Setting Boundaries When You’re an Empath

Hey friends, Cat Kabira here and I would love to talk with you today about some strategies if you're an empath and learning to own and respect your boundaries. 

So let's first define what an empath is. 

If you're an empath, usually you have a tendency to orient towards other people's feelings before your own. And it's not, usually, it's not that you're orienting towards people's joy, pleasure and happiness. You're oriented towards their pain. And so if you're an empath, you often will feel like you're taking on other people's pain. You feel drained by other people, environments, or even feel like people are putting their emotions on you.

You can also be an empath and be aware of other people's thoughts, whether you're aware of that or not. And you also can be aware of their physical pain or even their posture in their body. Now, I keep using the word awareness, but usually you're not going to be aware that you're even doing this. 

So I'm talking about the unconscious empath, where you just have a hard time and you feel a lot of stress and anxiety when you have to be around other people, because unknowingly, you're orienting all the time towards how people are feeling physically, mentally and emotionally. 

Being an empath, it is a trauma response. And whether this trauma response got activated or developed while you're in the womb from your birth or for the first few years of your development, it's something that is a defense mechanism, a survival strategy to feel okay. So in particular, if you're an empath, learning how to respect your own boundaries is really essential. 

And the two things that I want to share with you today is, number one, if you want to learn how to really take care of yourself and feel comfortable with other people, if as an empath, your impulse is how is the other person feeling? What did they want? What did they need? Because I need them to feel okay. So I feel okay. So your first step, and it's going to take a little bit of practice because you're unconsciously, immediately doing this when you're with other people. 

The first step is, what do I need? Where am I? What do I feel? What do I want? 

So first, orienting towards you before doing anything else. So again, remember, if you're an empath, your unconscious immediate impulse is, what do you want? What do you feel, what do you need? And even if someone else asks you, well, what are you feeling, what do you want? What do you need? You might not even be able to tell them. And it's going to feel potentially uncomfortable to even navigate. Like, is this okay for me to own, to know what I feel want? Okay, so first of all, what are your needs? 

Second tip, if being an empath is a trauma response, then your motivations with other people, even if you don't want it to be, it's going to be based out of fear and anxiety. It's not out of love. 

And I'm saying this because oftentimes if you're an empath, you're going to be prone to people pleasing, you're going to be prone to, I've tracked, I understand this person in front of me and what they need to be happy, what would delight them. 

And it is manipulative. 

Like, I'm going to make sure that you're okay so that I'm okay. And yet, even though you're still learning what are your own needs, it's not about suddenly, well, I'm selfish and you don't matter, or, you know, it's all about me and I'm not going to attune towards you. So we're not saying that. 

But the step two is once you know where you are, what you feel, what you need, there's going to be a negotiation. And when you're orienting towards the other, the choices that you're making to do for the other, to care for the other, it's coming out of love. It's not coming out of fear. 

The book The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz, he has a great line that I think is quite applicable here. He says: “the victim represses the warrior refrains.” The victim represses the warrior refrains. 

So it can be the same exact action, but the intention behind is what makes the difference. 

And so you can consider that, that you could be doing the same action with someone, whether it's a giving or doing for them, or actually saying, I'm not going to do this, but the intention behind is I'm doing this out of love, I'm not doing this out of fear. 

And the feeling difference for you is I feel secure within myself, which is why out of love, I'm choosing this. When you do it out of fear, you don't feel secure. Now this will be a separate video. 

And if you do work with me in person or online or do some of my other practices, you see that a lot of the work I do when you're learning how to really know and respect your boundaries is also how do you start to ground and build that security within yourself so that you can tolerate other people being uncomfortable. 

I hope this helps, and I look forward to connecting with you sometime online or in person. And I wish you such a wonderful day.