Free The Empath

What does caring and love feel like?

I was waiting for an appointment and there was a man who was also waiting. The wait was very long so we had a lot of time to talk about different things. He shared with me that his girlfriend was traveling for 2 weeks for work and he really missed her. He talked about how special of a connection they had and how incredible he thought she was and how proud he was of her. The best part – his eyes were lighting up when he was talking about her. This conversation made my week!

After that I went to the gym, and there was another guy who was working out with his girlfriend. The guy kept giving me the most lustful looks and tried to make a lot of eye contact with me. I was disgusted.

Sadly, the latter situation is more normal than the man who brags about how special his girl is and how much he appreciates her. Just how incredible is it that he talks in this way about her behind her back! It is so cool!

I realized that many women do not really know what a loving and caring man is. We often grow up with strong mothers and learn that we are strong and we got it! We can do everything and anything! I certainly learned that and I am proud of it. The downside of it is that I do not know what a caring and loving man feels like, yet. Somehow, in all of my relationships, I was very much wanted when I looked great and was happy. When I was sick, sad, laid off – my boyfriends were no where to be found. I remember one specific instance – my dog died. The dog was someone very special to me and the heartbreak of her death was beyond painful. When I left the vet, after she died, I sat down on the ground alone in the parking lot and cried for hours. I was alone but I was not single. I had a boyfriend of several years who had a very busy job. And then I got very sick and the illness took months to overcome and he was also very busy with his job.

Not to blame anyone but I simply had no idea what a caring man feels like. I know what the opposite feels like. I have countless examples of this. Here is one that is kind of funny but not really: in my 20s, I was in a relationship with someone for several years and one day I got a terrible cold. I was in bed with fever and the boyfriend was not really interested in spending time with me while I was snotty and coughing. I got upset and asked him why he was so uncaring that he could not even bring me some food while I was sick. He went out and bought a 5lb sack of potatoes. Am I supposed to eat raw potatoes? If I knew what a caring person is like, I would have absolutely dumped him right then and there or even before, way before.

In my family, my mother, her sisters, her mother and my mother’s mother all experienced the same thing – uncaring men. THIS STOPS WITH ME. If a man is not caring supportive and loving, he has no place in my life.

As an empath, my superpower is my intuition and the ability to pick up on people’s vibes. The common intuition that I experienced with ALL men I dated was the feeling of loneliness, coldness, emptiness, blackness even when we were out having fun.

As I said, this stops with me. And I will do my best to help other women realize that only caring, supportive and loving men are worth my time, love and body. I bet it feels pretty amazing and warm to experience someone truly loving. I look forward to a day when I can brag to my friends how warm and loved I feel.

For those who feel they do not belong here….

I just watched a documentary about DJ Avicii and wow such a powerful and tragic life.

He was an introvert. Quiet, intuitive and brilliant. He was surrounded by people who saw him as source of lots of $$$. It was all good in the beginning but when he needed help and told people around him that he could not do it anymore, no one cared. No one heard him. He felt alone. He was surrounded by people but he was alone. So alone. He felt like he did not belong… Eventually, he took his life. Sadly, too damn sadly, many people who feel they do not belong here, do the same. It breaks my heart and also drives me to do something about it.

I can strongly relate to the feeling of not belonging. I am an introvert and often I look around at our loud, outward oriented world and just shake my head and feel like I am visiting some sort of an insane asylum. I would like to be able to make a difference for those who feel they do not belong here as someone who can understand the feeling.

When I mentioned the subject of suicide to my friends, most react with “WOAH dark subject”. And that’s the problem with our society. We are afraid of dark subjects. We need to change that. We cannot be afraid of it. We have to go there, talk about it, make it open and not taboo so those who are considering it, do not feel like they are alone.

If you feel like you cannot go on, if you feel like you do not belong – you are not alone.

More to come on the subject.

Fuck Evil

I am reading a book right now and there is one sentence in there, which really struck a cord with me. It is about how there are people who can break other people physically and there are other people which are far more destructive who break others’ spirit.

