I want to share about something that feels edgy because what I want to write doesn’t feel easy to say.
I want to talk about empathy because I think it is really quite misunderstood. I so often hear people saying that they are empathic, and more specifically too empathic, over empathic and that it’s a problem for them. Described as a chronic experience they don’t feel they have choice about and it’s exhausting to say the least. People often describe it as being with a person and feeling all of the other persons feelings like a sponge, mopping them up (or in a space or a room) This is of course very real and most people who suffer, have done so for their whole life !!
However… I don’t believe empathy is when we are absorbing others feelings like a sponge. This is different to empathy. In my opinion this experience is more akin to emotional contagion. A kind of emotional intensity magnet, or emotional resonance, maybe even emotional projection from early childhood or somatic attunement when our bodies pick up on the emotional charge of others or the space we are in. Felt strongly and instinctively more than rationally, conscious thought isn’t in the mix.
Empathy does indeed start with resonating emotionally with another, and I don’t think it’s empathy unless we can translate that emotional resonance into something that’s useful for the other person. It’s about being able to hold our own internal dysregulation enough to be present for someone else (that comes from our inner loving abundance rather than a sense of obligation)
~ Empathy is an offering from our heart to come into intimacy and closeness with another alongside the ability to consciously translate the emotional experience we’re having in ourselves with a visceral awareness of the other person’s experience and translate that into a heart led response that centres the other person’s needs as defined by them (not us)*
If, when we feel others emotions we get overwhelmed and have to either: shut ourselves down, get away from the other person or be alone, make them wrong for how they are feeling or try to control them, go into a sacrificial overriding/pleasing or rescuing mode or advise giving then it’s not real empathy. That’s more about us trying to regulate our OWN struggle to be with what is moving in US.
The work is not to be sponges for others emotions. Our work is to be a hollow bone and let things flow through us and give it back to source, to love itself. Our little human self does not have to do this work. Let source to the work and let go of feeling you must rescue. This isn not our job, what we can do it trust that spirit will do what is needed if we let the inside of our bones be slippy and slidey so it can all flow through and out with ease.
It matters not where the feelings began, even if they began in another and that other is spilling them out in the space, as soon as they are moving in OUR body, hearts and minds, then it’s ours to navigate within us. No one can make us take on another persons emotions. There has to be a magnetic field that we unconsciously agree to. It’s unconscious and we truly don’t feel like we choose it. At a deep primal level of the inner children within us it’s what we learned. That said it’s very much our responsibility to unlearn it rather than make the other wrong for what they are expressing and only offer anything if it can be done without obligation. That is a loving act towards self and others. This is then all acts of self love. Aligning who we aspire to be with who we actually are in any given moment with loving kindness.
And most importantly, while it’s most likely true that we all want to be empathic be recognised as someone who cares, it’s not a requirement to be empathic. Sometimes it’s just not possible for us for a myriad of reasons and that 100000% ok. Sometimes we only have capacity to deal with our own internal world and don’t have the inner resources to extend to another. This is 100% ok and does not in any way negate our deep desire to help and support. But let’s be honest about what we can and cannot do so we only help from a genuine loving abundant place within.
