***What An Empath Can Lose

If you’ve been reading my articles here, you know that being an empath can be bliss. As a skilled empath, you can gain wisdom and do service in a way that non-empaths simply can’t.

As a very skilled empath, you can learn techniques for what I call “empath-merge” and have an extremely vivid experience of being another person. Or a flower!

But skilled empaths are made, not born. Instead some of us — I estimate 1 in 20 Americans — are born as unskilled empaths, “merely” talented.

Unskilled empaths have a lot to lose:

•Our sense of self, as in “Who am I?”
•Our confidence, when we’re with others or alone
*Our power in work relationships
•Our power in personal relationship
•In some cases, we may even appear to lose control over our behavior .

If an unskilled empath, loss of self is a far more likely danger for you than having to deal with a narcissist or psychic vampire.

It could even happen that a perfectly normal person appears to be a narcissist or psychic vampire. Maybe you feel as if you’re under psychic attack from a perfectly innocent person.

Why? As an unskilled empath, you may be more vulnerable than you know.

MAGNETS IN HIS EYES

The pull couldn’t be stronger if that other person had magnets in his eyes. In a recent session, “Helen” told me about problems she had during high school. (You know, back in the day before she knew about being an empath at all, let alone a skilled empath.)

Helen was terrified of an administrator, “Stan.” He expected her to do poorly in classes. He expected her to get in trouble.

And guess what? She did.

It was as though, in his presence, Helen would lose control. Not only would she act out. Helen would become what he expected her to be.

She suffered a kind of unintentional and extreme empath-merge, as if Stan had magnets in his eyes and could pull her whenever he looked in her direction.

Has that ever happened to you, back when you were an unskilled empath?

Terms like “self-fulfilling prophecy” are far too mild for the kind of torture and powerlessness Helen went through as an unskilled empath. It’s a terrifying experience when you feel lost to yourself and, instead, act like somebody else’s puppet.

Yet, to be fair to Stan, he wasn’t an energy vampire or narcissist. He wasn’t conducting a psychic attack. The man was just doing his job.

Two factors can be involved here: Need for skill as an empath and the need to cut a cord of attachment. Let’s consider both.

EMPATH EMPOWERMENT

Everyone, empath and non-empath alike, is affected by expectations. But self-fulfilling prophecies take on a different depth of meaning if you happen to be an unskilled empath.
Here are some of the ways your behavior might change.

•As an unskilled empath, you might take on Stan’s judgments of you and start acting them out, e.g., “Helen is a loudmouth.”
•As an unskilled empath, you might feel Stan’s unspoken criticism and speak in a defensive manner, e.g., “Helen is such an angry girl.”
*As an unskilled empath, you might find it impossible to “feel normal” in Stan’s presence, e.g., “Helen has got to be hiding something.”
•As an unskilled empath, you might walk differently, talk differently, laugh differently. In college, I knew one unskilled empath –linguistically talented — who would unintentionally mimic the speech patterns of all her friends. With a New Yorker, she’d sound like she came from Brooklyn. With a gal from Boston, she’d say “Pahk your cah.” Jennifer had no idea she was shifting into different speech patterns, no more than she knew that she was an unskilled empath.
•During an argument, as an unskilled empath, you might be unable to speak up on your own behalf. You might forget your point of view altogether and start defending Stan, even if you really disliked him. So his assessment of the hapless, unskilled empath might be, “It’s no use talking to Helen. She doesn’t know what she wants.”

In short, as an unskilled empath, you might feel lost, weak, confused, hopeless, helpless and generally doomed to a lifetime of being taken advantage of by others.

You might feel that your world is over-populated by psychic vampires, narcissists, and loads of people who cause psychic attack. But how much power would that give you, other than the power to be even more frightened.

Instead, you really do have the power to change things… as a skilled empath. You aren’t making up all those problems.You really can solve them. It’s a matter of consciousness. It’s actually one or more magnificent gifts as an empath, run amok, and further distorted by having one or more toxic cords of attachment.

WHY NOT JUST CENTER YOURSELF?