That last part made me cry and made me think. It made me really sad for all others that I know who had their spirits broken by other people. It is not a crime, unfortunately, in our society to break a human spirit. Think about all of the parents that do that to their children, spouses doing it to each other, teachers doing to their students. Not all, of course, but there are plenty who do and the damage is not visible to the eye.

But the damage is “visible” to empaths and others who can sense it. I always sensed it and always wanted to help people see that there is light and there is love out there. I always try to remind people how strong they are and point out other strong qualities in them because I always instinctually knew that they can save their broken spirit and fight evil if they only knew how powerful and strong they are.

It also makes me realize how strong I am. I have dealt with my share of evil that tried to break my spirit. I always bounced back, stronger than ever.

What I learned in my experience about people who try to murder other people’s spirits is that they regularly tell you how bad you are, how not enough you are, only if you could change that one thing… If you accuse them of excessive criticism, they will turn this around on you and make you feel like you are absolutely crazy and they are only trying to help you become a better person. Fucker, I did not ask for your help to become a better person. There is no reasoning or logic to deal with evil. I found 2 ways to deal with it – laugh hysterically in its face and leave. Burn bridges. To execute both steps though, you need to have a strong footing in your life. You have to know your value, your worth and not expect someone else to define it for you. Otherwise, that’s how evil gets you – it senses your weakness and happily destroys you. We also have to learn that it is NOT ok for anyone to keep pointing out how bad you are, how wrong you are, how much you are doing wrong. Sure, criticism will exist in any relationship but if it is all that exists, that’s there to break your spirit. Do not let anyone ever break your spirit.

As an empath, I easily pick up how a person feels. I also was in a relationship with someone who was pure evil and the interesting thing with him was that every single time I slept next to him, I had the darkest nightmares. Normally, I sleep well and extremely rarely have bad dreams. With this person, I would wake up sweating, with my heart pounding.

It will be hard for others to break our spirits if we know who we are and how powerful we are.

Cheers,

Who took away your ability to dream?

A couple of posts ago, I wrote about PTSD from dating. I am sure I am not the only one. In fact, I know I am not the only one. If you research PTSD, you will see how fragile our psyche is and it does not take a lot to shift it.

I tried to do a meditation where you are called to imagine how you would feel if a desired outcome happened. Not just visualize your desired outcome but FEEL it. FEEL it. I spent several hours on this over the span of few days and while I can easily visualize what I want, I could not create the feeling. It was like there was some internal block. I would hit a wall. I was trying to imagine what it would feel like being in a happy, loving relationship and I could not.

I decided to meditate on this. As painful situations were happening through my life, I was slowly shutting down my feelings ..and along with that.. my ability to dream, to imagine, to have faith, to believe that something good is coming.

I am not someone who is a victim and I do not like to blame. But there are people on our paths who take away our ability to dream and believe. I certainly had a number of those. While you can say I gave away my ability to dream to these people, I can say with certainty that I approached every single one of them with nothing but a desire to be loved and to love. There were never ever hidden agendas. No one deserves to have their ability to dream taken away from them. But the good part – I choose to take it back now.

Visualize the part of you that you lost coming back to you. Visualize the ability to dream coming back to you. Take back what was always yours!

Let’s meet in the middle

I often hear from other empaths and HSPs that other people do not connect well with them. They do not feel understood especially when it comes to dating and romantic relationships.

As an extreme empath, I can read the person on date one. I can know about them more than they are willing to admit to even themselves. I used to blurt it out because I was proud of my skills. Now, I hold it back and just collect the data about the person. I also know very quickly whether I want to go the distance with the person or not. The problem with this is that if the other person is not an empath, INFJ or HSP, they might get freaked out. It does not mean he/she is a bad person. It just means in their world they get close to someone gradually. In my world, if I know, I know and I want emotional closeness quickly.

Why don’t we just meet each other in the middle?! I am right and the other person is right. They might need more time to open up and feel comfortable and why not grant them that time. Why not let them give a chance to get used to us ?!

I think it is not that other people do not understand empaths or INFJs. We speak “different” languages in a sense that what and how we want to connect are different.

