Today I’m sharing Part 4 in my Empath series over at Sally Cronin’s Smorgasbord Blog Magazine – How Do You Know If You Are An Empath – The Signs. My next series will be on the topic of angels.
Smorgasbord Blog Magazine – Spiritual Awareness – How Do You Know If You Are An Empath – The Signs by D.G. Kaye
Explore the spiritual side of our natures as D.G. Kaye shares her experiences and research into this element of our lives.
Welcome back to my spiritual empath series. This is the last part of the empath series. In the three other episodes, I’ve talked about empathic communications, how to shield from negative energies, and energy sucking vampires. In this part, I’m going to share tips to help you decide if you are indeed an empath.
First, I’d like to share the two different definitions between empathy and sympathy. These two words are often misconstrued.
– the act or state of feeling sorrow or compassion for another
Empathy – Noun,
– the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the emotions, thoughts, or attitudes of another
If you’ve been following this series, you have already gained some information about being an empath and all the good and bad that come along with being one. Often referred to as both – a blessing and a curse.
The word ‘empath’ is often thrown around loosely, and often misconstrued with other spiritual terms pertaining to psychic abilities. But plenty of empaths live among us, many you may know, and many you may never have guessed are empaths. You may detect from some friends or family who cannot watch a movie containing scenes of violence (like me), one in your circles who acts like a mother hen, always willing to help, or the one who is first to take care of a sick loved one. These are your typical empathic people who hold a great amount of compassion as they have the ability to feel other people’s pain and struggles as though it were their own. Besides the people empaths choose to help, they are extremely vulnerable to selfish, psychopathic, and narcissistic personalities who will attempt to drain them dry for as much giving and attention they can get.
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Below are some telling signs to help you find if you too are an empath:
You are very perceptive and highly in tune to the energy and vibes around and feel an inner knowing about something that just feels amiss . . .
Smorgasbord Blog Magazine – Spiritual Awareness – How Do You Know If You Are An Empath – The Signs by D.G. KayeExplore the spiritual side of our natures as D.G. Kaye shares her experiences and research into this element of our lives.
xWelcome back to my spiritual empath series. This is the last part of the empath series. In the three other episodes, I’ve talked about empathic communications, how to shield from negative energies, and energy sucking vampires. In this part, I’m going to share tips to help you decide if you are indeed an empath.
Welcome to my third part in my empath series at Sally Cronin’s Smorgasbord Blog Magazine. In this post I’m explaining how to deal with people who drain our energy – also known as energy vampire suckers. Narcissists also fit into this category perfectly.
Smorgasbord Blog Magazine – Spiritual Awareness – Empaths and Energy Sucking Vampires and Narcissists by D.G. Kaye
Explore the spiritual side of our natures as D.G. Kaye shares her experiences and research into this element of our lives.
Empaths and Energy Sucking Vampires and Narcissists
Welcome back to my part three in this series of Empaths and Energies. In the first two episodes, I spoke of empaths and how to shield negative energies. In this segment I am using the popular term used for those that drain our energies – Vampires.
It should be no big surprise that empaths attract both, energy sucking vampires and narcissists, who are often associated as being energy sucking vampires as well. As I spoke about before, empaths absorb the emotions of others, are sensitive to other’s energies, and often are like human lie detectors. As an empath myself, I often refer to myself as a ‘soul reader’.
A soul reader is a highly in-tuned empath who has the uncanny ability to read between the lines when people speak – or don’t speak. We can see the invisible mask. we can hear the words that are unspoken, we know what goodness or mal intentions are held secretly when we hear their words and even the words omitted.
Empaths often attract people with problems because of their sympathetic natures, but are also an open target for energy vampires and narcissists because of their open vulnerability to receive energies – good and bad. Empaths often hide their own problems and have an overwhelming want to try and solve the problems for others. Narcissists in particular, can spot this vulnerability. Weaker and troubled souls are often attracted to empaths because an empath’s personality gives off the energy that they are compassionate and open to receive. Narcissists especially love to gravitate to empaths because they see us as easy targets to manipulate because of our open to receive nature.
Energy sucking vampires are often deeply wounded individuals who have been hurt in their current or past lives. They may have been beaten, demeaned, or bullied themselves and wish to project same onto others. They may have grown up in abusive families. They have somehow been unempowered somewhere in their lives, which can instill a sense of entitlement as a compensation for something they didn’t receive when they were younger, or worse, because of mental or physical abuse or neglect they experienced at some point in their lives, such as unresolved childhood pain. Often, these people cannot see the light so they create scenarios where they must put themselves in the spotlight to feel empowered and better about themselves.
