I Don't Want to Be an Empath Anymore

by Ora North

  Care for yourself after the party.After a pity party, it’s important to use compassionate self-care. Clearing practices are necessary to purify some of the energy that’s been released. Taking care of the basics—like sleep, hydration, food, and bathing—will be incredibly important. Spend time talking with your support about the experience, or journaling about it. Give yourself time to adjust before you jump back into normal life. Check in with your feelings, your energy signatures, and see how they feel. If you’re having trouble getting out of the difficult feelings that were brought up, turn to your support.

  Contraindications: When Not to Have a Pity Party

  Conscious pity parties are not always for everyone. If you know you’re working with some intense trauma, especially in the form of PTSD, it’s necessary to have the right support team. There is a difference between making space for your feelings and retraumatizing yourself, and if your triggers are too intense and traumatic, then avoid doing this kind of work by yourself. Always consult with your mental health team and make sure you have the support you need for where you’re at in your process.

  Chapter 5:

  Whose Feelings ARE These?

  I sat on the kitchen floor, my back up against the cabinets. This was my giving-up spot. I wiped away my tears with my sleeve as I clenched my jaw in anger. I’d recently moved in with my partner, and I knew I was supposed to be in the honeymoon phase of cohabitating, but I wasn’t. As the weeks went by, I noticed my moods being more unpredictable. I was angry when I didn’t have a reason to be angry. I felt listless when I didn’t have a reason to be listless. Everything felt a little fuzzy around the edges. Everything was a little unclear. And when he said something that didn’t quite sit right with me, I snapped at him. And then my sudden irritation triggered him and he snapped back at me. This continued until I resigned myself to the kitchen floor.

  When we both had calmed down, and he joined me on the kitchen floor and finally explained to me how he was feeling, I was alarmed to find that it was the same way I had been feeling. Only, I didn’t understand why I was feeling it. The more I thought about it, the more it didn’t make sense. When I tried to find the root of my anger, I couldn’t. My reactions were like echoes of his feelings, but I had no real stake in them. I wasn’t really angry. I was feeling him being angry, and then taking it on as my own. It was like I was becoming him and he was having a fight with himself. It was like I disappeared into his feelings. In that moment of realization, I discovered that I had subconsciously taken on so many of his feelings that I was having trouble figuring out what my own feelings were.

  Being an empath means that you can feel other people’s emotions, but it also means that you can disappear inside of them. Confusing the energies is a common problem. What are their feelings and what are mine? The more the empath coexists with others without proper boundaries and ways to discern their own energy, the messier and more confusing things get. It gets even worse when triggering emotions are involved. It gets easier, though. By working with your energy signatures, your intuition, and what triggers you, you can easily discern which feelings belong to you and which feelings belong to others.

  Turn to Your Energy Signatures

  Feeling bombarded by the feelings of others is exhausting. It takes a toll. It not only distorts your relationships with other people, but it also distorts your relationship with yourself and your dreams and your goals.

  Working with your emotions and creatively describing them so you can recognize their energy signatures will be your greatest strength in discerning whether the energy you feel is yours or someone else’s. For example, if you’re with your partner and you’re feeling some anger that you don’t know the source of, you can feel into that energy, and if you recognize the energy signature, that energy is yours.

  Maybe you’ve named your anger emotion Claude, and his energy feels snobby and has an orange haze, and you were able to feel that energy while arguing with your partner. If that’s the case, you can hang out with Claude, trace that anger back, and find the source of it. Once you know it’s yours, you can hold space for yourself, even asking your partner to hold space for it as well. If you feel into the energy and it’s an energy signature you don’t recognize, like you’re building a new character you’ve never met before, that energy is probably not yours, and it’s time to separate yourself from it. Essentially, you’re going to know yourself so well that you will know exactly what belongs to you and what doesn’t. You may even get to know the energy signatures of your loved ones, which makes it even easier to discern between theirs and yours.

  Knowing yourself that well takes time and space. To truly process and identify your own emotions, you need some time away from everyone else. Separating from others gives you the space to let everyone else’s energy fall away so you can focus on your own. Sometimes that means you will have to excuse yourself from others so you can process on your own. Sometimes that means pushing the pause button on an argument or temporarily walking away from decision-making. Taking time to examine emotions on your own is an important way to hold space for yourself and your skills as an empath. You’ll find more ways to create this space in Energetic Clearing Tools in the resources section.

  Using Yes and No Intuition

  Tuning into your body is an exercise in listening to your intuition, which can help you discern energies. Your body can give you distinct signals to indicate whether you’re on track or not. To tune in, all you have to do is get into a relaxed position and do a few minutes of deep breathing.

