Empaths: What No One Talks About

OK, so bear with me for just a minute, and I'll get your attention.

I think we're all, to some extent, versed on the whole business of personality types, intro & extroverts and the increasingly more common media topic of ‘Are YOU an empath?’ offering us 10 more or less vague signs that we maybe, or maybe not, tune into other people's emotions.

So imagine for a second that instead of us having to find out who we are (introverts, extroverts, idealists or what have you) from a perspective of what we already believe and experience/have experienced, we first take in those beliefs and experiences and transform them into our personality traits.

Now, let me break this down in an example first.

Imagine you're a kid walking home from school and you've encountered a bully who subsequently injures you, steals from you and generally leaves you feeling frightened and weak.

Now, being a child, young in life with little experience (again we're imagining) you are very vulnerable and for the metaphor's sake this is the first time this has happened to you.

Of course you have the obvious choice of informing an adult, staying quiet and sulking over it or going back to confront the bully.

But what about all that essential thinking and processing now going on in your brain? Every thought descends into your subconscious and lingers there possibly all your life when not tackled.

So as this kid with a unique vantage point, at a critical junction of conscious thought and memory, you have to feel some way about the situation and you have to feel some way about how people feel about the situation.

Do you follow so far?

If, at this point, one decides that the bully hates them, for some inexplicable reason, then they might also decide that other people may hate them for some inexplicable reason.

This might lead to some problems as you can imagine, loosely summarized they would be along the lines of ‘dissociative’ personality symptoms when not faced and overcome.

Another example being maybe one feels that if they do not handle the problem themselves they will be targeted again and perhaps singled out as weak in the future.

Regardless of success or failure to do so the resulting mindset can lead to anger problems and over time an inherent need to push against the world.

Now what about the bully? We could imagine the bully in this situation in the past has most likely experienced something similar and over time allowed it to aid in determining their actions/reactions.

So what does this mean for empathy?

Are you the bully, the kid, just you or all three?

Are you an introvert and an extrovert?

Well the signs seem to tell us that we are whatever we believe to be, and what we believe to be gets more complex and rock solid with years of things to believe having been experienced or simply just thought.

By this logic we could come to the conclusion that we are all empaths, psychopaths, sociopaths, etc etc in our own individual rights, specifically tailored to fit our own unique flavor of perspective.

In the end, though, what does all that really mean for you?

Well, to those of us who already feel like empaths we can let all that weight off our shoulders and instead continue embracing our exploitative traits of people's energy in more constructive ways, like, simply empathizing without any judgements or assumptions on what role goes where and who gets more of what, so on, so forth.

For those of us who don't, and feel out of touch with the world and its people we too can rejoice in knowing that we all have a little bit of that in us. We also each get to choose exactly who we want to be in exactly what way, wherever we are.

To put it simply, if you feel like you just dont have the mental capacity to understand others, or to switch perspective (or that others cant understand yours) it is only because you felt that and decided that's what you were going to feel based on a set of circumstances or decisions, reactions, whatever it may be.

Lastly, why am I going on about this?

Because of all the things there is to believe in, belief itself as an action never fails to provide a clear and concise, yes or no result upon testing.

We tend to stick to the most obvious and clear results, but depending on what those results are, and how you move forward upon getting them, they will mold us in ways that we believe are permanent or extremely hard to change.

Sometimes in life these traits come out at us from the depths and one might be prone to feel, depending on circumstance, like what's done is done.

In the end, though, whatever you believe will have the most profound effect on all results you get upon interacting with the world. It's the root of every complex behavior, judgement, muscle movement, you name it.

For example, if you don't believe, at all, you can do something and you aren't pushed without choice to do it, then you won't do it. Or maybe you try it and via the major lack of effort you inevitably fail.

Bottom line, you decide! Be an empath, love the Earth, love people, understand people, humble yourself, or don't.