The role of the empath -
As an empath, I can attest to this -
Empaths feel much. Often times we think we feel too much.
And we intuit much of other people’s feelings and the energy in the room(s) that we’re in.
All of these emotions often feel incredibly overwhelming. Combine that with being an HSP - A Highly Sensitive Person—as many of us are, and the world often times feel excruciating.
It also makes grief and loss, and, of course, suicide all the more intense.
I’m not saying the above are ever necessarily light for anyone -
But some people can compartmentalize better than others.
I have never been very good at that.
The premise doesn’t even compute/make any sense to me.
I am incapable of that.
And, if you are like me— you have also from the time that you were little - have been told you’re sensitive, or that you have a marshmallow heart - or something similar -
And feeling all these brutal, brutal emotions of this world—that I feel and that I know others feel - often times make me feel like I’m going to drown. Or erupt. Or simultaneously combust and burst into flames.
It has often felt like too much to contain.
I know that this is also why I looked to alcohol - drink it down. Temporarily halt the feelings.
Because - It’s too much. I’m not going to stay standing if I feel all of this.
I truly believed that.
Because—for me—repression in other ways didn’t help - Some people can shop it away or work it away or exercise it away - I tried those things and sometimes it would help. Before the trauma(s) and suicides.
But after those, not for long. They would come back and so so soon.
Because—after combined with the trauma and the neuro-changes and the high cortisol - I also just couldn’t calm my body.
Try as I did, and in so many different ways, I just couldn’t fucking relax.
I’ve written at length on why this was a bad idea - I make no excuses. Repression through drugs and alcohol only buys you time. Whatever you’re trying to push down will indeed resurface, worse and stronger.
And eventually you will have to pay the piper and feel the feelings or it’ll make you sick—in vastly different ways. The body remembers and holds the anguish, especially if you don’t allow the emotions to move through, to emote, that’s what the root word means. It’s what they are supposed to do.
I was thinking about all of this - feeling all the deep, big, big, scary feelings the other day, because I read something that gave me pause -
It was a take on the unique role of the empaths and our calling and purpose in the world.
Their —this transcendentalist therapist’s—notion is that the empath is “here to awaken, not to heal.”
That we are here not as a helper, but as an archetype, a mirror of the collective shadow of humanity.
In being a revealer, our suffering is not a weakness, but we reveal the residue of what society refuses to face.
The point that we are often misunderstood and we often times misunderstand our own role - that it’s not to soothe, but, in actuality, to disturb the collective sleep.
We reflect back to society - their/our shadow side - “not only their wounds but un-grieved pain of entire bloodlines, cultures, epochs.”
They said - “We tremble in places where others numb.”
Our sensitivity—this therapist argues—is “not a flaw,” but they framed us as “a tuning fork,” to be used for “psychic permeability.”
Because we “exist at the edge of collective repression.”
We’re here “to reveal what the tribe has forgotten, disowned, or buried.”
More fascinating to me - our initiation - as empaths - “begins after we stop pathologizing our pain, and instead, start to decode it as symbolic data from the unconscious.”
We need ask ourselves - “what is trying to work through me?”
We “must die to the role of the rescuer - as we have the tendency toward co-dependency and a lack of boundaries.”
But that “we must become sovereign.”
Here we are instructed to —
“Feel without fusing with another” -
To say - “I see you, but I’m not you; I’m not a sponge.”
“We are not dysfunctional but prophetic.”
“Our gift is not to make people feel better but to feel more.”
That last part really struck me, as did the part about how in feeling too much, we show the wounds of humanity, culture, society.
No wonder we try to shut down feelings - through patriarchy, colonialism/western ideologies, capitalism, etc.
None of these makes much allowance or esteem for ‘feelings’ or emotions.
If anything, from all of the above ideologies, we’re taught to minimize them. We are taught they are not reliable. We are taught that they are the less reliable form of persuasion and knowledge.
Even in church, I’ve heard to be wary of emotions -
Well, sure.
But also - they are what make us human.
Not feeling them makes us sick.
The New Testament accounts many stories of how Jesus felt all the emotions - the anger, the sadness and desperation and grief - God in the Old Testament too.
It’s always interesting to me how we try to shut down feelings -
Because those who don’t feel - at all -
We have names for their issues - psychopaths - sociopaths - narcissists - with NPD -
An inability to feel for another person is often regarded as a disease. A disorder.
And for good reason.
We find you scary if you can’t empathize for another human being.
And yet how often do we not give people the space to learn about emotions, to process them, to regulate them.
We are getting better about this and also - too many fail to be able to do this. I truly believe that most substance abuse is an ability to feel and to address the range of pain and grief and loss and trauma of this world.
Misunderstood, I think too often people think that addicts and alcoholics just want to feel good - that that’s why they’re on drugs or alcohol.
Quite the contrary, too often we want to numb.
Because the former assumes that we are neutral when we start using.
Many of us are trying to cover up what we feel - pain, anxiety, grief, loss, trauma, betrayal, abandonment, heartache, stress, etc, etc -
Does it make it right to abuse substances? That’s not what I’m saying.
But we are in pain.
People don’t wake up and one day just suddenly, surprisingly, find themselves with an alcohol or drug problem because everything’s going great- it started as a tempering of struggle that has gotten out of hand - that has ballooned out and now has made our lives unmanageable.
Reading things like this, make me realize that it is my calling -
As a human
As a cycle breaker
As a Cancer and a highly emotional and sensitive person -
As an empath -
To feel all of it.
And to know it won’t break me.
I can survive it.
I can feel it.
And I will be okay.
I even have a divine role and calling to do so.
I was made this way.
Apparently I am supposed to do something with it.
As I seek to know my purpose, for why I am here -
I can’t help but to think that this is most certainly a component of it.
Even when it’s hard.
Especially when it’s hard.
Maybe even because it’s hard.
Because I am fairly certain that—in coming from a long line of alcoholics on multiple sides of my family - I am the descendent of many, many people who felt incapable of feeling and refused to feel. And so, instead, they shut it down.
I read a lot about intergenerational trauma and emotional inheritance-
And how our spirit, our emotions, our nervous systems, our genes, our energies and auras - are directly influenced by our ancestors.
So, it makes me wonder—
What if some of us are empaths and HSPs, those of us who are also learning how to live as sober alcoholics - what if it is a direct result of our family/ancestral line?
It also boggles the mind and begs the question -
It makes me wonder -
What if we did really live in a world where we were all encouraged to feel and to empower and help others feel?
How different and how much better would our world be?
I think we can scarce imagine it.
And I don’t mean - moodiness and I don’t mean crankiness and bad moods - in terms of “all the feelings—”
I mean all the hard emotions of life - that we simply must process or else we bear the consequences and repercussions of it.
What if that were the preferred form of learning and knowledge and meaning-making - instead of logic and analytics and data and numbers and objective facts and scientific data —that western knowledge has always taught us as more important.
Much like the ballooning effects of coloniality —
I can scarce imagine that.
To swim against the stream, to live against the grain - in this regard - And to have intensely human and emotional experiences —
Is to live.
It’s brutal.
And it’s a helluva ride.
And there’s no other way to really exist or to experience this life, this world.
Of that I am fully convinced.
Even when I fucking hate having to do it.
Because it’s so damn hard.