Hi,
I'm Trevor Lewis,
Author of Thriving as an Empath,
Empowering Your Highly Sensitive Self.
I've been an empath all my life and since 2013 I've been on a mission to help other empaths learn more easily the lessons I had to learn the hard way.
This talk looks to answer the question,
Am I an empath?
There are lots of quizzes on the internet to determine if you're an empath.
Some of those quizzes expect you to answer more than 30 questions.
I like being efficient.
I work with just five questions to get the same results.
Those questions are one,
Were you described as oversensitive as a child?
Two,
Do you avoid crowds?
Three,
Do you sense when someone is not telling the truth?
Four,
Do you experience quick changes in your emotions?
Five,
Are you aware that you pick up energy from other people?
Let's take these in sequence.
Question one,
Were you described as oversensitive as a child?
Nearly all of us had our empath abilities all of our lives.
In childhood it may have been noticed by those around us.
Other people may have called us out for being more emotional than they considered appropriate.
It may have been that we were also upset by loud noises or bright lights,
For instance.
Often we were made to feel like we were the odd ones out for being labeled oversensitive.
For many of us that label has stuck into adulthood as well.
I remember that I was about 18 when I realized that a scientific instrument is rare or more valuable if it's highly sensitive.
So why was I thinking that being sensitive was something bad?
Question two,
Do you avoid crowds?
When we are around other people we pick up their stuff.
We don't have to be in physical proximity to other people.
But the more that we are,
The more their junk rubs off onto us.
Given a choice,
We will avoid large groups of people.
Question three,
Do you sense when someone is not telling the truth?
Especially if you listen to your heart and gut rather than thinking intellectually about whether the person is lying or not.
We may not know why we know.
We just know when someone is untrustworthy.
Question four,
Do you experience quick changes in your emotions for reasons that you often don't understand and can't control?
This is a clear indicator because you can take on somebody else's stuff in just seconds.
Although it's often the case that you may get into a mood for no reason,
The mind is crafty and will often come up with really convincing reasons why your mood change is your own when truly it isn't.
I'll come back to this topic in more detail in a later talk.
And bottom line,
Question five,
Are you aware that you pick up other people's energy?
If you want to get to this one,
The issue really isn't am I an empath?
But rather,
What can I do about making being an empath easier to deal with?
You are aware that you don't like to be around certain other people,
But you don't have good defense mechanisms to deal with them.
As a result,
You would prefer to avoid other people completely.
If you answer yes to most of these questions,
You are an empath.
You process other people's emotions.
That means that you've probably spent most of your life trying to fix yourself for feeling emotions that weren't yours to fix.
You don't need to fix yourself for feeling other people's emotions.
The starting point to feeling better is just to recognize that those emotions were never yours to begin with.
Most of us as empaths are far healthier than we give ourselves credit for.
The next talk in this series will look at the factors influencing us as empaths.
Thank you for listening to this talk.
Thank you for helping yourself learn to become a thriving empath.