For me, what makes me happy is talking for hours about buddhism, philosophy, mind-body connection, meaning of life, lessons learned in life, etc. What might make the other person happy is talking about a car, car parts, business, pets, fashion, work, etc. So, again, why not meet in the middle and discuss both?!

I wrote a post before this one, saying while we look the same (two eyes, two legs, etc), we are all different species and we communicate very differently. So, as an INFJ empath, I often pick up books on small talk and I find it very helpful. And often people see me as an interesting person who is interested in their subject and then they are willing to go deep with me which makes me really satisfied.

And some days, I do not want to talk to anyone or hear from anyone. It is re-charge time.

INFJ vs other species

I am an INFJ from a very capital INFJ x1000 and an empath.

Often we, empaths, HSPs and INFJs get really depressed and disillusioned with other people. We feel that no one understands us. No one can relate how deeply we are able to feel. No one is willing to go that deep. If we open up to someone and they discover the level of our depth, they most likely will be shocked and run away unless it is another INFJ.

There are people who are narcissists and should be avoided at all costs. They are not able to feel. They have no conscience.

There are regular people who have gone through trauma and shut down and as a result do not really let anyone in their life.

I, as an empath, cannot shut down my feeling center regardless of how much I get hurt. I am able to doorslam people eventually but shutting down my feelings is not something I can do.

There are people who would rather die than have a discussion about how they think and who they are.

There are people who can only do small talk for HOURS (insert puke emoji here 🙂 )

Here is a perspective I want to offer. What if we look at all the people I listed above as different species and instead of being disappointed that someone is not able to discuss anything deep, we just understand that it is their capacity.

It is kind of like this to me… No matter how much I cry that my cat does not bark at the mailman, the cat is not going to change. The cat is of certain species and has certain traits whether I like it or not.

We look at other humans and expect them to be like us because they look the same (2 legs, 2 arms, 2 eyes, etc) BUT we are very different. Some people will never have the emotional capacity that we want them to have. They just belong to a species that does not have that trait of going deep.

Or with narcs… do you try to domesticate an alligator and hope that through love you can change it?! No matter how much we cry and ask, an alligator will be an alligator. I hate using narc and alligator (beautiful animal) in the same sentence but you get the idea…

Even though we look the same, we walk side by side with different species. And may be there is a huge value in understanding that you are an empath and/or HSP and/or INFJ so that when you need support and help and a deep conversation, you go to someone who is the same species as you.

It is not about someone being better or worse. It is about realizing that despite physiologically looking very similar, we walk side by side with different species.

I cannot tell you how much time I wasted trying to love someone who was not open to a greater love, someone who was not interested in deep discussions. If I realized, I am dealing with different species, I would have saved myself a lot of time, therapy $ and suffering.

I have some friends who are lovely people but for the life of them, they are not able to go deep in a conversation. It is fun, however, to hang out once in a while when I just want some giggling and nothing serious. But then if I want to howl at the moon, I need to find a fellow wolf and not ask a squirrel to howl with me and then get depressed that the squirrel does not want to howl with me…

May be we do not need to wait for the aliens to land .. may be they are already here – us, as different species, who look the same.

Much love and laughter to my fellow INFJs, empaths and HSPs.

Empaths, Anxiety and PTSD from dating

Around my 30th birthday, I was dating a guy. A couple of days before my birthday, he said he was so excited to give me a really cool surprise on the day of my birthday. When the day came, I jumped out of bed and was so excited to spend the day with him. By lunch time, I have not heard from him. I thought that he must be working really hard to prepare the surprise for me and did not have time to text me or call me. So, I started getting dressed up absolutely certain he would show up soon. 6pm came, 9pm came, midnight – I started taking off my make up and my clothes. I have not heard from him. I also did not hear from him the day after. Two days later he called as if nothing happened. And when I said WTF happened with the surprise, he said he owed me nothing. That was the end of it. A month of debilitating depression ensued where I could not get out of bed. I did not eat, I could not face my friends or family. May be I reacted too much but I could not help it (empaths feel so damn deeply). I was in bed staring at the wall for a month. It was a very very dark time. At some point, I got better and life was good again but what I know now is that these things do not just leave our psyche.

