Empathy Pains

I don’t like complaining, but I need to get this off my chest. Being an empath sucks! Perhaps it is my experience of it that is to blame, perhaps I am just a not very advanced empath and that’s why I am suffering a lot of times. See, the way I feel people’s emotions is like distortions in the atmosphere, the stronger the emotion and the more ‘base’ it is, the higher the distortion is. It doesn’t matter whether an emotion is “positive” or “negative” in the traditional sense, someone being very excited about something can be worse than someone being angry. It is all about the quality of the emotion, and from my experience when the emotion is self-centred, whatever that emotion may be, the lower its quality will be. On the other hand higher emotions (that are usually selfless) are felt as an absence of distortion, peacefulness, like everything is right. So when someone is feeling pure happiness or love (which is not very often) I feel happy myself not because of the actual emotion produced, but by the calm absence of distortion in the atmosphere. Now, with prolonged exposure to a person (typically after a minute or two) I am aware of the kind of emotion present, the way I am aware this is by feeling exactly what the other person is feeling in his energy body. This would typically be a sting on the navel chakra, but it can take part on all chakras. The most common ones after the navel is the solar plexus, heart and throat. At this point I am virtually feeling what they are feeling although I may not be able to describe it verbally. That’s because people’s emotions are usually so jumbled up and confused that they themselves may not be clear as to what they are feeling or why. I find a lot of times that I have a better grasp of people’s feelings than they have of their own. With even longer exposure (more than 6 hours) my energy body slowly absorbs these disturbances from the person completely healing them, and causing me to go through what they were going through with these emotions although they are discarded from me at a much more faster rate. One can say that I am an unwilling healer.

It’s been almost a year since my empathic abilities manifested and since then I have been trying to deal with it. I tried using a shield but found it useless in public places or with people I am close to. I tried just going with the flow and letting the distortion just pass through me, but that just made things worse. I have found that alcohol completely blocks the empathy, but that sort of block completely alienates me from people and plus I don’t like drinking! The best defence I’ve found against the distortion is creating an inner feeling of happiness and euphoria; this actively blocks my empathy senses as they are saturated by my own feelings. Like a shield this is very hard to keep up for a long time, it can be very tiring and then if I lose it the distortion attacks stronger than before. It is the best way I have found though for blocking people’s emotions in cases of public places and mobs in the streets. The worst thing is when I’m not feeling very well myself, if for example I’m depressed or a bit ill then I’m so sensitive to the distortions it almost becomes unbearable. Locking myself in the house is the only solution but I am still affected by my housemate, and if she happens to be in a bad mood… I’m screwed.

I wish people close to me would be more considerate of this, but not a lot of them really believe or can understand what it really means to be an empath. One thing is for sure though, empathy has brought me closer to people, or more like accept everyone for what they are. Being able to read everyone like open books means that I can see beyond their layers of false personality and get a glimpse of their essence, which is beautiful in each and everyone. :)