Do you often experience emotions or physical sensations that are so powerful and out of the ordinary that don't seem to belong to you? Then you might be an empath--a psychic who experiences the emotions and/or physical sensations of other beings as their own. Learn the common signs of being an empath and discover how to work with this ability.
12 Signs You're an Empath
Someone with empathy powers is so sensitive to the energies surrounding them, especially the energies of other people, they can fall victim to tremendous stress and inner conflict without understanding what's happening. If you experience any of the following, you may be an empath.
- You feel others' emotional pain deeply.
- In fact, you feel all others' emotions deeply, even the positive ones. So if someone close to you is joyful, you feel joyful. If they are angry, you feel angry.
- Often these feelings have little to do with what's actually happening in your real world at the moment, so the feelings seem random and out of touch with what's happening in your life.
- You develop deep empathic psychic connections to others; for example, in relationships your partner's emotions consume yours, and you seem to feel your children's emotions more deeply than other parents.
- You may feel like an electrical current or simply a nervousness suddenly overpowers you followed by a flood of emotions.
- Feelings of sadness or melancholy may come out of nowhere and consume you. This becomes confusing, since you may not fully understand what is happening to you, so you may try to own those feelings by attempting to understand why you're feeling such odd and unfounded emotions.
- You may not be able to differentiate the feelings and emotions of others from your own, especially initially.
- You may experience anxiety or depression, especially when a major world event has a lot of people feeling anxious, angry, depressed, or afraid.
- You may feel like you're on an emotional roller coaster all the time.
- You may have a lot of unexplainable random physical symptoms.
- You may get "sympathy" symptoms a lot when a loved one is ill. In other words, if someone you love has a stomach ache, you have one, too.
- You may know someone else is sick or sad before they do.
How Empaths Receive Information
No one really knows the true mechanisms of empathic abilities. Empathy is a psychic ability that connects you to other conscious beings...not just people, but also plants, animals, or even the planet. Typically, you receive the information as a personalized feeling or emotion. So you may feel powerful emotion like joy or grief, or you may notice physical sensations that seem to actually affect your body.
The Empathic Child
The inexperienced empath is usually overwhelmed by the sudden flood of information she receives, especially when these experiences happen to them as a child. The feelings and even physical sensations an empath picks up from another person can be stronger than their own. This makes it very difficult to distinguish which emotions are theirs and which ones belong to someone else.
A child doesn't have the coping mechanisms of an adult. This psychic ability can make the child high-strung and overly emotional or even anxious. If the empath doesn't have someone in their life who understands what is happening, she can be misunderstood. Sometimes, the child can be misdiagnosed as having various emotional or mental disorders. Children can become trapped in this framework early on and remain defined by an illness or disorder their entire adult lives.
How to Control and Strengthen Empathic Abilities
Whether it's you or one of your children who is empathic, you can work with your abilities in the following ways.
Seek Relative Isolation
Many empaths find a physical solution to the flood of emotions and other sensations by living in sparsely populated areas to have a facsimile of a "normal" life. A rural lifestyle doesn't mean the empath becomes immune to the emotions and energies of others, but you certainly may be able to cope better than you might in a metropolitan environment.
Talk to Someone
If you are an empath, it's highly helpful to have a confidant you can confide in and never worry about being judged. Unfortunately, anyone with psychic abilities often feels isolated and even ostracized for being different. Those feelings are often compounded by the many feelings you experience from other people, and they can become debilitating.
Work With a Mentor
Working with an experienced psychic who has empathic abilities is a great way to learn to both control your abilities and strengthen them. As you learn the best ways to work with your abilities, they grow stronger and more directed with practice.
Use Techniques to Control Reactions
There are several proven techniques that can help empaths minimize and even shut down their empathic abilities. The problem with shutting down is that the person often becomes irritable and nervous since empathy is a normal function.
- Meditation is one of the most effective and common techniques used to assist in controlling and understanding empathic and other psychic abilities.
- Take a psychic development class. Most psychic development classes teach basic control techniques for all types of psychic abilities. Mystic Familiar, an international online community, offers psychic development classes for empaths.
- The well-known authority on mind and body healing, Deepak Chopra, M.D. along with David Simon, M.D., operates the Chopra Center for Wellbeing and offers various programs online as well as various workshops throughout America.
Try a Simple Technique
One simple technique for controlling empathic abilities is visualization.
- Close your eyes and visualize two volume switches in your mind's eye. Label one switch "me" and one switch "everyone else."
- Turn your volume switch all the way up. Turn the volume switch for everyone else all the way down.
- Reset this as often as you need. In the beginning, this may be several times a day, but as you progress the switches will stay in position for longer periods. Do this when you are about to go into situations with crowds (such as going into the city, going shopping, etc.), or if you feel overwhelmed by emotions you suspect are not your own.
Living as an Empath
If you're an empath, you must learn how to minimize the personal reaction to information you receive. This comes with a lot of practice and eventually, you will be able to distinguish which emotions are yours and which ones belong to someone else.
