Do you identify as an emotional empath?

So many of my clients do, and I used to myself.

I hear my clients say that they’re so often emotionally exhausted by the world, because as empaths, they absorb the feels of everyone around them.

Like a firehose of emotion that’s constantly turned on within them, flooding them with other people’s anger, sadness, disappointment, frustration, and yes, joy and gladness too.

So, you know that I’m both a total nerd and a woman full of the witchy woo, and I believe that some people are emotional empaths, born with the gift of feeling the feelings of the beings around them, including the trees and the animals and the earth.

I think that’s beautiful.

And for us humans whose mental cassette tapes are set to play the song of codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing thinking, I think there’s a lot of complexity to it.

I long called myself an empath and used to get so overwhelmed by other people’s feelings.

Sometimes, this empathic ability to feel other people’s feels thoroughly in our bodies is a beautiful thing: a profound rush of joy if a friend achieves some milestone, or feeling tingly and amazing when someone loves a present you give them.

And the opposite can also be true.

If someone else is uncomfortable, we may feel uncomfortable and compelled to shift it for both of us.

If someone else is upset, we often feel an urgent need to fix it, to take it on as ours to manage.

We insert ourselves as the fixer in other people’s lives, or find ways to blame ourselves when something is wrong.

In my experience with my clients, the experience of being an empath is often a combination of actually feeling the feelings of other beings and projecting our own internal landscape onto others.

On episode 94 of the Feminist Wellness Podcast, we to talk all about being an empath — the beauty, the challenges, what it might mean when you say you’re an empath, and how to support yourself, especially during the holidays in a continuing global pandemic.