  When you feel relaxed, you can ask your body, What is my “yes”? When your intention is focused on your body, your body will respond to your question by producing specific sensations. Those sensations can differ from person to person. My yes feels like an expansion, like my chest rises and my shoulders straighten, and I feel like I could stretch into as much as space as I’d like. You might feel something similar, or maybe butterflies in your stomach, or tingling in your third eye.

  Once you’ve discovered your yes sensations, you can then ask your body, What’s my “no”? Your body will respond to the new question and produce completely different sensations. My no feels like my body is contracting and collapsing into itself. You might experience a sinking feeling, or your shoulders might hunch over.

  Knowing your yes and no can help you identify your own feelings and separate yourself from the feelings of others. If you feel overwhelmed with emotions and you’re not sure if they’re yours or someone else’s, ask yourself, Does this feeling of dread belong to me?

  If that feeling is yours, your body will respond with your yes sensations. If it’s not, it will respond with your no sensations.

  This works especially well for discerning whether another person is good for you or not. Since empaths are often vulnerable to narcissists and those who would exploit our compassion, having discernment when it comes to others is paramount. If you’re getting strong no sensations in your body when you’re with a certain person, especially if it’s a romantic partner, your intuition is telling you that it’s time to walk away. If you feel yes sensations when you’re with another person, your body is opening up to love and trust in a positive way.

  This technique only works if you use it frequently, for both small things and big things. When you feel intense emotions, sometimes those emotions themselves will create physical sensations in your body, which could confuse your yes and no sensations. If you start with small, seemingly meaningless situations to use your yes and no sensations, you’ll start to build a trust in your body.

  One of my favorite ways to start small is by asking myself questions throughout the day. I’ll ask myself, Does my body want kale salad for lunch today? or Do I want to watch trashy reality TV tonight? or Should I go out with my friend this weekend? By starting with decisions that don’t seem to carry a lot of weight, you learn your intuitive craft in a way that takes the pressure off and may actually surprise yo
u.

  Sometimes I really don’t want kale salad and sometimes I really want to watch trashy TV. And surprisingly, those decisions can end up being healthy decisions. My body may give me no sensations with kale salad one day, because my digestion just needs some cooked food. Or my body may give me yes sensations to trashy TV, because what I really need is some time and space to relax and take my mind off things. I’ve often intuitively said no to social engagements, even though I wanted to go, and discovered the next day that I was sick and couldn’t go anyway. I’ve also intuitively said yes to social engagements, even though I was feeling depressed, and ended up having an incredibly healing time with friends.

  By using this technique frequently in a variety of situations—even the small ones—while also realizing how your emotions affect you, you’ll be able to fine-tune your responses and understand yourself and your body on a whole new level. Your body holds an entire universe of knowledge, just waiting to be utilized by you.

  It should be noted, however, that communicating freely with the body like this isn’t always possible. For those with a history of trauma who may have difficulties with disassociation, making the mind/body connection is a little more complicated. This is totally normal and okay.

  Another way to use your yes and no intuition, even if you can’t sink into your body quite yet, is to assign your yes and your no an intuitive visual signal. Let’s say you assign your yes the color purple, and you assign your no the color orange. Start by asking yourself yes or no questions you already know the answer to, and intentionally visualize the color for the right answer. You’re creating a visual association to those two colors in your mind, so when it comes time for you to use yes and no intuition, you begin to intuitively see the color purple when it’s a yes and the color orange when it’s a no.

  Working with Your Triggers

  Uh-oh…it’s happened.

  You’ve been triggered.

  You feel an onslaught of frantic painful emotions, defensiveness, and your fight-or-flight response is activated. You’re ready to either jump down their throat or shut down completely. What do you do now?

  Being triggered is a psychological response to something that reminds you of your trauma. The trigger could be a smell, a certain phrase, a tone of voice, or any stimulus that causes your brain to bring up the memory of your trauma, making you feel like you’re reliving it to a certain degree. When you’re triggered, your body and mind may react as if they’re experiencing the trauma all over again.

  As overwhelming as they may feel, your triggers are actually a good thing. (I know, that seems really untrue and annoying, but stay with me.) Your triggers offer you clear insight into the areas where you need healing and awareness. Triggers happen because a wound has been activated, and your natural defenses want to prevent any more pain in that wound. That’s why you feel defensive.

  Triggers also pull you down into negative neural pathways, into the pathways your trauma created. Your brain is wired with a lot of repetitive, conditioned thinking. The more you think a certain thought, the more that thought carves a pathway. That pathway becomes more worn the more you go back to that thought, and before long, you find it hard to choose another path. This is why your triggers are always related to your past.

  The first thing to do when you feel triggered is to stop and make space for it. Your trigger is like a toddler having a temper tantrum, so it’s important to stop and pay attention. This could be when you excuse yourself from the fight you’re having with your partner so you can be alone to go through it. If you have an understanding partner, you could ask them to allow you to walk yourself through the trigger with them. More often than not, though, I recommend being alone, especially if you’re new to confronting your triggers.

