Are You An "Empath" or Wounded?

Why you gotta stop minding other people's business. Yellow Brick Road.

Credit: Ethel Moore

Welcome to Yellow Brick Road, an exploration of the guided path!!

Have you spent years sulking about serving other people’s needs?

Do you consider yourself someone who tries to solve other people’s problems?

Do you resent those you love for how little energy you have when you leave interactions?

Do you have a hard time discerning what you want and need from those around you?

You may be suffering from a bad case of The Empath Syndrome. You may be calling yourself an empath when you’re actually a very good, well-intentioned person with really, really awful boundaries. Stop that. Like, right now. For your own sake, babe.

Here are some functions of The Empath Syndrome in my personal experience:

• Learning to anticipate needs and behavior in early childhood/parent dynamics and continuing to do so throughout adulthood

• Internalizing the ability to anticipate others’ needs as self-worth and calling it purpose

• Unconsciously and resentfully minimizing self in career, romance, and friendship under the guise of servitude

• Losing interest/ability to identify and hold space in reciprocated relationships

• Watching the deterioration of your own happiness and feeling apathetic about boundaries

• Repackaging fawn response and self-abandonment as empathy

_lisaolivera

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Being a human shield was my default as far as my memory serves. I was the child who fought bullies on the playground for other kids because I was frankly 5 feet tall and 180 lbs by 10 years old. Nobody was silly enough to fuck with me. When my girlfriends and I went out to Sixth St in Downtown Austin, most nights ended when I got in a screaming match with a drunk idiot for groping my friend at the bar. I’d always felt other people’s pain like it was my own, like I was both the perpetrator and the victim needing to absolve a wrongdoing, and the only way I understood how to love was anticipating, and then sacrificing.

My first love was someone who didn’t even want to live, let alone love. He suffered from severe suicidal ideation for 15 years and I hoped that if I loved him deeply enough, he would know how precious life was. He was followed by many interests who required me to shear my own skin to keep them warm. Most of my friendships through my early 20’s were self-victimized white women whose worst enemy were their own minds - whose dreams, nightmares and experiences I protected in tenderness just like I did my mother’s. I protected them - though they would never need or desire to protect me - because that was the only idea of safety I ever knew. Until I sacrificed everything I had for the last time, and was left lookin’ like a bag of charred bones.

When I hit rock bottom - completely drained after years of unconsciously neglecting my needs and calling it altruism - I finally owned up to the fact that the common denominator in all of my mismatched, draining, and tragic relationships was the woman in the mirror. I had no choice but to stop blaming my empathy for my nonexistent boundaries.

It may seem counterintuitive to abandon the label of “empath” when you feel like an inherently empathetic person who is guided toward nurturing and healing, but the issue with over-identifying with labels is that you forget who you are without them. Labels become a crutch for bad behavior, an excuse to say “I can’t change that because this is WHO I AM!!! It’s my thing!!!” We make ourselves small by identifying with a label so big and burdensome, it leaves little room for who we are when we’re full and fulfilled. We may even hide behind it when it’s time to address the fact that we’re not actually serving anyone at all, including ourselves.

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There is a question if there is such thing as purely “inherent” guidance toward nurturing at all costs. If you are compulsively sacrificing your own peace to carry other people’s responsibilities on your back, you’re probably living by a trauma response, not a virtue. I do believe people are gifted with the innate ability to heal, to help, to intuit, to serve, and to guide. I believe I am one of those people. Most of us, however, are forced to learn hard lessons in what it means to walk in that path without letting our egos and unnecessary attachments to other people’s business get in the way. And to be clear, those who cling so tightly to the label of empath are just really good at minding other people’s business.

I value empathy greatly. The world could use a lot more of it, and I suspect that’s why those who are deeply empathetic feel inclined to overcompensate for what’s been lost. With that said, I feel the same way about labeling yourself an empath as I do with labeling yourself a healer. It’s not that it is inherently bad to relate or identify with these terms, but the degree to which you identify can be toxic to your own wellbeing and to the people you claim to help. People heal themselves. People feel for themselves. People learn life lessons on their own time, their own terms, and for reasons absolutely nobody can dictate but them. We are here, in this place and as this person, to witness love grow. Not to force and contort it into something of our own liking. It is nothing short of self-absorption to think that you know people and their best path more intimately than they do, that becoming the most actualized versions of themselves requires your inner knowing and guidance.

When we dig a bit deeper, we can see the truth behind the labels. That we don’t know how to define our needs. That we’re still learning. That learning to sit in our own energy through the pain of unreciprocated true love, lopsided friendships, needy and codependent family ties is sometimes a necessary evil. Tending to other people’s pain is self-sabotage and an excuse to stop reciprocated and honest connection from forming in our lives so we don’t have to face the fear of becoming everything we’ve ever dreamed of.

I consider energy exchange in terms of generosity. In order to be truly generous, you give within your means and without pretense of receiving something in return. You give to give, and with the knowing that energy is abundant and can/will be returned. Scorekeeping happens when self-proclaimed empaths overextend themselves because they believe it is the only way to receive love, attention, kindness, and maybe half of that energy in return. Whomever is on the receiving end of that interaction is unwittingly indebted to someone else under the false pretense of generosity. That sounds like manipulation, doesn’t it? Because it is.

It took me a long time to realize how defining myself as someone who saves, helps, and solves was unconscious manipulation, and a step further and more inward, making me emotionally unavailable. I kept wondering why I was “attracting” friends and lovers who were largely unavailable to nurture my healing process, my interests, my goals and passions. But I wasn’t even available to nurture those things within myself because I was too focused on others, while simultaneously unwilling to receive the same attentiveness I was capable of giving. Unwilling to voice my needs, in case the answer was - as I’d learned in childhood from unavailable caretakers - “No.”

Empathy and sensitivity are gifts that deserve to be protected and honored. Protection looks like catching yourself when you’re claiming other people’s stuff as your own. Protection looks like drawing boundaries with people who are energy vampires while holding yourself accountable. The problem is not your empathy, not your sensitivity, not the divine hope that people are courageous enough to love you and see you and feel you back. The problem is that you think your value lies in the ability to know people better than they know themselves. The problem is that you don’t truly believe people will choose you even when the line between where they end and where you begin is clear and strong.

My best advice is that you simply have to know what you feel like without other people’s energetic debris. You have to know how valuable you are without anticipating other people’s feelings and needs. Let people feel for themselves, and you just might find that they feel the inclination to love all of you without condition or sacrifice.

Mantra: I don’t have to become overwhelmed, consumed or intoxicated by other people’s energy because I love embodying my own.