Self-awareness is a trait - or maybe 'practice' is the more accurate way to put it - that everyone can always improve at. It is part emotional intelligence, part perceptiveness, part critical thinking. It means knowing your weaknesses, of course, but it also means knowing your strengths and what motivates you.
This is part four of a five-part series on energy and Thriving as an Empath. Did you miss any of the blogs?
Thriving as an empath, as opposed to surviving, will requires taking part in your own development. To thrive means embracing your empath label by learning all you can.
Read books, go to talks, find support groups, take action because you won’t feel better without doing the work. If you are someone who feels victimized by being an empath or constantly finds themselves in difficult to navigate situations, I strongly encourage you to find a mentor, healer, or guide. Someone who can provide compassionate accountability. Someone who can support your healing and help you learn to know yourself at a deep level.
Bottom line: you aren’t broken, you are sensitive to energy and you need to learn how your unique energy system works in order to feel better.
If you are an empath, then you know it is not an easy gig. Life was challenging before I understood I was an empath, but after I was educated about being an empath, I experienced a brief honeymoon of joy and peace until the reality sunk in.
“So I am an empath, there is a reason I feel all these things, great, but now what? I am still struggling with feeling all that I am feeling, and knowing what I am knowing, is this just the way it is? Is there no hope of feeling ‘normal’ or at least in control of my emotions and life?”
I asked my counselor/healer some variations of these questions on more than one occasion, “how is this a ‘gift’? How is it helpful to me or other people?”
All I could see was how this empath gig kept me separate, isolated, and silent from people when all I desperately wanted was connection.
The Road to Authenticity
Until I learned how to be a healthy empath, I would be pretty miserable and limited in my success. It ended up being a long slog over a bunch of years but eventually I learned about being an empath and I worked with different teachers and healers who allowed me to develop the much-needed tools for success.
The answers to how to live a healthy and emotionally balanced life take time to reveal themselves. We are all different and our needs, expression, and goals will be different. Thriving as an empath means getting to know yourself and understanding what expression you have as an empath.
Discovering Your Expression
Be curious about your moods and emotions. Start by talking to other empaths and keeping a journal of your emotional experiences throughout the day. Discover when you seem to be more susceptible to overwhelming emotion, what is happening at the moment? Where are you? Who are you with?
Begin by paying attention to the environment you are in and the people/ animals/ objects near you when you begin to feel bad.
- What is happening?
- Are you alone with your thoughts or out in public?
- Who is near you and how are they behaving?
Attempt to describe what is happening inside you. List your feelings, whatever they are, in whatever language you have for them at this moment. If you are someone who was not encouraged to feel or discuss emotions, this will be a difficult exercise at first, but don’t give up. Keep digging for your truth.
Uncovering Our Driving Need
- What is most important to you?
- Is it safety?
- Happiness?
- Connection?
Probe this question deeply. Your initial answers may be reflecting societal norms and not your deepest truth. Usually, we have one or two driving needs that we pursue throughout our lives. And often this is a need we didn’t have met as children.
Our inability to get this need met as a child can cause us to seek it out from other people using methods like manipulation, people-pleasing behaviors, or other forms of damaging behavior.
Our driving need can be a powerful motivator for achievement or satisfaction in our lives, but it can also be an invisible agent for chaos when we try to meet our need through behaviors that ultimately cause harm to us and those people we love most.
Let that pain of discovering our deepest wound allow us to seek healing, knowing that we can heal and begin to learn how to get your needs met in healthy ways. This in turn allows our deepest wound to transform into a powerful catalyst for your life.
Unwinding the Patterns of Unhealthy Behavior
I remember as a child and young adult my deepest motivator was finding happiness. I said it often, usually through tears and despair, “I just want to be happy.” There were three different pieces of knowledge that came from uncovering my driving need.
- My view of how happiness “happened” was flawed. I believed it was something that could be bestowed upon me from an outside source, a parent, a friend, a lover, or employer. Finally, I discovered that happiness was something only I could provide myself.
- So, why was I unhappy? Why did I learn to believe that happiness was something that came from outside me? And what did these clues mean? I was unhappy because everyone around me was unhappy and I was feeling their emotions, not realizing they weren’t mine. So, if my unhappiness came from outside me, then my happiness would come from outside me too. This wasn’t so much a thought process as it was an unconscious understanding of the energetic process.
- I was training myself to believe that in order for me to be happy, everyone around me must be happy too. When you don’t understand how to manage your emotional energy, you believe that the only way to be happy is to be around happy people.
Through some great teachers, I learned what would counterbalance my childhood experiences. The truths that I discovered about my driving need revealed that my energy system was weak and needed boundaries, energetic and behavioral.
I learned that my permeable energetic boundaries were a big part of what was making me unhappy. I was merging with people looking for connection and fulfillment but ending up absorbing their sadness, depression, and unhappiness.
And because as an unhealed empath I merged with everyone in my life, my takeaway was other people needed to be happy in order for me to be happy. This was my earliest lesson in co-dependence.
Revealing the Truth
I had learned to people-please and care more about how others were feeling than how I was feeling. This is one of the most common patterns found in empaths and it can be broken with the right tools and a mindfulness practice.
The key is self-awareness. There is no peace for an empath without the journey of self-discovery.
Key Questions for the Development of Self-Awareness
- Is this feeling mine? Are the feelings I am overwhelmed by actually mine?
- In this moment, what is in my awareness? People, places, situations…note where you feel bad and where you feel good. Begin to parse out how energy (emotional and other kinds) affect you.
- Now that I have been zapped with other people’s moods and beliefs, how can I begin to find better feelings and more empowering beliefs? Know what feeds your soul and soothes your energy. Is it a walk in the woods? Or maybe it is listening to death metal? Is it meditation or yoga? Watching a favorite movie?
It will require time and effort and the earlier an empath discovers they are an empath and begins the journey, the less work is needed. Every journey is different but there are usually some similarities, so find your community of empaths so you can be supported through the challenges of life as an empath.
It is going to be challenging sometimes AND it is completely possible to achieve a life of purpose and authenticity. Find comfort in your own skin and know your strengths and your energetic limits. Be an empath and thrive in your relationships, your work, and your own body.
If you would like to learn the energetic tools to becoming an empowered empath check out the Empath Apprenticeship. You can learn your unique make up as an empath, the common challenges and strengths, and the tools to own and manage your energy and build a fulfilling life.
Read the next installment, Evolution, Empaths, & Lightworkers.
Thriving as an Empath will be a five-part blog series. If you are ready to begin the journey to becoming an Empowered Empath, download the Four Practices for Claiming Your Empath Power.
