way? Do you lash out? Do you shut people out? What about your sacred expressions of that emotion? What are some ways that you can give that emotion space in a sacred way? Can you write a blog? Can you take a self-defense class? Can you talk to a friend?

  Lastly, what is the message that this emotion is trying to give you? It’s okay if you don’t know what it is right away. Sometimes you need to work with an energy signature for a while before you can understand its personal message to you.

  Here are two examples of my own energy signatures. Yours may be completely different from mine, and you might have a completely different way of describing them. (I really like to play into the drama and poetry of it, but that doesn’t mean that you have to do it the same way I do.)

  Rage

  Rage is bright red. It’s the hot poker that’s been sitting in the flames, ready to threaten any person who merely looks at me the wrong way. My fire is an unending force to keep that poker glowing red-orange. It’s the Goddess Kali, the goddess of death, destruction, and rebirth, the goddess that protects abused women and takes revenge on the abusers, the goddess who wears a necklace of severed heads and a belt of severed arms. Rage feels sharp and angled, but sexy, like the precise edges of expertly applied red lipstick. Rage sits low in the gut and rises to the throat.

  Sacred rage is an empowered feminist rant. A strongly worded blog against injustice. A protest. A fight back after being powerless for so long. A cathartic workout that gets the sweat pouring out. A manifesto of truth above all the crap. Unapologetic sass in the face of condemnation. A vent to a compassionate friend.

  Harmful rage is taking out my frustration on other people. It’s yelling at my partner because of something that happened at work. It’s turning my rage inward toward self-destructive tendencies. It’s rude and patronizing. It’s senseless violence. It doesn’t serve anyone or anything; it only wants to destroy.

  Rage sends the message that my boundaries (or the boundaries of my loved ones) have been crossed or disrespected. Rage sends the message that active change is required to rectify the situation.

  Sadness

  Sadness is a dark gray-blue, like the color of the ocean on a gloomy day. Sometimes it’s all consuming, like the tide rushing in during a hurricane. Other times, it’s calmly in the background, like still waters disappearing on the horizon. It’s an ache in my chest, slowly flooding my heart until I have no choice but to empty it out through my tears. Sadness lives in the heart chakra.

  Sacred sadness is pure beauty and art. A melody composed through tears. A poem about the experience of life that is painstakingly lovely and honest. A philosophy book. An expression of selfhood that is truly transcendent.

  Harmful sadness is perpetual drowning. It’s hitting the snooze button on my alarm twelve times too many. It’s watching too many sad movies and listening to too many sad songs. It’s the slow sink into depression.

  Sadness sends the message that I’ve seen too much and my sensitivities have been activated. It warns me that my attention is required so sadness doesn’t slip too far into depression, and it wants me to deal with the less-than-perfect realities I’ve seen.

  You’ll want to revisit your energy signatures often. You’ll work with these energies for the rest of your life, so it’s natural that they’ll shift and change as you shift and change. Feel free to revise your energy signatures as they change for you.

  Plan for a Pity Party

  Clear your schedule.To plan for a pity party, clear some time in your schedule. Decide on a date and time, and how long you will give yourself. I recommend starting with one evening or one day.

  Have support available.De
eply emotional and psychological self-work is no joke. It’s big and it’s real, and sometimes you need support when going through it. Sometimes the waves of emotional instability that are inevitable with changing your patterns can feel too overwhelming to handle on your own. You want to have someone in your corner who knows what you’re doing. This could be a trusted friend or family member. Know who you can call when things get difficult. Know who is strong enough to hold space for you without discouraging your work. Do you have a friend who is going through this same thing? Maybe that person will be with you, or maybe they’ll be available in case you need to call them. Have you started a book club with this process so you have a group that is experiencing these challenges together? You may not need their support, but having support at the ready is always a good idea. Maybe your support is a healer or coach or therapist. No matter who it is, they need to understand the importance of allowing you to express yourself and feel your emotions without trying to steer you away from the feelings.

  Be unavailable to everyone else.If you’re worried about other people interrupting your process or being unsupportive of you, tell the necessary people that you’ll be unreachable during that time. It’s much easier to give yourself space to process when other people aren’t taking up your extra space. Turn your phone off if you need to. Shut your computer down. Your space is sacred, so make sure you’re protecting it.

  Plan what to do during the pity party.If you’re planning a conscious pity party, chances are that you’re already feeling a lot of those negative feelings bubbling up. But if you want to open the gates to those feelings, choose things that tap into them. Pick that one movie or listen to that one album that always brings up your self-pity and sadness. Do things you would normally do when you want to wallow in a breakup. Eat junk food if that feels right to you. Angrily vent or cry to your support person. Journal about the things that have made you a victim. It’s important to immerse yourself in the feeling, and ride it out whatever direction it wants to go. Maybe you want to scream at the top of your lungs, or break a plate, or sob for three hours. Let yourself feel what you’re feeling. If at any point it feels unsafe, or like it’s too much, that’s when you call your support to step in.