A Letter To The Empaths

How I Learned To Understand My Sensitivity

First you must realize that all of life is emotions and emotions have frequencies. Everything man made and otherwise that exists in this universe began with a thought and an accompanying emotion. Or an emotion and then an accompanying thought. Desire, anger, love, hate, ambition, greed, joy, each with it’s own frequency, is the fuel that manifests the thought into reality. Whether it be a baby, a building, a relationship, a situation, a work of music, art, a spaceship, or a war.

Empaths feel emotions more intensely, more deeply than non empaths. One of the things about being an empath is that many of us don’t realize we’re empaths until later in life. As a child you probably didn’t recognize that what you were feeling was someone else’s energy or projections. You may have thought that all those emotions and ideas were coming straight from your own heart and mind. You may have thought you were crazy at times, unsure of your true self, when you were just sensing and feeling the emotions of other family members and the people around you.

We find ourselves in situations where we’re focusing on something whether shopping, work related tasks, or personal interests when we’re around other people and feel an emotion come over us. Your first instinct might be to assume it’s something you’re feeling about what you’re focused on. But if it seems out of the blue or completely disconnected from what you’re focusing on, it’s likely you’ve picked up on someone else’s energy.

This is why knowing who you are, knowing thyself, is of the utmost importance to an empath. You are not a blank screen to be projected onto by whoever focuses on you or passes by your energy field. You must be able to sense foreign energies and know the difference between your own emotions and thoughts, and the energies of others down to the God particle within you.

Abuse, whether physical or emotional, is usually what creates an empath, if you weren’t just born with a psychic gift. Many of you, like myself, may have been raised by narcissistic, neglectful, and or abusive parents and have repeated the pattern of attracting and being attracted to those personality types countless times as adults.

A number of you may also have attracted controlling personality types and along with that personality trait may have come someone who operates in the dark arts. A negative psychic misusing their gift. A disaster for an empath who doesn’t understand their own power. You could be vulnerable to a cult.

It’s easy to feel powerless as an empath. Emotions come out of nowhere and overwhelm you, you don’t know how to react, you let them fill your mind, and you react badly which could include self harm, drug and alcohol addiction, depression, mental illness, and other self destructive and negative behaviors.

What and how do we manage this unique quality we have? What is it’s purpose? How do we use it to the benefit of not just ourselves but the rest of humanity? How do we gain better control of this extreme sensitivity?

You need to become stronger and more loving in your sense of self to control how these energies affect you.

What I’m attempting to do here is map out the way I realized the difference between my own thoughts and emotions and the emotions and energies of other people. But I must include some of my backstory in my search for true self.

I started out with a bit of a mess in my adult emotional life. Growing up, we weren’t a poor family. Both parents had college degrees, my mother getting her master’s degree caused a rift in their relationship. My father having an affair with a coworker hammered the final nail into the coffin. Both my parents were narcissists who had this sometimes violent, highly contentious divorce, and cared very little for how any of their five children were processing and handling their split.

I was twelve when the split took place. Over the course of three years my father and brother gradually distanced themselves from us, and his entire side of the family stopped speaking to us. So I lost not just my father and brother, but grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, people I had bonded with and loved, all while going through puberty.

My mother began to take out her frustrations on me starting at age thirteen, not any of my siblings, just me. It’s a well known fact that a narcissistic parent will often single out a child to be the scapegoat of the family. That was me. We had regular fist fights because I didn’t think her reasons for hitting me were sound or necessary. I always hit her back, but that didn’t stop her trying to control me with violence, this went on for almost 3 years.

When there wasn’t a fist fight there was no guidance, no parenting, no affection, or attention unless something went wrong. I had a roof over my head in a relatively safe suburban neighborhood, clean clothes, enrolled in school, there was plenty of food in the fridge and that was it.

So with this foundation of grief from the loss of my family and father, along with soul crushing, emotional neglect and physical abuse from my mother, I went into adulthood a very damaged person.

I realized I could hear what other people were thinking when I was about 19. I didn’t think anything of it. I’d had a few psychic dreams at that point and I had been able to sense spirits since age 10. Still not connecting the dots or trusting what I was sensing. My self esteem was in the toilet. I constantly doubted my own thoughts and instincts. I didn’t have a clear idea of who I was and I was very vulnerable to narcissistic, manipulative people. And now I was out in the world trying to be an adult with all the expectations and responsibilities of any normal person.

Things were not going the way I wanted them to.

