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.