Unaware Empathic Person with HSP Traits
If you landed here after taking the Empath Quiz, Your answers align with a person who is both a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) and is unaware of his/her empathic abilities.
This is not surprising. . .but it does create the need for a lot of self-monitoring and self-care. HSPs’ support is typically found in psychology and counseling, while an empath requires more specific mentoring and awareness to work with their clairsentient ability. But self-care and self-awareness are vital tools for both an empath and HSP.
Identifying the source of your sensitivity
Ask yourself if the sensitivities are more aligned to environmental elements that impact your five sensory networks—sight, hearing, touch, smell, and feeling? This would indicate a sensory processing sensitivity of an HSP.
Do you notice and analyze fine details in the room and in people’s behavior to build context and plausible outcomes and scenarios, which are often proven correct? This is also an HSP trait of sensitivity to subtleties. For your self-care, do you need to remove yourself from loud noises, bright lights, and busy/crowded places with too much stimuli to track? Do you tend to be hypersensitive to criticism and lean towards perfectionism? All of these traits align with an HSP.
The HSP label, which was presented in 1997 by Dr. Elaine Aron and accounts for 15-20 percent of the population, gives a legitimate framework for environmental and social sensitivities, but it doesn’t account for empathic sensitivities.
“Empathic” means that you receive sensory information from the subtle energetic planes of emotions, thoughts, and physical impressions. As a child were you considered sensitive, intuitive and empathetic? Could you feel the tension in the room of what was not being said?
The evolutionary arc of an empath:
The HSP portion of your sensitivities may be the easiest to relate to—particularly since it has been well documented and is more or less part of mainstream consciousness. The empathic part of your sensory perception may take you by surprise, particularly if you have conformed most of your life and chalked up any abstract impressions to your imagination.
We evolve from empathic to empath. Right now, your empathic nature might be limited by beliefs or perceived circumstances. But I sense that you know at your center that there’s a depth to your own presence, which is intuitive and sensory by nature. It might even scare and intimidate you. But remember, we tend to fear what we do not understand. This is your opportunity to understand yourself at a deeper level–an authentic level.
Unaware empathic persons often question if they are imagining random impressions and phantom pains. Their relationship to places and people can be perplexing and confusing. They can internalize this as self-doubt and not feeling comfortable in their own bodies.
Unaware empathic tendencies:
Accept everything you feel as your own. Burden with feeling responsible for emotions you don’t necessarily understand.
Overwhelmed and overstimulated by crowded spaces. Particularly stagnant spaces. Strong noxious smells can negatively impact you.
Retreats as protection; creates barriers rather than boundaries. Prefers to be invisible, will leave places quickly.
Strong mental defense. Easier to judge something than to feel it.
Self-care tips for the unaware empath:
First, be kind to yourself. You have more than likely have had years building up defenses to either not feel, or to give yourself a great buffer to not have to interact with the space around you. You may feel like this took a lot of energy to manage, but you’ve actually been quite passive with your environment.
Notice when you want to withdraw into yourself. This may be a reflex by now, but build up strategies to break this pattern. This is needed to build trust in yourself, your relationships, and your ability to navigate the space around you with confidence.
Explore working with a therapist to examine any unprocessed trauma that is occupying your perception of safety. Knowing what your triggers help you identify more quickly when you are picking up something that isn’t yours.
Find an intuitive mentor that can help you gain awareness of your empathic reception. This ability is also called clairsentience.
Demystify this communication channel and actively engage your life by embodying your authentic sensory nature and experience what real connection feels like.
After taking the Empath Quiz, Look for my follow-up emails to learn more about how to use your sensitivities as a guide. I tend to say that once you identify as an empath, you are on a spiritual path. It requires that you know yourself and accept your life’s experiences. This takes patience, but it garners wisdom and compassion.
