The Curse of Being Able to Tune into Others’ Feeling — Aaron Doughty
An empaths ability, struggles, and healing strategies
The Curse of Being Able to Tune into Others’ Feeling — Aaron Doughty
An empaths ability, struggles, and healing strategies
JUN 9, 2024
The Ability to Tune into Others’ Feelings
So empaths, people that can feel other people’s energy. This is both a superpower and sometimes a curse on the other side of the spectrum. You gain out of survival, this amazing ability to tune to everybody else.
This survival mechanism that we had as a kid was to move the energy from the bottom three chakras of the root, sacral, and solar plexus. We move it up into this amazing ability to perceive of what everyone else is thinking and feeling.
And then what happens is we start modifying ourselves so that we can then act according to what will get that validation and approval. This is the pattern that stems from that of a deeper core of some form of abandonment wound, feeling abandoned, feeling like mom or dad physically left and/or weren’t able to meet my needs as a kid.
The Dynamics Between Empaths and Narcissists
The funny thing sometimes about people pleasers, for example an empath, is that sometimes they attract narcissists. There’s actually something to learn from narcissism, by the way. The thing to learn, the thing that a narcissist does that attracts an empath is an empath, wants to give or tune themselves to then get the validation, or the approval and the safety of something on the external. A narcissist who’s on the toxic side of feeling in their self, will manipulate everyone else around them to get their own needs met. They have a strong sense of self, even though it’s toxic. Without a strong sense of self, empaths attract narcissists to learn something from them how to be in their own sense of self. The narcissist will constantly test the empath until they get the lesson, and sometime lesson is no more, I’m out, which can be hard sometimes as an empath.
Struggling with People Pleasing and Authenticity
Sometimes a certain part of oneself modifies what is authentic to make other people happy. This can make it very hard to say no to things even if you need to go out of your way, take on expenses, and even risk your safety. Even though it can be fun to do things for others, if you have other things you want to prioritize it could be holding you back.
The frame technique has to do with feeling inside of your body, feeling the separation between you and a candle flame. And as you feel safe in your body, your vibration begins to raise.
Managing Tension by Shifting to Internal Energy
By bringing the energy more so inside of your body, you can delineate self and others. If someone else feels tension because you said no to something you couldn’t do, you do not have to manage to get their approval or validation. Tension is not a bad thing.
When grounded into oneself, it possible to say no without giving an excuse or lying. This ability comes with setting boundaries between oneself and others.
A person’s energy can be felt through the space between people and their sense of selves. It can be attractive or repellent. A people pleaser projects energy unto others and then asks them to have the burden to make you happy. That’s why it is an unattractive force or tactic. A narcissist will manipulate others to get their needs met, and it is inauthentic and obvious. But the empath that gives also gets pretty manipulative. It is the same energy
Abandonment and Healing Through Connection
Awareness is always the first step. When it comes to abandonment and feeling alone, like mom and dad weren’t there emotionally, even if they were physically present, is that at a certain age, we feel alone. That’s why you sometimes see people leaving their kids crying because they think that if they attend to them, they’ll get used to it, which is kind of silly because nurturing is the healing of that.
Mark Wollum wrote the book “It Didn’t Start with You” which is all about how we inherit genetic trauma from family lines prior to us a lot of it has to do with mostly the energy of us inside of our mom when and then our mom inside of her mom it’s mainly it’s very strongly connected through the mom side of the family and what happens is this energy is is on autopilot and until we do the work like all of you are doing, you are now becoming aware of these patterns. You’re becoming aware of your childhood stuff and you’re able to heal it so that you break the cycle so that your kids don’t have to carry with it too.
Have you ever heard of the still face experiment? It’s a video from the 90s that shows the relationship between a mom and baby girl. The mom validates the baby’s emotions, and they have a beautiful connection. Then, the mom turns around with a still face, showing no emotion. The baby protests, gets anxious, and feels itchy because there’s no mirroring of emotions. Finally, the mom comes back and starts mirroring again to heal that energy.
For many of us, abandonment is like that still face moment. We never got the reintroduction of the mother coming back to mirror our emotions and heal it. So, we look outside and believe we need to do something to get that nurturing because we’ve let go of believing we are naturally worthy of it.
This is when we move into basing our self-worth on what we do. So, when a baby is born, it’s inherently worthy, and the mother’s mirroring, validation, nurturing, and soothing reinforce that worthiness. The key to healing this process is becoming aware of how we can nurture ourselves and connect with an energy greater than even our own mother’s.