Narcissists often adopt behaviors that will help them gain favor from people. They lack compassion, remorse and refuse to acknowledge or admit the errors of their ways. Sadly, positive psychology won’t heal a narcissist or an energy sucking vampire because these people would never admit their weaknesses. Empaths must learn how vampires operate and help themselves because vampires don’t change. An empath’s biggest struggle is to learn ‘no contact’ with such individuals. Many empaths have had a vampire parent. I most certainly can say I did. I grew up with a narcissistic, energy sucking vampire, known as my mother.
It took me over 50 years to learn how to deal with my own mother. It was painful to be around her, and even as a young child, I knew instinctively something wasn’t right with her.
I analyzed her for 50 years before I figured out why out of us four children, she sucked the most from me and preyed on my emotions and compassion – because she knew how vulnerable I was to emotions, knew she could manipulate me with guilt, and knew how much I feared her to stray from her stronghold. But I finally put it all together, and after years of literally feeling as though my insides were being torn out and twisted by my mother’s reign, I did the hardest thing I ever had to do, despite how sad I felt to abandon her. I walked away. I stopped lowering my vibrations to her level to continually appease her. Being addicted to rescuing others is dangerous to our health.
So what can we do to help our empathic selves from becoming drained by these narcissists and energy sucking vampires? …Please continue reading at Sally Blog for some helpful methods to deal with energy draining people.
Explore the spiritual side of our natures as D.G. Kaye shares her experiences and research into this element of our lives.
Welcome back to my second post in my empath series. As I discussed in Spiritual Awareness – Communicating through Spiritual Energy #Empaths, there are ways to help us shield ourselves from some of the negative energies that grab hold of us. So today I’m writing about empathic shielding.
How Empaths Can Shield Negative Energies
HOW TO AVOID BEING DRAINED BY ENERGY SUCKERS WITH SHIELDING AND TOOLS TO AID IN CLEARING
As empaths we absorb thoughts, feelings, and emotions of others. We are highly sensitive to energies, people, places, and nature.
For those of us who are empaths and often find ourselves being caught up in people’s orbits who constantly lean to us when their life is in turmoil, just know there is help for us to shield ourselves from being drained by low energies, we have only to learn how to use these tools.
The difference between being empathetic and being an empath is empathetic people feel for someone’s unhappy situation whereas an empath actually takes in the vibes of that someone, almost like a sponge absorbing feelings, and feels their emotion within, regardless of the emotion they are giving off whether happy, sad, angry etc.
When we’re around negative people giving off their vibes and toxic energy, there are a few things we can do to repel those energies from penetrating into our own emotions.
How can we avoid attracting these negative energies when we’re empaths who tend to attract too many feelings? Only what we allow ourselves to give our power to is what can affect us. What permits other’s energy to enter us is when we sympathize with them, leaving us feeling compelled to help. We as empaths, have a dire need to fix people, creating a bond between us and the person in need. We absorb their need for help and that energy stays within us, depleting our own positive energy.
A good head start to avoiding energy draining is to stay protected by first paying attention to our senses. If we begin to feel sensory overload from toxic energy, we must train ourselves to create a mental shield for protection. If we are able to pick up energies, we are certainly capable of learning how to create mental shields. Besides learning how to shield, it’s important to learn to recognize whose energies around us are stealing our good energy and learning how to keep those people out of our spaces. To limit the amount of people who steal our energy, we must learn to practice avoiding such people. But there will always be times when people will enter our orbit and we may not be able to avoid them, and in those times, it’s time to turn on the shielding.
HOW TO SHIELD
In order to stay grounded and not enable bad energies to seep into our psyches we must first ground ourselves and set intention. By setting intention we first focus on our desire to shield and sending good vibes out to the universe. Often, setting these intentions will drive vibrations, sometimes making the negative person wanting to leave our presence on their own volition, not wanting the good we project. But we won’t always get that lucky so we must learn how to deflect.
Picture yourself centered surrounded by pink light. Close your eyes and visualize yourself being poured over with pink light from above your head right down all around you, down through your feet, finishing and sealing yourself in with that light going just below the ground. This ensures you are completely sealed as though you are in a bubble. It may help to envision liquid pink bubbles of light being poured over your head and protecting you like a big round soap bubble. Pink light is ethereal and provides a semi-permeable shield, meaning while it repels negative energies it can still allow your good vibes and loving energy to flow out of it becoming a filter of sorts.
The beauty of shielding is that it can be done anywhere, and nobody has to know what we’re doing. We can be out in public, at somebody’s home or halfway around the world and we have this ability to use it anywhere. We can also use the shielding in our own home when we’re feeling overwhelmed from a guest in our home or from negative energies which may have been left behind after someone left or even if we’re just watching TV and listening to negative news.
