An Empath's Guide to Embodiment, Pt. 2

The dynamics of emotional contagion and how to address it

Before we begin, a brief note about column length. Most of you know that brevity is not my strong suit. 😊 I’m committing to an intention to make these columns shorter—and, I hope, more readable to you. (And as a bonus, less gargantuan for me to write.) Here goes!

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A few weeks ago, I began a series of columns on empaths. (You can read An Empath’s Guide to Embodiment, Part I, here.)

Here’s the first paragraph of that column:

Do you often wonder which emotions are yours, and which belong to someone else? When people you care about are hurting, do you feel their pain so deeply that it’s hard to let go, even when they’re out of crisis mode? In relationships, do you pour out so much of your own natural resources that you suffer from a chronic energy shortage? And with those you’re close to, is it hard to figure out what your own needs are—or even what you want for dinner? If the answer is yes, it’s highly likely that you’re an empath.

There’s something incomplete about the term empath. To be sure, it speaks to empaths’ inner experience: a high degree of empathy, emotional contagion, and a diffuseness of boundaries. But the term overlooks interpersonal relationships, a key arena of struggle for empaths. That’s where I’d like to focus today.

Is It The Chicken Or The Egg?

Are people “born” empaths? More frequently, in my opinion, the nature of attachments we have with caregivers and the family roles we play “groom” empaths to be this way. Perhaps we tune in deeply to the mercurial needs of a less-than-stable parent. Or become a family’s emotional barometer. Or use our empathic powers to monitor siblings’ emotional needs.

In the comments section of the column on projective identification, Kathy H. commented,

“It's hard to know if that person put it [projective identification] there (a violation?), I picked up myself (perhaps a subconscious choice) or it just kinda got replicated from two bodies/energies being in contact (humanity happening).”

I really resonate with her point. It illustrates the lock and key quality in the way we learn, early on, to relate to others and then replicate these relational patterns throughout our lives. (And as the question suggests, all forms of emotional contagion can happen in intimate relationships as a matter of loving someone fiercely, as you would with a child or parent or partner. We do bear part of the responsibility—a fact I’ve come to appreciate for the way it returns much-needed agency to empaths.

A Vulnerability to Emotional Contagion

Emotional contagion refers to the tendency to catch others’ emotions—sadness, anger, or fear— in much the same way as we’d catch a cold or flu, and incubate them in our own direct experience.  

Over time, this leaves empaths vulnerable to anxiety, depression, and chronic stress, and to auto-immune illnesses such as allergies, lupus, or fibromyalgia. This means that part of empaths’ internal experience may not be native to them but may belong to someone else. No matter its origin, though, you still have to metabolize the experience inside you.  

Emotional contagion is a boundary violation toward empaths. But in the “garden variety” kind of emotional contagion, empaths commit the boundary violation too. Yes, we’re being infected by someone’s emotions; but we’re the ones who take them on.  

For me, this dynamic evokes the television commercials for a U.S.-based fitness center, in which a muscle-bound weightlifter keeps repeating, “I pick things up and put them down.”

This right here is the Life Assignment for empaths: Pick things up, if you must. But learn to hold them lightly. And learn to put them down again, as fast as possible.

Empath Rx: Develop Emotional Immunity.

Interoception, or mindful awareness of body sensations, can help you notice what you’ve picked up when you spend time in someone else’s company. Try Sensory Differentiation, the exercise included at the end of the Empath Part I column. It applies just as much to emotional differentiation. The key: The more time you spend in your own native landscape, the more easily you’ll be able to spot the difference when you’ve picked something up from someone else.

Research shows that we’re more vulnerable to emotional contagion when we’re highly empathic, or the other person is in a relative position of authority (say, a boss), some other power dynamic is in play, or the person has narcissistic qualities.  

Interoception helps you notice how you feel (and what you’ve picked up) after being in their presence. Over time, you’ll start to see patterns: A friend who seems kind, but with whom you always feel drained afterward. A family member who snuffs out your good mood in seconds, leaving you seething with frustration that you thought was your own. A coworker who often inspires you to feel inadequate. You’ll soon learn which people are more hazardous to your health, and you can limit your interactions with them.

Let me say here that the tools mentioned in this column apply to all aspects of the empath spectrum of relationships; you can use them again and again.

