Holding Onto Other People’s Pain

It’s March 2022 when I’m writing this note. The original blog post was written in April 2012, and I can tell you that most super-sensitive, highly sensitive, and empathic people are hypervigilant. This is usually caused by seriously upsetting childhood experiences, and that includes trauma.

If a person heals, the highly sensitive experience goes away. They don’t feel like they’re holding onto others’ pain, and they can be with people and be at peace in themselves.

In short, do your healing! You can view the following blog post as an example of who I was and how much I’ve learned. 

This post is dedicated to everyone who is super-sensitive. You’re the type of person who feels everything going on in the room as if it’s your own. You may also be the type of person who shies away from large groups of people because it’s too intense, although you may not yet be able to verbalize why it is too intense. To you, this blog post is aimed to help you understand what you are, i.e. what your energy body is naturally doing .Hopefully by the end, you’ll have a better understanding of how to not get caught up in other people’s pain and how to better take care of yourself.

What Is Your Energy Doing?

I think some of us are naturally designed certain ways. Much like badgers have claws for digging burrows or birds have wings for flying, everyone has different types of energy. Because our overly sensory-focused world doesn’t allow itself to think much outside the 5-senses box, this may seem outlandish, but trust me, what is really crazy is to deny what you really are simply because it doesn’t fit your current point of view. That denial will lead and has probably already led to a lot of unexplainably uncomfortable situations, so I encourage you to open your minds to these ideas simply to see if those unexplainable things are actually very easily understood.

Back to talking about energy types, some of us are naturally energy movers. When we walk into a space, the energy shifts dramatically around us. These types of people you always know when they’re in the room. They can make you both very happy or uncomfortable depending on who they are, how clean their energy is, and how it matches up with your energy vibration. Other energies are extremely sensitive to other people. So, these types of people naturally know how others are feeling. Still others are extremely open and sensitive. So it’s like the doors and windows are all open and all kinds of stuff can come into your space. There are even more types of energies as there are billions of types of people, but let’s start here.

Paying Attention to Your Energy

The best way to learn about what type of energy you have and what it is doing is to pay attention. In truth, that’s kind of the best advice for most of life: Pay attention. The New-Agey way to say this is to bring “awareness” to something or to bring “consciousness” to it. Use whatever term you want, but just do it. It will really help you to find out what’s going on, and when you know what’s going on, it’s much easier to take conscious action.

Because without conscious action, you will be very reactive. You won’t know why some situations feel so awful. You won’t know if it’s something that needs to be healed in you or if it’s something that needs to be healed in the space, another person, or something else. It’s very easy to make a lot of bad decisions such as totally shutting yourself down. A lot of people do that to their hearts because they feel everyone else’s emotions all the time. In getting disconnected from their hearts, they get more and more miserable, subsequently attracting more and more upset, miserable situations to them. It’s a nasty downward spiral depending on what you do, and hopefully, you’re reading this blog post before you head down that way. If not, we can talk about tips about healing, but you’d best contact me directly so that we can do so privately.

Why You’re Holding Onto Pain

People hold onto pain for more reasons under the sun than I can think of. Many times it’s because you think you deserve it. You think you should suffer, or you erroneously think that suffering is helping you. There’s a big lie called the “No pain, No gain” philosophy, which leads people to torment and punish themselves in the hopes of achieving something. But all achievements are fleeting; only the present moment is real. And the end result is that if you are suffering for 99% of the time for a 1% of the time moment of joy and exuberance, then you’re just in a whole lot of pain. And that’s sad, and that’s not what this life is about.

Other reasons people hold onto others’ pain is because you think you’re helping them. You’re not. And if you think you are, just look at all the people who transformed because they had so much pain that they finally faced it, let it go, and became an amazing symbol or leader for people. Ishmael Beah’s story called “A Long Way Gone” talks about how much healing is needed for child soldiers. I recommend it as an example of how someone can overcome immense pain, but it’s not a fun read.

And specifically to energy, you are holding this pain in your energy body. I remember one student who when she lost a lot of weight, she was also energetically letting go of a romantic partner. It was one of her little realizations along the way about how much she was energetically holding in that relationship. And many people do this naturally as they come to similar vibrations with a close partner. But this kind of harmonization isn’t healthy, and it, ultimately, does not serve your partner.