At home, we can also use objects to keep our work or living space clean from negative energies by setting up an area we like to spend time in with plants (energy absorbers), negative energy repelling crystals and protective stones, and objects symbolic to us specifically such as: Buddhas or angels or any other meaningful items we desire to provide psychological shielding. If we find we are often drawing in negative energies, keeping protective crystals on our person, in our pocket, purse or under our pillow help to deflect negative energy. You will never see me without wearing a stone or crystal somewhere on my person.
Do keep in mind that we don’t have to wait till we feel like we’re in the midst of toxic energy to begin shielding. We can practice shielding at home and do it as a once a week precaution. Take a good minute to prepare your intention and clear you mind and spend a few more minutes envisioning the shield you cast around yourself and focusing on positive messages. . . Please continue reading at Sally’s blog for more shielding exercises …
I was recently invited by Sally Cronin to begin a new spiritual series at her Smorgasbord Blog Magazine. I used to write articles for our Fey blog that Colleen Chesebro used to run, but life was getting busy for Colleen, and she was running a few blogs, so something had to give. I had copied all my articles before Colleen closed off that blog over a year ago, but I also moved my blog platform back to WordPress last fall, and somehow during the migration of my material, my spiritual posts were half lost. So I’ve been revamping and rewriting in this series. Last week, I shared the first post in this series on Empaths and Communicating Through Spiritual Energy. I hope you enjoy reading.
Smorgasbord Blog Magazine – Spiritual Awareness – Communicating Through Spiritual Energy – #Empaths – By D.G. Kaye
Explore the spiritual side of our natures as D.G. Kaye shares her experiences and research into this element of our lives.
Empaths and Spiritual Communication through Energy
Thanks for rewinding my spiritual series, Sally, which I’d originally written for my Sisters of the Fey blog, which is now out of circulation. Written in 2020, but no doubt still applicable.
Perhaps it’s these crazy times we’re all living in, but for people who are Highly Sensitive Persons also known as HSPs, and for those of us who are empaths with similar traits, I’ve found these last few months, and in particular these last few weeks of world-wide protests for justice, weighing me down with a heavier than usual load to carry, emotionally.
For us sensitives, we are uber sensitive to the energies emitted when the hurt in the world becomes insurmountable. For empaths and HSPs, we don’t necessarily have to be directly in front of one person to pick up energies. We can also take in the collective. And I can tell you, absorbing too much of the negativity going on in the world can be very affecting.
Empaths are ultra-compassionate people, and it’s no surprise that we are feeling way too much in this time of the world.
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The question has often been asked – what is an empath, and what makes empathy different from sympathy? So today I’m going to break it down.
Empaths can literally feel the emotions of another. An inner-knowing through a feeling of invisibly transmitted energy, is how I’d explain it. I suspect every empath has their own unique abilities about how they receive messages, just as many sensitive people, including psychics and mediums, feel spirit using one particular sense.
For example, I can sense when spirits are around me by a sudden drop in my body temperature to downright shivering, no matter the degrees it is in the room. I also sense spirit by scent. I don’t see or hear ghosts, but I sense their presence when the room I’m in suddenly begins to feel very chilly to the point that my teeth chatter as the rest of me shivers. I can smell a distinct odor of Export A cigarette smoke just as I always did when my father entered a room and when he now visits me from ‘the other side’. I get the same feeling when a mysterious waft of a certain sweet scent of perfume fills the air when my Aunty Sherry pays me a visit. Not surprisingly, I’m the only one who can smell these visitors if I’m not alone.
But I digress, I was talking about receiving empathic messages before I got lost on the ghostly messages, lol. My superpower? I like to say, I read souls. I can read and feel emotions – yes, goodness, anger, sadness, evil and every emotion in between. It’s not always a good thing, that’s for sure, but it does come in handy for sizing up situations. How to explain?
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How does an empath absorb the emotions of others? I can only speak from my own experience, and the best way I can explain it is – In person, it only takes a few minutes for me to sense emotions from looking through the eyes – beyond the eyes, into the soul, so to speak. Body language and words also transmit energy. Certainly, we’ve all heard some of the old clichés like – ‘the air was so thick you could cut it with a knife’. That example of thickened air is a good indicator of what an empath picks up on whenever encountering negative energy. Empaths can feel the emotions given off by others. Like I previously mentioned, I would describe it as an energy transmission – communication through absorbed energy.
