Understanding ourselves as empaths

I personally wish we would educate our children more about the most important things in life, self knowledge and acceptance being the absolute first priority.  Instead what happens in families and in schools?  We are taught fairly early on that we need to fit into the system and if we don’t the price is a judgement or a label or exile of some kind.  And this kind of shit can take years to wake up from.  Tell a child for so long that she has something wrong with her or is bad or evil or should feel ashamed for feeling and expressing certain emotions including anger and soon enough you have a shut down person who is in conflict with her own auto-immune system.  Pure and simple, people. You have raised a people pleaser, someone who has been educated not to trust her own gut instinct.  Punish him or her enough with words or gestures in invasion or invalidation abuse and you have someone who is carrying a pain body of fear and terror so deep down inside that it is barely conscious.   Then watch as the person in the absence of care and comfort, protection and support, empathy and understanding begins to turn to addictions and substance or other wounding people who keep him or her locked in a prison inside where every real, raw authentic emotional response is buried and then wait for the suppressed emotional charge to come calling like Vesuvius, possibly around age 21, 31 or 41 or even later for older generations.

All this goes double for empaths.  For those sensitive, awake, gifted, deeply intuitive children that arrive on this planet.  Psychological writer Alice Miller has devoted several books to this issue.  The first and most important being called The Drama of the Gifted Child.  In this book she explains the plight of such a child, raised in a family with a focus chronically turned outwards to ideals and standards and to parental needs, a family in which the true needs and character of the child lay unrecognised and even become invalidated in all kinds of ways.  The pain of this kind of lack of validation and recognition lives on deep within us,  as empaths in absence our own needs being met, we turn towards others to meet their needs, hoping that if we become good enough emotional witnesses, sponges and caretakers in some way our needs will be fulfilled and in a way they are to one degree, we at least get some kind of connection, but it may come at such a high price that we pay with our own cell tissue ultimately ending up with a chronic fatigue illness, cancer or other auto-immune problem.

And as well as this our empathy is even more heightened.  We become sponges of the shadow energies and we can begin to become the mops to clean it up.  I wonder too if this is how so many of us become ill in families.  What our hearts and minds cannot know or admit and our bodies cannot feel gets dumped in cell tissue.  Our cell tissue may be literally vibrating with sensed or absorbed charge.

Presence to energy stored as trapped or dumped emotion is the only way I see out of this dilemma.   Just such a process is spoken of in great deal in Michael Brown’s book The Presence Process.  One thing he doesn’t seem to discuss though is how as empaths we can pick up the charge from others from their energy field, it will then trigger something in our energy field we must process.  We need to be aware when we are with others as empaths of what we are picking up. Is it ours? Does it resonate on some level?  What does our inner child have to say and feel about it?  Where is the inner critic messing up our compass or leading us astray with what it may be telling us?  Also have we, by a process of psychic contagion been picking up negative thought forms of others without them having to say a word?

This is where todays blog ends, it has been pretty much stream of consciousness about what has been arising today and what I am sensing and learning.  If we are empathic, if we have known pain and trauma we have high geared emotional antenna.  We need to learn to use it well, so that as empaths we are not debilitated and so we don’t become numb to our own unintegrated emotions from childhood still trying to work through us. In an increasingly disconnected and shut down world we also have to be aware of who we turn to when in distress, for others may lack the capacity to relate to the depth of our suffering, if they have not a clue what empaths suffer and can carry in the unconscious for years and possibly even over generations.