Solve relationship problems with Energetic Literacy (Part 2)

Quick! (Quicker than you can say “Mary Cassatt,” whose painting is copied to our left.)

Quick! Here’s a short multiple choice quiz on the topic of improving your relationships:

Your degree of comfort in your closest relationships right now depends most on which one of these?

 1. How cute you look, especially that manicure

2. Whether or not your significant other is secretly an energy vampire

3. The skilled use of your talents

Aha! You guessed it, right? Having talents in life don’t mean owning static objects, like trophies on a shelf.

Talent that requires skill, if you want to be happy

Skill is particularly vital if you were born with talent as an empath. “Empath” is defined thus:

You have at least one lifelong gift for directly experiencing what it is to be another person.

One of the most important differences between those who do, and don’t, have energetic literacy is the ability to recognize if someone is an empath.

That’s different from being an HSP, a Highly Sensitive Person. HSPs have nervous systems that are highly tuned, making the person more aware energetically, socially, sexually, in every other way.

That would be 1 in 5 people. Whereas empaths are 1 in 20 people.

Sometimes, just understanding about what it means to be an HSP is enough to make a big difference in life. So you can go to websites for HSPs, like http://highlysensitive.org/ or www.hsperson.com, pick up a few screen-fuls of tips and you’re well on your way.

Being an empath is different. It is not simply a way of being in the body, where you need to know it’s okay to have what you have. Every empath has talent, and unless that talent is used with skill, it’s likely that the empath’s life is going to be more-or-less miserable.

Skills of Empath Empowerment

When you’re merely talented, not yet skilled as an empath, there is a lifelong problem of taking on STUFF from others. Every empath is an HSP (not the other way around). But the problems can’t be explained by sensitivity.

In my latest book for empaths, Become The Most Important Person in the Room, I go into detail, complete with diagrams, about Unskilled Empath Merges. These happen routinely until an empath gets skill.

Having skill means that you turn your gift(s) OFF most of the time. This becomes a habit.

You turn your gift(s) ON only by choice, to the degree you want, for a short period of time. Click here for FAQs about Empath Empowerment, incidentally.

Otherwise, you’re moving in and out of your significant other’s auric field. Someone with energetic literacy may describe your aura, as a not-yet-skilled empath, as vulnerable or, even, weak. Boundaries to that aura grow firmer with skill at how you use your consciousness. It has absolutely nothing to do with trying to firm up boundaries in social relationships, an approach most empaths have tried. (Unsuccessfully.)

Boundaries from the perspective of energetic literacy

Boundary work helps non-empaths, but it doesn’t help empaths. Because the consciousness of an empath will merge with others, regardless of social attempts to control self.

What if you tell your pushy co-worker, Zorro, “Stop eating my food from the company fridge”?

That’s a social boundary. Your choice is perfectly fair and sensible and even delicious.

But this social boundary setting has zero impact on what happens with your aura. You could be an unskilled empath, having the tricky talk with Zorro and the whole time you’re with him, unbeknownst to your conscious mind or his, you are moving in and out of his auric field, taking on his emotional hunger or STUFF related to thwarted power of whatever.

Nothing makes an empath skilled except, gulp! actually developing skills as an empath.

And it’s amazing how many relationship problems happen simply because an empath is moving in and out of the S.O.’s aura, picking up STUFF, but not helping that S.O. long term. (See our controversial earlier post about what, from the standpoint of energetic literacy, is required for healing to be permanent.)

Many of the worries people have about energy vampires, psychic vampires, narcissists, and emotional blackmail really stem from the weakness of an empath who doesn’t have skill yet.

If your self-esteem and sense of self had the weight of a feather, a whole lot of people would seem way too heavy, wouldn’t they?

How much fun is it, being with an unskilled empath?

My reason for asking this very bold question is that sometimes unskilled empaths assume their huge, merging sensitivity with a partner is a great gift.

We really need to re-think that one.

When a mother raises a baby, there’s a temporary time of being very merged together. This is appropriate, even required. All mothers do this, not just ones who were born as empaths.

Once we learn to hold up our heads, walk, talk, etc., we no longer need another person to anticipate our wishes. In fact, that’s the way of co-dependence (something that empaths can fall into before becoming skilled but, then, so can non-empaths).

Significant others of an empath are individual, grownup people. As such, they generally prefer to be treated that way.

One of the biggest gifts you can give your significant others is becoming skilled as an empath. In the language of Transactional Analysis, you can relate as Adult to Adult, not with your playing the role of a perpetual Parent with a perpetual Child.