Absorbing Others Energy and Emotions

Why you feel everything and what to do about it.

Imagine a child on their first day of school.

They walk through the door and within 30 seconds they know things.

They know the teacher is tired and a little sad today.

They know the boy in the corner is frightened even though he's laughing.

They know something happened in this room before they arrived.

Something tense,

Something unresolved or painful,

Even though no one has said a word.

No one taught them to know these things.

They simply do.

And here is the question that will follow this child for the rest of their life.

Perhaps it's the same question that has followed you for all of yours.

Why do I feel everything that everyone else is feeling inside my own body as if it were my own?

This is not a small question but it deserves a real answer.

The nervous system of a highly sensitive person does not stop at the skin.

This is not poetry and this is not spiritual metaphor.

The nervous system extends beyond the body.

It reaches outward into rooms,

Into relationships,

Into the emotional weather of the people nearby.

It is by its very nature a sensing instrument of extraordinary range and precision.

And so when someone near you is anxious,

You don't just notice their anxiety,

You feel it inside your own chest,

In your own breath,

In your own body,

Even when you know clearly and rationally that it's not yours.

This is the experience that bewilders so many highly sensitive people.

I know it isn't mine,

So why does it feel like mine?

Well,

Here is the answer that makes the most sense to me.

When a baby is born,

For the first few months of its life,

It does not know it is separate from its mother.

There is no boundary,

Is there?

No distinction.

No sense of where it ends and the other begins.

It simply assumes completely,

Naturally,

Without question that it is part of something larger,

That it is,

That it is the other.

Highly sensitive people never quite lose this,

Not because something went wrong,

But because something stayed open that most people gradually,

Quietly close.

That original porousness,

That deep,

Pure assumption of oneness.

I am everyone.

What you feel,

I feel.

We're not separate.

If the whole world were like this,

It would be a breathtaking place to live.

But the whole world is not like this.

And so,

The highly sensitive person moves through life with an openness that the world around them was never designed to accommodate.

They absorb,

They carry,

They metabolize other people's emotional states as if they are their own.

Because somewhere,

In the deepest operating system of who they are,

They still believe in some wordless way that they are.

So what do you do with this?

Because this is the real question.

Not why does this happen,

But how do I work with it?

How do I remain open?

Because the openness is a gift,

Not a flaw.

While also staying grounded enough in myself that I do not lose myself entirely in everyone else's experience.

The answer is one of the most important things I know.

It is the solidity of self.

Not walls,

Not armor,

Not boundaries or barriers.

Not the decision to shut down the sensitivity and stop feeling so much.

Because that would be like asking a musician to stop hearing music.

It's not the solution.

That's the loss of the gift.

The solidity of self is something different.

It is the deep embodied knowledge that you are a singular human being.

That even as we all are connected,

Even as the nervous system reaches beyond the body and touches the world,

You are also you.

Distinct,

Purposeful,

Real.

I am one with the all and I am also my own.

Both things are true simultaneously and learning to live in both truths at once,

That is the work.

Here is something I have noticed in almost every highly sensitive person I've ever worked with.

Underneath the absorption,

Underneath the exhaustion of feeling everything,

Underneath the confusion of not knowing where they end and someone else begins,

There is almost always the same root.

A lack of self-respect.

Not because they are not worthy of respect,

But because they were never taught.

Not properly.

Not early enough.

Not by the people and systems that should have known better.

That they are a singular,

Purposeful,

Whole human being whose inner world deserves the same care and attention they give so freely to everyone else's.

And this absence of self-respect is not just a personal wound,

It's a cultural one.

It is why there is so much violence and so little integrity in the modern world,

Because self-respect,

Real,

Deep,

Embodied self-respect,

Is the foundation of a moral life.

And we stopped teaching it.

So if you're someone who walks into rooms already knowing,

If you carry other people's feelings home in your body without meaning to,

If you have spent years of your life wondering why you cannot simply observe the world the way other people seem to,

Without being pulled under by it,

This is for you.

You're not broken,

Of course you're not broken.

You're not too porous,

Or too open,

Or too much.

You are someone who arrived in this world with the nervous system of a sensor.

Vast,

Precise,

Extraordinarily alive.

And the work is not to dismantle that.

The work is to build slowly and seriously the one thing that will allow you to use it without being consumed by it.

A self that is solid enough to hold it.

A self you respect enough to protect.

A self that can feel everything and still know with quiet certainty exactly where it stands.

If this resonates with you,

Share it with someone who needs to hear it today.

Thank you.