Neither HSP or Empath
After taking the Empath Quiz, if you’ve landed here, your answers indicate that you do not experience heightened sensitivities to the physical world, like a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP); or that you have any empathic reception of picking up impressions from subtle energetic realms of emotions, thoughts, and feelings.
This does not mean you are insensitive. I’d like to share a passage from my book The Space in Between: An Empath’s Field Guide to give some perspective of what is before each and every person alive in this moment:
“While not everyone who is highly sensitive to their environment is empathic or an HSP, everyone has the potential to be empathetic and host empathy for someone/something outside themselves based on similar personal experience.
Empathy naturally unites and fosters inclusion; it doesn’t encourage manipulation or competitiveness. Empathy doesn’t expire and it isn't time-sensitive.
Though empathy is fueled with our own life experiences, it takes emotional awareness to see ourselves in others. This offers connection and can create communities. There is some predictability to the season of life: from being a child, through the years of education, transitioning into adulthood, with an emphasis on employment and family, possibly children, and then again, which moves us all closer to the end of life. At each stage, we experience life and form personal understanding through our relationships. This lends us the ability to empathize with others, even retroactively.
The world and national news are constant “trigger” zones since every day and nearly every second, someone is in danger somewhere. Wars, pandemics, pollution, poverty, gree, economic crisis, political pandering, social injustice, sexual abuse, mass extrinctions, and on and on—a seemingly never-ending newscast of the horrors afflicting humanity. How can a sensitive person hear, feel, and experience all of this while continuing to live and breathe with the hope for a better world? Quite simply, through compassion.
Compassion is the deep endless well of care that we have in our hearts and until we develop direct access to the awareness and presence, our life experiences allow sympathy and empathy to be the couriers of our heartfelt sentiments. The more we can see ourselves in others’ suffering, the more empathy and sympathy will grow until we can access compassion completely with the need for personal reference. We will no longer need to limit how we care about others based on our own life experiences.
Imagine that.
Self-care suggestions:
Reflect on your life experiences and create a list of situations you can empathize with. . . this is a way to showcase your emotional depth.
Look at where you may feel a victim to a situation, and explore how to shift that narrative. Consider working with a counselor, if you feel this is leaving you stunted in your own personal development.
How is your relationship to your body? What does your inner voice sound like? Critical, caring, inspiring ect.
How is your sensory awareness? Spend time building up your senses by practicing mindfulness: notice fragrance, sights, colors, the subtleties of distant noises, etc.
Write about any of the areas in your life that you are self-conscious about, and examine how you came to be self-conscious. We can suppress ourselves and our creativity, which can dampen our sensitivity.
If you know someone is an HSP or empathic, perhaps that is why you took this quiz. And that’s great–send them the link to this quiz. Friendships and relationships that are infused with respect and awareness tend to create healthier boundaries.
