October 01, 2019
The Empowered Empath
People who are drawn to do healing work, counseling, and social work are often very empathic. They instantly feel the emotional state of another. This can be a great gift in these fields, as it helps create instant rapport, but for many this can also be a burden. We are not born knowing how to deal with the overload of all of the incoming information, nor how to sort through what is ours, and what belongs to another, we are just wired to pick it all up.
In youth an empath may not even recognize that they are different; we all assume our normal is everyone else’s. After some time, however, we find we cry easier, melt down easier, and are singled out as “overly” sensitive. Depending upon how supported we are, this “oversensitivity” can become a journey of self medicating and not fitting in. As the overload redlines our stress response capacity, our anguish often leads people uncomfortable with emotion to reject us. This, of course, affects our self esteem.
One of the most crippling side effects of being highly sensitive is running high levels of anxiety. Sensitives, or SuperCeptors, are highly tuned to pick up on the nuances of their environments, keeping their bodies forever on alert. They are not the only ones, however. Anyone who has been imprinted by a stressful or traumatic period in their life, also has a brain tempered for further stress.
In her book The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine Aron notes that 20 percent of the human population is born with a level of sensitivity that is markedly different than the average person’s. They are the gifted intuitives and empaths among us. One in five of us has these gifts! In the days of old we were the treasured healers, oracles, mediums, channels and shamans of our community. Unfortunately, in a period of dark human history that we are just now awaking from, we were shamed into hiding and denying our true nature for fear of losing our lives. Suffering through rigid educational systems and roles that overload our delicate nervous systems, our current survival options eventually break us down. We are then dismissed as weak and... well... Sensitive, continuing the cycle of shame!