Characteristics of Highly Sensitive People

• You constantly feel overwhelmed with emotions and you may cry a lot, feel sad, angry, or depressed for no good reason. You may be tempted to think you are crazy for having random mood swings and bouts of unexplained fatigue. If you are a woman, it’s like having PMS all the time!

Unrestrained empathy can cause a person to manifest symptoms similar to bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder.

• You drop by the store feeling great, but once you get in a crowd you start feeling down, angry, sad, or overwhelmed. You feel you must be coming down with something so you decide to go home and rest.

• If you’ve found that you can’t be in public without becoming overwhelmed you may start to live the life of a hermit. But, even at home, you get depressed when you watch the news and you cry while watching a movie. You feel horrible when a commercial for the Humane Society shows animals that need a home. You may rescue more animals than you can possibly care for.

• You feel sorry for people no matter who they are or what they have done. You feel the need to stop and help anyone in your path. You can’t pass by a homeless person without giving him money—even if you don’t have it to spare.

• Many empaths are overweight. When they absorb stressful emotions, it can trigger panic attacks, depression as well as food, sex, and drug binges. Some may overeat to cope with emotional stress or use their body weight as a shield or buffer. In Chapter 9 of my book, Whose Stuff Is This? ~ Finding Freedom from the Thoughts, Feelings, and Energy of Those Around You I show how to use light as protection.

• Most empaths have the ability to physically and emotionally heal others by drawing the pain or ailment out of the sick person and into their own bodies. For obvious reasons, this is not recommended unless you know how to keep from becoming ill in the process.

• From chest pains and stomach cramps to migraines and fever, you manifest symptoms without contracting an actual illness. Later, you learn that your “ailment” coincided with the onset of a friend or family member’s illness.

• No one can lie to you because you can see through their façade and know what they really mean. You may even know why they lied.

• People—even strangers—open up and start volunteering their personal information. You may be sitting in a waiting room minding your own business and waiting your turn when the person next to you starts sharing all kinds of personal information. You didn’t ask them to and they never considered that you might not want to hear about their drama. People may feel better after speaking with you, but you end up feeling worse because they have transferred their emotional pain to you.

• Some empaths don’t do well with intimate relationships. Constantly taking on their partner’s pain and emotions, they may easily get their feelings hurt, desire to spend time alone rather than with the partner, feel vulnerable when having sex, and feel that they have to continually retrieve their own energy when it gets jumbled with that of their partner. They may be so afraid of becoming engulfed by another person that they close up emotionally just to survive.

• The ill, the suffering, and those with weak boundaries are drawn to the unconditional understanding and compassion an empath emits without even being aware of it. Until you learn how to shut out the energy of others, you may have a pretty miserable existence in which you feel like you have to be entirely alone in order to survive.

It’s easy to see why being an empath is often very draining. No wonder that over time, some folks shut down their empathic ability. There is no need to build walls and shut down your awareness or intuition. Instead, you can shift from feeling the energy inside your body/emotions and begin to perceive it as external energetic impulses that have a message for you.

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