  When you’re in a safe space, name your feeling out loud. Your initial feeling may be completely different from the feeling you end up with after the process, but that first frantic feeling is very important. Speaking that feeling out loud gives it validation, and naturally begins to create more space for it.

  Ask yourself, Why am I feeling that feeling?

  Answer your own question. The answer is probably going to be something your partner did or said.

  Ask yourself, Why did that bother me so much?

  Answer that question, and then ask yourself Why? again.

  This process will be a series of questions until you boil down your responses as much as you can, getting to the truth behind them. Each answer will peel away more and more of what the other person said or did to you, and each answer will bring you further and further back toward your core wounding, and what happened to you in the past. Once you reach your core wounding, you’re able to see that the pain you’re feeling isn’t just from the person who triggered you. The pain is from years of living with your core wound—years of feeling unseen, or unsupported, or abused. Once you reach this, use the core wound exercises in the Do Your Work section of chapter 3 to work on your healing. You can choose to share this exploration with the person who triggered you or not—that is up to you. But every time you trace your trigger back, you have another opportunity to heal yourself.

  Here’s an example: Julia sent a text to her husband, Mark, in the middle of a busy day, asking him to stop at the store on his way home to buy milk for the kids. They were completely out. Mark agreed.

  When Mark got home, he came in empty-handed. Julia asked him what happened, and he said that he just forgot.

  This action completely triggered Julia into anger, and Mark couldn’t understand why something as small as a forgotten gallon of milk would upset her so much.

  Julia went into her room to have some time alone.

  I am really angry, she said to herself.

  Why are you angry?

  Because Mark forgot to bring home milk, even though he agreed to earlier.

  Why does that upset you?

  Because he never listens to me. It’s like he just ignores me if it doesn’t have anything to do with him.

  Why does feeling ignored hurt so much?

  Because it means that he doesn’t care about me or my needs or the needs of his children. He only cares about himself.

  Why does it hurt so much to have your needs ignored?

  It turned out that Julia had an alcoholic mother as a child. Her mother would forget to provide basic needs, like milk, and would ignore or forget her children’s requests. Julia experienced so much neglect, even on the basic level of being fed, that her brain was wired to believe that her needs weren’t important.

  When Mark—who usually did his best when it came to the needs of his family—forgot the milk because of an oversight, he triggered Julia’s core wound of neglect. When Julia was able to realize her trigger, she explained the situation to Mark, who then agreed to be more mindful of the things that could cause her more pain. He was also able to reassure her that her needs were important. Julia was also able to see that she needed to do more work around her self-worth and with her inner child, and was able to meet her anger with love and understanding.

  Your triggers always trace back to a wounding, usually some version of your core wound. If you can practice the patience it takes to question yourself until you’ve traced your trigger all the way back to the root of where it hurts, you can shift the way you communicate entirely. Once you understand that experiencing a trigger means that you are experiencing a past pain that needs love, the trigger immediately loses its charge. You’ll also realize that whenever someone else is triggered, they’re experiencing that same wounding, which makes you more compassionate with them and less likely to continue arguing. You’ll begin to associate “what is triggering” with “what needs love.”

  Triggers as Mirrors

  Tracing your triggers back is one way to see how people are mirrors, reflecting back what’s inside of us. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that even though people are mirrors, that
doesn’t mean it’s all about your reflection all the time. Sometimes people will remind you of all the wounding you have inside of yourself and offer a chance to dig into that. Other times, people are simply being jerks, and by focusing on your own reflection every single time, that person will continue being a jerk to you. Let’s look at this distortion.

  Truth: We’re all mirrors to each other.

  Our relationships are examples of our own projections, perceptions, and experiences. People are often brought into our lives to light up specific issues and boundaries within us—both in loving, positive ways and in tumultuous, harmful ways.

  When you don’t like how someone reacts to you, it can be indicative of something inside of yourself and not about the other person at all. When someone doesn’t like the way you react to them, it can be indicative of something inside of them and not about you at all. Relationships are the greatest teachers in that they reflect so many things back to us. Sometimes our reactions reflect the work we need to do on ourselves and the healing we need.

  Also truth: These mirrors are funhouse mirrors.

  They bend and distort what is really happening. What you may see isn’t necessarily true. If someone reacts badly to you, maybe they’re just being a jerk and it has nothing to do with what you need to heal or reflect upon. If you brush off someone’s feelings about how you’re treating them because you just know it’s about them, maybe you’re the jerk and you’re bypassing their valid experiences. You can never fully understand the reality of what is happening between two people at any given moment in any given relationship.