I did have a modeling career which people think is a great thing, and it was a lot of fun for the most part, relatively easy work, modeling for catalogs, fashion shows and eventually a TV shopping channel, it was decent money. I wasn’t an A-list model so I wasn’t getting paid $10K a day, but it was comfortable enough to live on.

The thing about that business is, you’re being controlled. You’re told what size to be, what haircut/haircolor/hairstyle to have, they could tell you to get plastic surgery, get your nose or breasts done, everything down to what color your fingernails and toenails should be, in order to work consistently. You’d also do it without them telling you if thought it would get you more work.

Occasionally, depending who your agent was, and who you were working for, it could become emotionally abusive, you were constantly being measured, judged, compared, and critiqued. All this while you make it look effortless and glamorous when the lights and cameras were on. I fortunately never reached a high enough level to have to deal with the casting couch. But I had managed to recreate my relationship with my family through my career.

There are a number of narcissists in the fashion and beauty business both in front of and behind the camera. I can honestly say there are also many adults who were abused as children in the modeling business. Show biz in general for that matter. You mistake that superficial, very conditional attention for actual acceptance, which you may not have received as a child, and you believe that you have true friendships and connections with people, only to watch them disappear if you gain weight, stop modeling, somehow no longer fit the template.

Fortunately, nobody cared what was going on in your head they only cared about how you looked and presented yourself, so I realized at a certain point that I could focus my mind on whatever I wanted to learn, understand, create, envision. I devoured information, reading everything I could get my hands on, I was studying and writing music, lyrics, and stories, studying the esoteric, paranormal and psychic phenomena, gemology, yoga, Buddhism, Christian Mysticism.

I started making jewelry with semi-precious stones. One part of me was growing and expanding while there was still a very hurt child shoved way down out of sight, out of conscious mind and actively attracting, over and over again, that same abusive, narcissistic personality into my life, no matter what else was different about the person I chose or the situation.

I had trouble making sense of it because I thought I had put that hurt child behind me. I thought the simple passage of time had calmed the pain. But I was mistaken. I was having problems with depression and anxiety, I was drinking daily. I even entertained becoming a Sommelier I loved wine so much, for all the wrong reasons. And I was still attracting narcissists, sociopaths, and manipulative users.

I began therapy. I knew I had problems and wanted very much to work through them. Therapy was great more because of my own efforts, reading Jung, Chopra, Dyer, Abraham-Hicks, Eckhart Tolle, Joseph Campbell, Julia Cameron and other self help authors. My therapist initially put me on a good path to understanding myself, teaching me coping skills and helping me realize things about myself and my life, although I wasn’t being truthful with her about the amount of drinking I was doing.

What really went wrong after a couple of years, was that my therapist started telling me her problems. My therapy sessions became a, guess what happened to her last weekend, kind of thing and there was always a crisis. She told me she was physically attacked by the pizza delivery man, which I found hard to believe, it was an excuse she made for cancelling our appointment last minute, and her delivery of it had that same hysterical tone that she brought to every new crisis. She and her husband filed for bankruptcy and she urged me to do the same when I had some financial problems, she had an autoimmune disease she always talked about. I knew way too much about this woman’s personal life and tribulations.

If she called and I didn’t pick up right away she’d blow up my phone by calling and calling until I did answer. She told me she was proud of her ability to get people to answer the phone. When I finally told her I couldn’t do this any more and ended it, she gave me a sob story about how she thought I understood and this was our friendship. I plunged into a deep depression after that.

I had attracted a narcissistic therapist. Fortunately I was also seeing a psychiatrist for my antidepressant prescriptions, because the therapist couldn’t prescribe medication, and she confirmed the behavior was unprofessional and harmful. But I was on a serious downward spiral in part because I was still drinking very heavily. I would go through a 1.5 liter bottle of wine every couple of days, which was a lot for me. Alcohol exacerbated my depression while I had convinced myself that it helped and I needed it.

Keeping a very long story short: A mental breakdown and suicide attempt later, I realized some very important things looking out from the lowest point of my life. I realized how much negativity I absorbed from just about every member of my family. Being too messed up to work for close to 8 months and having to depend on my older sister, bless her sainted soul, I got to see my individual family members and the actual energies they were offering me. Resentment, jealousy, disrespect, crazy energies that I had been absorbing for decades.

I’d been feeling like an angry person was always glaring at me inches from my face for years, in reality it was certain family members who were always cordial and civil on the surface, but complete bitches behind my back. I had always wanted to think the best of them, I wanted and needed to feel like I had a family to love and be part of. I thought way too highly of them compared to what they thought of me.