(at the end of the month, the guy called, by the way, saying he was sorry and wanted to try again. Needless to say, I said FUCK OFF.)

About a year and a half ago, I began dating someone my friend introduced me to. We dated for about 2.5 months. We had a great time together and we were quite smitten with each other. One night, at 2am, he called me saying he really needed to talk to me and it could not wait for the morning. He lived an hour away and by 3am he was at my place. He came over to tell me how much he was in love with me and that I was everything he ever dreamed about in a woman. There were tears and many hugs and emotions. I said I felt the same way. There were even more tears and emotions. We ended up talking most of the night and at some point, we fell asleep. We woke up a couple of hours later. He had a different, distance look on his face and he said he could not do it and wanted to end things. I had an absolute shell shock. He quickly left. And that was it. The whole day, I was stunned. I did not cry. I did not talk to anyone. I was just stunned. A day later, it hit me and hit me hard. For the second time in my life (I will talk about the first one later), I was hit with a panic attack and the most severe anxiety I ever experienced. May be the lesson in this is that we knew each other for only a very short time – only 2.5 months. I do not know yet. But again, that kind of shell shock experience does not go away unnoticed.

About two years ago, I went on a few dates with someone. We had many common friends so there was a great deal of comfort in going out with this person. We liked each other a lot or so I thought. We went out together to a friend’s birthday. He said he would be right back. He wanted to get a drink. He was gone for a while so I went to look for him. I lifted up my head and saw him kissing some girl. I cannot describe what I felt. I left the party without saying anything to anyone and when I got home, again, the shell shock was so deep and debilitating that I could not even cry. That was it. But again, I think the shock of the situation did not leave my psyche.

And my first love… this one is for the books. I dated someone for about a year and a half when I was 18. We did not have sex before getting married because we wanted to do it right. Eventually, we got married. We still did not have sex. When I pressured him to tell me why he did not want me, he confessed he was gay and the reason he wanted to get married was because he was afraid his heavily religious family would find out about him being gay. The shock from this one was something I cannot describe. I was only 19 and he was my first love (or was it an illusion of love?). Again, I do not think the shock to my psyche just went unnoticed. The marriage lasted for 2 months.

I also do not want to say I never met any nice people. I did. But the point of writing this is to say that the shock from these situations did not just go away (PTSD?)

I now find myself having the most severe anxiety around dating. I am scared that if I let someone know how I feel, they will leave me. I am scared that if I open my heart, I will be kicked into it again.

I often read about not putting all of your emotional eggs in one basket and I am sure there is truth to it. However, the problem I see with this is that if I date multiple people at the same time, there is no way I am going to have connection and chemistry with all of them. And to me, why would I go on a date if I do not feel connection with someone.. for the sake of “diversifying?!”…I do not think so.

My current image that kind of self molded is that of a Snow Queen. My friends see me as someone who is very confident and sure of herself, someone who has her life together (it is together because I worked damn hard without days off or vacations for years to build up my career because I did not feel good enough otherwise) often cold and unreachable. In reality, it is just an image to hide and protect a very very hurt person. Behind that image is someone who has low self esteem, low self worth, debilitating anxiety and panic attacks and some very dark and scary moments.

I look forward to feeling more playful and carefree again. I look forward to liking someone without fear. I also look forward to making a conversation about anxiety and the fragility of our psyche more open and less taboo especially in empaths. We are not less because life beat the living shit our of us.

One thing I still struggle to understand is this: empaths feel DEEPLY. Empaths crave and long for deep love and connection. Most people on this planet are scared of powerful feelings. They run away from them. They would rather be with someone because there is some financial benefit or convenience than actually experience powerful emotions for another person. And I think most people at some point do experience powerful feelings but they get hurt and they shut down. I cannot shut down my longing for a deeper connection. I tried. I cannot be with someone because of convenience. BORING. So, the question still remains in my head – if empaths are capable of feeling so deeply but no one wants these feelings, why were the empaths blessed (or cursed) with this ability?!

