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 are an empath. Some of those quizzes expect you to answer more than 30 questions.
I like being efficient. I work with just 5 questions to get the same result:
They are
- Were you described as “over-sensitive” as a child?
- Do you avoid crowds?
- Do you sense when someone is not telling the truth?
- Do you experience quick changes in your emotions
- Are you aware that you pick up other people’s energy?
Let’s take these in sequence
Question #1. Were you described as “over-sensitive” as a child? Nearly all of us have 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 by being labelled “over-sensitive”. 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 rarer and more valuable if it is highly sensitive – so why was I thinking that being sensitive was something bad.
Question #2. 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 #3. 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.
Just that we know when someone is untrustworthy.
Question #4. 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 it truly isn’t.
I’ll come back to this topic in more detail in a later talk.
And bottom line, Question #5. Are you aware that you pick up other people’s energy? If you answered yes 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 mechanism to deal with them.
As a result you would prefer to avoid them completely.
If you answered yes to most of those questions you are an empath – you process other people’s emotions. That also means that you have 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 someone else’s emotions.
The starting point on the road 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 That Influence Us as Empaths.
Thank you for listening to this talk. Thank you for helping yourself learn to become a thriving empath.
For more videos see … Thriving Empath Videos