My entire life I have been a “highly sensitive person”. Constantly embarrassed for how emotional I get over sometimes nothing at all. Crying up to 5 times a day and many times I wouldn’t even know why. This would really frustrate the people around me because they couldn’t understand why I was upset and I couldn’t explain why. Everyday situations would leave me with an unexplained pit in my stomach and lump in my throat. As a child, it was extremely hard to navigate through overwhelming emotion hitting me all at once out of nowhere. Therapists just labeled it as “highly sensitive”, “depressed”, or “anxiety”.

Over the years I have been able to train myself to control the crying (now it’s more like 1 or 2 crocodile tears) but I still feel all the emotion crashing into me like waves. I would sometimes go through days of what felt like grieving out of nowhere when nothing, in particular, had happened to cause the grief. Other times it was situational, like going to a party or to the store. I also got weird, un-explainable, feelings of dislike for people I met even if they had done nothing to cause me to dislike them. I got disoriented by them and fumbled my words around them and I couldn’t explain why. I just got the sense that they were not being genuine or were trying to hide something. I would lose all ability to communicate effectively.

When I did have close friends I would often feel myself taking on their burdens and feeling their feelings. I would try to change myself to fit in with their life and had a hard time setting boundaries and expressing my needs. It almost always got too overwhelming and caused me to pull back on the friendship. Over time I guess I just learned not to get too close to anyone in order to protect myself.

One day I came across the term ‘Empath’ in an article I was reading on a day when I was feeling a lot of heavy emotion. It wasn’t a new term by any means but when I discovered what it was I knew almost immediately this was who I am and that I quite possibly came from a long line of them. Of course, I went into a research frenzy to learn all I could about it and the more I read, the more I was fascinated by how much it all came together for me.

First, let me explain exactly what an Empath is with an excerpt from Dr. Judith Orloff MD.‘s Blog.

“Empaths are highly sensitive, finely tuned instruments when it comes to emotions. They feel everything, sometimes to an extreme, and are less apt to intellectualize feelings. Intuition is the filter through which they experience the world….When empaths absorb the impact of stressful emotions, it can trigger panic attacks, depression, food, sex and drug binges, and a plethora of physical symptoms that defy traditional medical diagnosis from fatigue to agoraphobia. ”

And according to Christel Broederlow, a natural-born empath, and author, Empaths have a tendency to openly feel what is outside of them more so than what is inside of them. This can lead to Empaths ignoring their own needs.

She goes on to say-

“Empaths are sensitive to TV, videos, movies, news and broadcasts. Violence or emotional dramas depicting shocking scenes of physical or emotional pain inflicted on adults, children or animals can bring an empath easily to tears. At times, they may feel physically ill or choke back the tears. Some empaths will struggle to comprehend any such cruelty, and will have grave difficulty in expressing themselves in the face of another’s ignorance, closed-mindedness and obvious lack of compassion. They simply cannot justify the suffering they feel and see.”

When I came across the excerpt above it really hit home for me. There have been more times than I can count that I have felt physical exhaustion after watching something on TV because I get flooded with such intense emotion. My husband loves war movies but I just cannot watch them because I get too overwhelmed and when it’s over I feel like I just ran a marathon. As a child, I could never be around when the news was on in the living room because I would immediately feel intense emotion and sadness.Having empathy is a normal part of being a human and living in the world we live in. But, an Empath actually absorbs the energy of people and situations like a sponge. That energy lingers in physical feelings for some time until eventually the energy can be dealt with. Some empaths even have “sympathy pains” of someone they love who is in physical pain. They can also have what is labeled “social anxiety” but it is actually an overwhelming amount of energy hitting them all at once.

Setting boundaries is also difficult for Empaths. This is because people tend to react negatively and they are always left feeling those emotions of anger, disappointment, and grief. Negative reactions can be too overwhelming and letting someone take advantage of you just feels like the easier option. This is quite possibly why I push away possible friendships because setting boundaries is the hardest for me to do. Even setting boundaries with family members can be difficult territories to navigate because they don’t want to be left feeling the disappointment from someone they love.

While doing my research I kept coming across how confusing it is to be an Empath and everything I read made so much sense to me. Empaths suck up others energy and feel what others are feeling without having a reason to feel that way themselves. This can cause major confusion about which feelings are your own and which are actually someone else’s. I can’t even begin to explain how it felt to read about this kind of confusion because it is exactly how I have felt my whole life and I could never understand it. That lack of awareness and not being able to distinguish what is someone else’s feelings and what are my own feelings could be the reason I haven’t been able to gain control over the tidal waves of emotion.

This discovery moved mountains for me. Some people may think I am crazy, but I discovered something that in a short amount of time had been able to explain something I have struggled with my whole life. It was validation that I’m not just someone with weak skin and low self-esteem. I might have been given a gift that I needed to learn more about. Maybe there was way to control the waves and calm the waters.

This was back in 2016 and since that time I have jumped head first into the self-study of all things energy in an attempt to understand why I am this way, how I can control it, and how I can help others. This discovery was just beginning.