Clearing Your Space: Every Level Needs Work

If you’re new to these ideas, then you will have pain to clear from every level. It will start at the mind level where you have to face a lot of ideas that think you’re helping or that if you heal, then you’ll lose someone or something. But playing small helps no one on this planet, and it is just another ego game that will make you suffer for your whole life. Free yourself from suffering by noticing the thoughts you have about what types of pain you should or have to endure. Then start to work your way down into the core issues. You’ll work your way down into your heart to see how it’s closed or wounded. You’ll have to learn how to let go of pain there. For instance, just because a close friend is going through difficult chemotherapy doesn’t mean that you need to emotionally carry that. Your tears for her aren’t helping. They may have become a spreading of the dis-ease if you are caught up in your friend’s victim story. This doesn’t mean we become cold-hearted. Instead, we are learning how to be strong-hearted: to love fully and completely without carrying the emotional burdens that others are meant to carry.

Of course, we can’t forget the body. Whether it’s too much exercise, too little food for your body, or too much weight, pain can manifest in many ways. Finding balance is vital there, and then after those levels, there’s the energy body which is constantly being influenced by the energies that are all around.

Focusing on Your Energy and Clearing It

Well, this post has needed a lot of build-up to set the frame. We’ve just got a little more. Energy is ultimately like water or air. It just flows. The more crap is it, the less easily it flows. A bog doesn’t flow very well, does it? It just sits and festers. A lot of people’s energies are like bogs. They’re wide open to all kinds of sources of fluids and discharges, and the build up of heavy, dense energy has the water becoming more and more stagnant and putrid. It’s a disgusting feeling, but if you’ve never experienced yourself being clear of these things, you won’t be able to really tell the difference. As you clear out though, you’ll notice dramatic differences and start to wonder how you could ever have absorbed so much pain.

Here are a couple of ways we absorb pain and get drained:

• Negative friends and co-workers. Being around people who are always upset and complaining is toxic. Those words are just another form of energy, and listening to it without conscious awareness is a pollutant.
• Physical punishment. Whether through sports or difficult work, we can punish ourselves badly because we think we have to do it to earn money, succeed, or even have fun (I’m thinking of some extreme sports for this last one).
• People in pain. While negative people are often in pain, this bullet refers to those who are always suffering from an ailment or difficult situation. There world is always falling down on them (or so it seems), so they draw on other people’s energies to support them.
• Negative or dense environments. Some regions have been so full of pain for so long that those echoes are still there. There are certain places in different cities that I simply don’t like going to because of how draining they are.

There are many other instances, and how you learn to consciously open and close to them appropriately will become key to your own healing.

Three Quick Tips for Clearing Your Energy

Let me offer a couple quick tips to help you clear the debris out so that things can start to flow and to heal.

1. Visualization meditation. Visualize a cord of light from the universe/heaven/God/source running through the crown of your head and out the base of your spine into the center of the Earth/Mother Gaia. Imagine any darkness inside of you running down the cord into the fires of the center of the Earth and the cleared spaces being refilled by beautiful light coming in from your crown.
2. Psychic Clearing. This is another type of visualization. I suggest getting comfortable with the first before doing this one. Do that first visualization, and then for this one, pay attention to where you feel attached to external people and situations. Imagine using a giant pair of scissors to cut those strings, and then imagine a bandage going over the space on you where the string was attached to protect it and not allow the connection to come back.
3. Leaving the Old, Embracing the New. If things or habits are too negative, you may have to leave them. But in leaving, be sure to find something new to replace it. Many relationships, habits, and situations came into our lives to fill certain needs. Those needs still need to be met, so be sure to find something healthy or healthier to replace what you’re removing from your life. If you’re quitting smoking (which is horribly polluting to your energy system), then add in more time in nature as a compensation for the habit or something like that.

Breathing a Little Easier

This work makes it easier to breathe and relax. It’s amazing sometimes how much pain we carry inside of us and how much pain we may be carrying this isn’t even ours. Many of you who like to “help” others will be challenged by this. You’ll have issues come up around abandoning others, but you’re not. You’re actually un-abandoning yourself. When you do that, truly you’re becoming a more powerful agent of change and love than you can imagine. I encourage you to trust the process, and I encourage you to bring a whole lot of awareness and love to this process. It may not be easy especially if you’ve never even thought about things in this way. In truth, you don’t have to think about things in the way that I suggest. What I am really getting at is helping you to see a different perspective so that you can start to develop your own ideas past the initial set of assumptions and social ideas that you’ve grown up. Healing the mind is often the first step as we learn to let go of pain, and as you get down to the core energy of things, you’ll start to be able to really see yourself, possibly for the first time.