What is Toxic Empathy?
What is Toxic Empathy?
Toxic empathy is the experience of feeling other’s emotions at an overwhelming weight that is detrimental to the empath’s safety. You may feel that your purpose involves taking on other’s challenges to help them find solutions. But empathy must not come before your own
- safety
- refinement
- overall wellbeingÂ
1. Separate Your Emotions
Get clear on what your emotions are in a given moment. Close your eyes, breathe, and check-in with yourself. How do you feel on the inside? Write a list of all the emotions you feel inside. Research different types of emotions if separating your emotions are a challenge. Next, discern when other’s emotions are entering your space.
2. Create Space
Develop a safe space for yourself first. Only you can do this. Do not hide behind the hope that others will protect you. Unless you develop a true essence of safe space for yourself you will not feel safe around others:Â Start with your inner space.Â
Meditate on how a comfortable internal space looks. What colors and places do you see? Get a sense of where this lives in your body. Find a way to document these safe spaces you find within so you can feel them when you need them again in the future.
 Next, work on your physical space. Make this an individual task of wearing or using the colors or sounds you found in your safe space meditation. This safe space will help you become aware of what safety is for yourself. Carry this knowledge into future relationships you build.
3. Re-establish Your Personal Emotional Boundaries
When you gradually gain trust for yourself through a self love journey you start to trust yourself to create honest boundaries that will help you build a true relationship with yourself.Â
Seeking control over your emotions is a goal for anyone who has never established emotional boundaries or has experienced emotional abuse.Â
In relational intimacy, one learns not to take more than what one receives. Create boundaries that allow your emotional lines to be personally drawn.
4. Redefine Empathy
Take time to redefine what empathy means to you. You might find it helpful to listen to this article where we discuss the Empath Matrix. The empath matrix is broken into four main quadrants.
Spend most of your time in the first quadrant which is giving to yourself. When starting a self-love journey you are learning how to develop our foundation and our principles to live a better love-filled life by committing to your self-love journey.
5. Practice
Overtime, you will begin to recognize when you are being influenced by the emotions around you. You may be shocked to learn how much of your emotions are coming from outside influence. If you see that you are actively doing the work to control your empathic emotions and seal your energy leaks, you will spot a red flag that warns you to stop consuming other people’s emotions. Use this mantra ‘I keep my energy my energy, and I keep outside energy outside.‘ Take some time to reflect on how healthy you are as an empath.
Change any unhealthy traits right now!
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