My breakdown wasn’t a failure by any means, it was absolutely necessary for the scales to fall from my eyes, for me to see the actual people and the inaccurate images I had of those people. I needed to see the inaccurate images I had of myself based on the emotions I had absorbed from being too close and unassuming around them. I needed to see the emotional impact all this negative energy had on my life and my self esteem. I needed to stop drinking. I needed to stop associating love with disrespect and emotional abuse.

My family treated me like an errant, stupid child and I realized in my 40’s when I had my breakdown that I had been feeling like that all of my adult life. They treated me like a joke. Someone to never be taken seriously. If you’d asked me years before the breakdown, I would have told you how intelligent and impressive they all were. Advanced degrees, successful careers, impressive employers. What a great family. How do you know you’re being treated disrespectfully when that’s pretty much the way they’ve always treated you and they’re family so they must know you, and you have to accept it because they’re all you have in this world? Right?

No. No you don’t. My beautiful sister passed in 2015 after a long battle with an illness. As I got better over the years and began to trust my instincts and intuition more, I started setting definite boundaries with the rest of my family. My only true ally was gone. Eventually I stopped going to family gatherings. The intensity of the negative energy and the various reasons and intents of the individuals projecting that energy onto me was insane. No wonder I lost my mind when I was trying to be a good, and affectionate family member. No wonder my self esteem was in the shitter.

I understand now that I had an inner child who felt like she had no one, just drifting through life feeling like she had no control over what happens to her, and attaching to people who took an interest in me for reasons that I mistook for affection or love but were, at their core, manipulative and abusive. She was in a deep state of grief and loss, and in a panic to bring her father back. That twelve year old girl who watched half her family disappear forever. That hurt kid who wasn’t getting love, guidance, or attention. That girl who was forced to fistfight with her mother to avoid getting beaten for some useless reason. Frozen in time like a living festering snapshot. She was my shadow and a huge influence on my point of attraction for decades.

Sure I received messages from my guides through dreams that I didn’t understand at the time. Always a few days before family gatherings I would have dreams of a child in a dangerous situation and I would try to save it and fail. The child fell from a second story ledge, I tried to catch it and missed. In one dream a catastrophic explosion happened and I covered the child with my body, it was badly burned but still alive. In these dreams the child was never killed, it always survived, but it was definitely hurt. The child in these dreams was me, my psyche, in the presence of my family.

In my short marriage I constantly had dreams I was being attacked. I would have dreams that I was physically fighting, hand to hand combat, for my life with some mysterious aggressor. Sometimes I’d win, sometimes I wouldn’t. I didn’t connect the dots to my ex because I was in love. The relationship wasn’t physically abusive at all, but he was another grown up damaged child, a good bit more damaged than myself. At the end of the relationship of less than two years, I felt like he’d drained the life out of me. He needed a mother and a psychiatrist, not a wife.

Pay attention to your dreams, write them down in a journal with dates along with your thoughts about what they might mean in your quest to understand yourself. Read over them every so often and ask for clear understanding in your prayers.

Lets talk about prayers. Some of us get prayer wrong. We ask God for material things, like we’re asking a parent for toys or money, or we ask God to fix things in our lives without asking God to fix us, or show us how to fix ourselves emotionally. The prayers don’t get answered or, we don’t see the answer because we expect something different and that clouds our ability to see the answers that come. When you pray for something, don’t expect to know what the answer will be or how it will come. Stay open and receptive to what may come. Meditation along with prayer is also important.

It is in the quiet of meditation that you may hear the answer to your prayers. Learning to quiet your mind is of the utmost importance. Learn to listen with your soul. You ultimately have control over the energies that invade you, but it is found in the quiet and the love, not in what we think of as fighting. When those unwanted energies intrude they’re usually negative, if we hold ourselves in a place of self love we are not vibrating at the same frequency as negative energy and it doesn’t get in. The only way we feel the negative energies is by being at the same frequency. Our less than loving sense of self makes us vulnerable to negative projections and energies.

Become stronger, more confident and more loving in your sense of self.

Because many of us are survivors of childhood abuse, our emotional and spiritual boundaries are permeable for that reason. We don’t understand how we’re letting the energies in because we’ve always let them in. We were conditioned to let them in from an early age.

The most thorough way to “block” the thoughts and energies of others is with unconditional self love. Not egotistical self love, but genuine spiritual, unconditional self love. Knowing yourself and loving yourself. Not many of us have achieved this.