I am like a sponge or a Bounty paper towel, and have therefore, learned through the years, where to keep myself away from to avoid absorbing certain energies from attracting to me. Again, hard to explain, but I’m sure almost every one of us has had a superstitious moment in life where we’re convinced there is a black cloud hanging over us, or have once felt that someone has cast an evil spell on us or maybe we just plain feel like bad luck is surrounding us. These examples are what an empath feels when we pick up negative energies about a person. And that person doesn’t have to be physically in our presence for energies to bounce off us. And not to mislead anyone, empaths pick up both good and bad energies – no discrimination. It’s just that attracting the negative energies are harder to repel. And it’s no surprise when an empath is accused of being ‘moody’ that an energy can certainly have us changing our minds like the wind.
A good example of picking up collective energies is when we’re watching the news. There really is no good news on the news and by watching too much sadness, our energies become ‘empathetic’ to the pain and sadness of others. My heart gets heavy, and my concentration is shot as my heart prefers to lead my mood. Just as when we’re around a celebration and our hearts are full, we’re going to feel joyful because that is what surrounds us. And those good energies are like refueling from being drained from other bad energies. It’s a cycle for an empath, but there are ways to help deter attracting those energies by learning how to shield.
Empathy is different from sympathy in that having sympathy is more of an offering of condolence as we may feel sorry for someone because of their loss, but we do not feel that person’s actual grief as an empath can by taking in the griever’s actual feelings and emotions. Our own bodies can feel the pain of others – as though we’re walking precisely in their shoes.
Some may think it must be so cool to have this ability, but honestly, I’d rather not have it. Being an empath isn’t something we typically train to become, but rather, it’s an inherent or unconscious developed trait. Psychics, spiritualists, witches, and earth angels are more notoriously known for having empathic abilities, but one doesn’t have to be any one of these in order to be an empath.
Being an empath is sometimes referred to as ‘a gift’, but it’s not always a gift. Many people are empathic. And many more may be but are not aware of their ‘gift’, and some are often hindered by it.
It’s been asked many times, does one just become an empath? Is it inherited? Is it learned? Well, I’ve heard various takes on the subject, but one thought of interest stuck out to me: Some empaths don’t realize that their desire to help others sometimes stems from a lack of nurturing as a child, resulting in an unconscious need to help others. I think that’s just one possible method of how a person can be transformed into an empath subconsciously, and despite there being a ‘how to’ for almost anything available, my personal feeling is that teaching someone to be empathic would be like trying to teach someone to become a psychic. We can read all we want about the subject and watch Youtube videos, and gain lots of insight from doing so, but one cannot simply just ‘become’ an empath or a psychic. Dr. Judith Orloff, Psychiatrist at Psychology.com explains how genetics and trauma can aid in playing a part in becoming an empath, in her article where she explains this a little further.
What’s it like being an empath? Well, let’s say you’re watching a depressing movie or reading a sad part of a book and your feelings are touched by what you’re reading and/or watching. You may be feeling anger, disgust, elation or any other emotion from that movie or book. The writer of the story has done a great job of painting a story and bringing the characters to life when they can evoke these emotions and the reader is drawn in and can almost feel what the character is experiencing. For an empath, we don’t require someone to narrate their feelings to us, we sense and feel the emotion. Sure, if someone shares something affecting that happened to them, I can immediately take in how they’re feeling as a result of that incident, often no words are required. It’s a vibe and energy someone gives off and that energy is transmitted into their personal space. An empath only has to look into someone’s eyes to pick up on emotion – unspoken emotions. There is definitely more than meets the eye, to quote an old cliché – ‘the eyes are the windows of the soul’, because they definitely are.
An empath is a receptor for the energy. Someone not as sensitive to these energies wouldn’t be an empath, and subsequently, wouldn’t even be able to take notice of someone around them with a hidden emotional issue unless they were informed. And sadly, it’s sometimes difficult for an empath to shield or shutdown so as not to absorb these energies. Shielding is a protective measure that is learned, it’s the virtual putting up of an invisible wall to repel the energies to keep them from penetrating into us. With that I’ll add that one doesn’t have to be an empath to learn how to shield themselves
Empaths are usually open targets for energy vampires (suckers) because we take in other people’s energies. Our compassion can sometimes exhaust us when we encounter too much needy energy at one time. Needy doesn’t necessarily always mean the vampire is intentionally reaching out to us, but, because we are susceptible to other people’s energies and feelings – means we can sense the needy energies. We receive the feelings through energy. This is the reason I refer to these types of people as vampires – because they suck out and overwhelm our own energies as we begin feeling their pain or sadness. . . Please continue reading atSally’s Smorgasbord
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