That’s a common strategy, isn’t it? But if you think that “centering yourself” equals becoming a skilled empath, I have sad news for you.

Centering yourself brings perhaps 3% of the benefits of being a skilled empath.

Why? You don’t have just one center. As an unskilled empath, you will probably attempt to center yourself by focusing on the part of yourself that is most out of balance — your body if you have a physical gift as an empath, your emotions if your biggest gift as an empath is emotional, etc.

By contrast, a skilled empath uses the Coming Home technique from “Empowered by Empathy” (or its equivalent) to learn a whole lot of different ways to center yourself:

•As a skilled empath, you can center into your social self at the level of the environment.
•As a skilled empath, you can center into your physical body.
•As a skilled empath, you can center into your mind.
•As a skilled empath, you can center into your intellect.
•As a skilled empath, you can center into your emotions.
•As a skilled empath, you can center into your soul.
•As a skilled empath, you can center into your spirit.

Until you can experience yourself clearly at ALL the different layers of yourself, it is very unlikely that “centering” will help you much at all. More likely, you will create an artificial facade related to your habitual way of centering yourself.

When an empath tries hard to center or create boundaries, that doesn’t keep out other people’s STUFF. It lands right into your aura .

To comfort yourself, you might blame psychic vampires, narcissists, or perpetrators of psychic attack. Then you might try harder than ever to center yourself, like being your own defensive football player.

For an unskilled empath, centering yourself brings only two advantages:

1. Although still unskilled as an empath, you feel that now you are doing something.
2. You don’t seem as insecure as before. Unfortunately, you appear artificial/fake/detached/as if you’re manipulating your behavior .

And it’s only fair that a hard-working unskilled empath might give that impression, because it’s exactly what you are doing.

THE IDEAL STRATEGY

If centering yourself doesn’t work, what can you do as an unskilled empath? Get skills! See the bio section after this article for resource that can turn you into a skilled empath with a minimum of time and trouble.

Simultaneously, you can help yourself by cutting cords of attachment to people in your present and past like Stan.

Is it an accident that I have developed both the system of Empath Empowerment(R) and 12 Steps to Cut Cords of Attachment(R)? Maybe not.

Some cords of attachment can make it very difficult to become a skilled empath. Helen and I saw this in her session. Her cord to Stan kept Helen stuck in the past, lost and terrified. The lack of control over her own personality kept recycling in her subconscious mind 24/7.

Without cutting the cord, this would have continued until the last minutes of her life, even if Stan had been dead for decades.

Each cord of attachment has its own characteristic patterns. You may know, I call them “cord items” and describe them as part of the healing process when you have a session where I facilitate cutting a cord of attachment.

If you choose to learn to cut cords of attachment on your own, that the method you’re using must include access quality information.

Unless you can validate specifically which energies the cords of attachment are causing to be recycled within your subconscious mind 24/7, a quality job is not being done. The healing will be incomplete. You may even become involved the absolutely preposterous routine of “I cut my cords every day.”

Why preposterous? When cords of attachment are cut properly, the healing is permanent.

Having to cut any cord of attachment more than once is, to be blunt, a confession that the healer is completely lacking in skill at this particular type of work.

Fortunately, skill at cutting cords of attachment isn’t some rare and difficult thing. See the bio section after this article for how I can teach you to develop professional-level skill at cutting cords of attachment.

And what if there really has been a person in your life, present or past, who qualifies as a narcissist, psychic vampire or perpetrator of psychic attack. All the more reason to cut your cord of attachment to anyone you suspect of hurting you energetically!

CUTTING CORDS OF ATTACHMENT

With cords of attachment, self-fulfilling prophecies are repeated and broadcast into the subconscious mind 24-7.

By cutting cords to someone like Stan, you will stop re-living the dysfunction of your past.

Empaths and non-empaths, alike, benefit from this energetic freedom.

And the combination of releasing cords with developing skill as an empath will leave you with what? Yourself! Little old me! Me, myself, and I.

That isn’t asking too much but asking exactly enough.