I'll be honest today has been a rough day. I'm on antibiotics for an insect bite and I find most medication really knock me about, as do insect bites (they love the taste of me).
In Judith Orloff's book The Empaths survival guide it says that empaths are often more sensitive to medication than others and I definitely am. However, is my sensitivity to medications different in any way to others? I guess we'll never know.
So of course being run down & tired due to lack of sleep, has made me more sensitive than normal, (or my normal) and perhaps that's why a conversation with my husband today jarred and hurt more than normal. But it did remind me of something...
I'm currently re-reading Judith's book and reminding myself of some things I had forgotten, but one thing people don't realise is that for those of us with a sensitive empathic nature, life can be quite lonely.
Sometimes we bring it on ourselves when we need to shut off from the over stimulated world, but other times it's because it's hard to make people understand what we go through, so it's easier to try to lock away our emotions than discuss what is happening to us. We learn from an early age that people don't want to know.
Does it scare them? Empathy was a sign of being a witch during the witch trials so perhaps it does.
I tried to have a conversation about it today with my husband, who I love dearly. He is so supportive on so many things, yet he can be so very skeptical. If there is no pure harden science behind it, he dismisses it and states it can't be true. Whereas I believe there is so much that science doesn't yet understand and we should have open minds to it.
I tried to discuss today with him about a story I'd read on the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-43572639?SThisFB and before I'd even finished my sentence he'd dismissed it.
I then tried to continue the conversation about how I could relate to what was being said in this article, but again he wouldn't let me finish a sentence and hear my side of the argument.
I tried to tell him how him not listening to me made me feel, but again he cut me off before I could speak.
In the end I decided today wasn't a day to have this conversation with him. He was barbed like a hawthorn and each comment felt like a wound in my neck. (I find negativity always goes into my neck).
Something is off with him and he doesn't want to share. So I close myself off. I tried to explain to him a scenario I had in the past, but as I can't explain to him why it happens in a logical way, he didn't want to know. I desperately want to help him to understand, we agree on so many things but this is obviously one he cannot get his head around. So I will wait and close these thoughts and feelings away again and wait until a time when I am less sensitive than I am now.
However, I wonder how many of you find yourself in the same place, not able to talk to anyone about your empathic sensitive nature. Often we don't even realise that what we feel is different to others we assume everyone feels the same as us.
I remember realising I was different when I trained as an aromatherapist in my 20's. I love herbs and aromatherapy and find it fascinating, but the reason I did not pursue with it as a career was because of the way it made me feel.
During my training my tutor said she'd never met someone like me before. Every client when I went through the client questionnaire would open up and tell me things they'd never told another person. I remember one lady breaking down and telling me about herself and then looking at me and saying "I don't know you, why did I tell you this?".
But it wasn't this that was the problem. When I gave treatments to certain people it was like a blackness came out of their bodies and crawled up my arms into my body. It was a darkness I couldn't explain and I soon decided I couldn't do treatments anymore.
I've since learnt techniques to ground myself and protect myself and it may be I could have used these to carry on in that profession, but I was young then and hindsight is always a wonderful thing.
Every empath will have different sensitivities and it can be so hard for them to talk and share their stories. Like those with Synaesthesia in the news article, there is so much we don't know about the human mind, body and spirit. Yet we shouldn't dismiss it. I love sci fi and currently watching back to back box sets of Marvels Agents of Shield. In it people are transformed into "inhuman" via a process called terrigenesis. They say that every inhuman is there for a reason, to bring balance into the ecosystem. I believe the same is true for all humans, we just don't know it yet.