Filling up your auric and physical space with the love, the Creator of All That Is, has for you is something to pray for and work towards.

In the meantime, start to recognize the energy of the thought as it passes through you, feel the emotion behind it and counter it with your confident loving sense of self. That energy is attempting to change the way you feel. Own your space. Love yourself in the face of it. You know how true you feels, and you know how you want to feel. Center yourself there and be at peace. Recognize the energy for what it is and dismiss it.

Don’t see yourself as a victim, don’t perceive yourself to be helpless to it. The intrusive energy or thought may come with words but emotion is what conveys it, don’t be distracted by the words, ignore them. Learn to read the emotion and decide not to feel it, feel something better.

Even if its just imagining how you feel floating in a beautiful blue ocean with the sun on your face. Anything loving, pleasant, funny, peaceful, joyful that counters the emotion of the thought.

That being said, pay attention to an urgent psychic warning that could be mistaken for an intrusive thought or emotion. Those usually come through pretty clear and strong. You should be able to tell the difference. If you shut the thought down but it keeps coming back, pay attention and ask for clarity. Just ask: What’s this about? You’ll get an answer, learn to listen with your soul.

We all have a guardian angel, every single person who lives has one. Try praying to your guardian angel. Start with asking for their guidance and help. Ask for them to be closer and easier to understand. Ask to feel their love daily. Ask them to steer your life in the direction that benefits your higher good. Include Archangels and Saints, call on them for help, protection, learning, love. There really is a host of heaven who wants to see humanity overcome negative influences and grow spiritually. These Ascended Masters and enlightened beings are all around us wanting to help. But we have to ask for that help. We have to reach for that hand.

When you ask for things in your prayers, ask for states of mind. Ask to know what unconditional self love feels like every day when you pray. Ask for a clear vision of what you need to see, and know, in order to live your true purpose. So many of us are not living our true purpose for being on this earth. We get sucked into what society or family tells you or forces you to be, and your true purpose is obscured and forgotten. Meanwhile you’re depressed and anxious and don’t quite know why. You’re not living your truth, whatever it is. Your higher self knows your truth, and we all have higher selves.

I met a Reiki Master, had a few sessions and decided to study Reiki. I became a Reiki Master. The thing about Reiki is that you have to practice it on yourself before you can practice on anyone else. You have to be a healed vessel before you can heal anyone else. Also Reiki cannot be used with negative intent. It’s specifically for love, healing, clearing and balancing. I’ve been using Reiki on myself for three years now. I’ve learned to clear foreign energies from my aura and body. I clear foreign energies from my home and items I bring into my home. I put protective energies around myself daily and even then I still pick up on other people’s energies, but I recognize them and clear them when I have a chance to.

I avoid crowds and crowded situations as much as possible, they are still very uncomfortable for me and I doubt that I will ever find those situations comfortable. But because I know Reiki I can always cleanse myself when I get home or duck into a public bathroom stall and do a quick energetic cleanse and protection. Knowing Reiki is a blessing. I highly recommend it for any sensitive person.

Become aware of all the sensations in your body. We store trauma and negative energies that can manifest into physical pain and disease if not acknowledged and worked through. Before I dealt with my childhood trauma I would have a traveling knot in my back and shoulders. One day it might be on my left side, another day it may be on the right. Muscle spasms and sciatica. I went to chiropractors and got massages and physical therapy when I could afford it. But it never really went away.

Now that I have been allowing myself to identify the depth and nature of the pain I’d been carrying, the muscle spasms are far more sporadic, less severe in intensity, and have settled into specific areas that I focus on when I Reiki myself, meditate, chant and pray. I also realize when I’m picking up on negative energies projected at me, I feel it physically that’s one way I know when an emotion or thought is not coming from within me. Many psychics have a physical location in their bodies where they sense things and tune in more readily, everyone is different.

I still occasionally see a doctor to deal with physical aspects of whatever pain might be surfacing while I spelunk the emotional and psychic end of things on my own. Medical marijuana has also helped me tremendously but I understand it’s not for everyone. Don’t drink alcohol, it’s carcinogenic poison.

Know thyself. True you is closer to God than anything anyone might try to convince you is a better way to be close to God. Love Yourself. Such a simple concept yet so difficult to achieve for so many of us. It’s a life long journey. What else could ever be more worth your time and energy?

Know yourself. Love Yourself.

Thank You.