What I am also realizing is that the guy being gay, the guy kissing some other girl while on a date with me… this had nothing to do with me – that is – nothing I did that caused this. They were broken people in their own way. Still painful to be on the receiving end of it but it is nothing that I did to deserve this kind of treatment.

I also came across a quote that said this: “The one who loves the least, controls the relationship”. I see the point of it – you are playing with the insecurity of another essentially keeping them unsure at all times but for fuck’s sake?! Is this why I was born feeling so deeply to play mind games and pull strings my whole life?!

Cheers…

Knocking on doors that are actually walls.

One thing that has always weirded me out about this planet is how closed and emotionally cold many people are. And it is understandable because too many try to take advantage of each other and the result is an army of closed-hearted people who just want to be loved but they are terrified at the sight of what might be love because they are not sure anymore what is hidden behind what appears as love.

Another thing…Recently I noticed that I complement people and they look at me confused. So, I began asking people what it is with the reaction I get when I compliment (both men and women). And what I am hearing is that people do not believe me. They try to find a reason why I would compliment them..aka..I might need something from them but they can’t figure out what it is I could possibly want from them. So, they are confused. To me, this is so fucked up and boring. What kind of planet do we live on where we cannot tell another human being that he/she looks nice, does something well, etc. C’mmon, we can do better than that…

So, being an empath with my heart so wide open (tried closing it. doesn’t close) and eagerness to see the best in people (even when they do not see it in themselves) makes me feel like I keep knocking on doors that are not doors..these are walls. Boring. Yawn..

Empaths and Love

I might be jumping around on this subject because it is really broad and big…

Love… we all search for it especially empaths who crave connection and depth 24/7 and feel incomplete without it.

I think our view of love and relationships in FUCKED UP in a major way. We enter relationships with the idea what that person can do for us (emotionally, physically, financially, etc)… But may be this is why we have so much divorce and disappointment in love. We enter the relationship with the idea of taking. Would it be better to enter the relationship with the idea of giving?! I do not know but I am going to give it a try.

We expect.. we find a person.. and we expect he/she will be our friend, love, father, mother, therapist, etc. How often do we stop to think whether we give enough to the other person and how often do we sit down to think what they might need to feel happy in this union? Usually, we end up saying “I need more of this. I am not getting enough of that.” And disclaimer, of course, there are dysfunctional and empty relationships that one should move on from. More often than not however, we have a certain idea for what a relationship should be like based on books, movies, etc. We do not have a real idea what a relationship really is. May be being in the relationship is the most selfless thing you can do?!

And again sure, we have our needs and we want our needs met. May be we will have our needs met more often (repeating myself here but I feel it is important) if we think first what the other person needs and what we can give them and if it is a healthy relationship, the other person will reciprocate.

I often hear from men how when they go on a date with a woman and all she talks about is herself. This is not cool. At all. And many men do that too. And then they enter a relationship, and just like during the date, it is all about them.

We have to stop thinking how a new love interest can heal our traumas and solve our issues and instead try to understand better the needs of a person we enter into a relationship with.

Many people already give too much in their relationship. But this giving is not genuine or healthy. They give not because they are whole and overflowing with love. They give with the hope of a certain payout. I certainly have done this before and then got really angry that I kept giving and giving without any return. That giving was not sincere. I was giving too much because I thought I was not enough. That me, just being there and loving the person was not enough. So, excessive giving was in a sense a bribe for them to confirm that I am good enough and attractive and desirable enough. This is the most unhealthy form of giving.

I am going to continue this subject … it is very important and so massive

Having no expectations

So many things in our lives are lies. Media, social media, etc. We pretend that we know someone or something when in reality we do not. We could be in a relationship with someone and claim to know who they are but we do not. We do not know what the person is really thinking. As a result, we have these massive expectations and then the fall, the realization that you actually did not know the person or situation is very painful.

Social media – all lies. People pretend they have perfect everything when in reality they are often miserable. Job interviews – facade, dates – facade.

I think the only thing we can control is what we do or think. And after clearly seeing just how much lies there are all around us, you arrive to the point where you see that all you can control is what you are and who you are. Nothing else and no one else. And with that comes a sense of freedom which is priceless.