The gift and the trap of being an empath

I’d like to say something on Empathy as an empath, a highly sensitive and recovering people pleaser with epic fawn responses..

Empathy has two sides, there’s the gift and there’s the trap.

The gift as you know is to be able to feel into a situation, or a person and this has likely developed from needing to do this for safety reasons when we were younger, we had to learn to attune to the environment this way.

The other gift is the ability to know how other’s feel and be a guide for them in those dark moments and know that they aren’t alone.

It is an incredible, if not vital feat to be able to feel what a client feels and help them through this deep visceral compassionate witnessing.

But there is a trap too as an empath that not many people talk about.

Sometimes we can extend our empathy on to people to a point that will inevitably hurt us or crosses our boundaries.

And we can find ourselves stuck in a loop with these people because we only see the best in them, have so much compassion, empathy and understanding for what they’ve been through that we don’t notice that our needs are going unmet, boundries crossed, and that we are actually being drowned by our own ‘kindness’.

The empath has this amazing ability to feel, but they also have a tendency to put other’s needs before their own and avoid rocking the boat at all costs.

If this energy exchange or lack there of becomes a pattern, the empath becomes more disconnected from themselves and attached to the relationship, which causes them to eventually develop chronic illness, fatigue, anxiety, unhealthy attachment and depression.

Empaths are here to learn to be able to hold another compassionately but not take it on and not absorb.

And to discover and implement healthy boundaries.

To discover the somatic wisdom of the body and to voice their needs.. maybe even to learn how to be a little selfish!