A Nervous System Primed for Hypervigilance

The nervous systems (including the enteric nervous system or belly brain) is a primary medium through which we negotiate boundaries. An empath’s nervous system resembles an emotional “satellite radio” with surround sound and hundreds of channels. It surfs the dial constantly, flipping stations to listen to others’ emotional broadcasts: a boss’s work complaints, a partner’s anxiety over a potential job loss, a best friend’s sadness about a breakup.

These information-processing demands can catapult an empath’s nervous system into overdrive. Sometimes, for example, you can interpret a loved one’s charred dinner—a bummer, but no big deal to them—as a five-alarm fire. And it can result in others feeling that you are the intrusive. one

Over time, you can become more engrossed in someone else’s emotional life than you are in your own, a habit that can be hard to break.

Empath Rx: Balance Your Nervous System.

Learn to notice the emblems of nervous system overdrive: that inner sense of something always “humming” beneath the surface. Elevated heart rate. Increased emotional reactivity. A strong mental narrative. Fast and shallow breathing.

Practice simple breathwork techniques like Box Breathing (see instructions below) or deep nasal breathing (and if accessible, nasal breathing with a longer exhale) to slow your heart and bring your nervous system back to baseline. Regular breaks from social media also help.

Practices drawn from dynamic rest postures, such as connective tissue self-bodywork and Restorative Yoga, will help quiet your mind and balance your nervous system.

Issues with Intimacy Regulation

For empaths, intimacy doesn’t typically build slowly or remail stable, as it might for others. You can meet someone in the line to pick up drinks at Starbucks and within two minutes, feel as though you’ve met your soulmate. And as quickly, someone you’re enamored of can give you a huge case of what an old friend calls SRS, or Sudden Repulsion Syndrome. Every little thing they do—the way they chew their food, lean in for a hug, or that laugh—disgusts you, even if you once found it endearing. You can’t get away far enough or fast enough. And sadly, you don’t often hide your disgust from them. This happens, in my opinion, because empaths transgress boundaries in the “infatuation” phase, and need vast amounts of space to balance them.

Intimacy for empaths comes down to how you negotiate space and reciprocity. You can feel like Dr. Doolittle’s Push-Me-Pull-You: Sometimes you crave no space and intense emotional, physical, and spiritual bonding. At other times, you need so much space that having your own personal galaxy might feel too crowded.

When you want to merge, you can threaten people who have a higher need for breathing room. And when you need wide-open space to connect with yourself again, you can come off as remote and withholding.   

An Empath’s Response to Fantasy

Highly empathic people can also experience emotional contagion and emotional distress in settings that aren’t real and from people that aren’t real. Take social media, for example. The people you follow can be contagious to you, even in a “virtual” setting. I’ve often entered my Instagram feed, only to find someone crying in distress, or outraged, or under attack for a social misstep. These encounters can become “sticky” for me; they leave a mucoid residue. My mentor and friend, Sebene Selassie (check out her wonderful Substack Cosmic Connection) recommends regular social media breaks for everyone. For empaths, these breaks can be lifelines to re-membering the connection you have with yourself.

And then there’s characters in a novel or a TV series. Over the last two years, I’ve witnessed in myself a tendency to become over-immersed in a novel or a series I’m binge-watching on television. For example, I forced myself to watch The Handmaid’s Tale through season 4, but ultimately had to stop. It disturbed my nervous system the entire time; often, I’d have trouble sleeping. And I’d go through my meditation practice the next day or even the day after that with June’s direct experience  in full, vivid color inside my own internal landscape. And recently, I couldn’t stop watching Queen Charlotte, after which I spent a week worried about what seemed to me a lack of enduring reciprocity in her primary love relationship.

Empath Rx: Get better at “space awareness”

Empaths can find it hard to ask for space directly; they fear that they’ll hurt someone, or be punished or abandoned in return.

Here, it’s helpful to learn the early warning signs that you need space, and to verbalize and act on them before they grow into an emergency (and leave you primed to excommunicate someone). In myself, the early warning signs include mild irritability, a “light” feeling of invasion, or difficulty identifying my needs. When I notice these signs, the need for space is often moderate, not severe.

I also find it beneficial to have people in my life with whom I can voice my inner turmoil in primal (i.e. not socially acceptable) ways—and maybe even joke about it. With one friend, the phrase “Killing needs to happen” is a signal that primal rage is present. And with two other friends, we regularly stop a debriefing session with the quick inquiry, “Is this infecting you?” We’ve made a solid pact to answer honestly. And I’ve noticed that giving voice to our inner states this way feels like a variation on self-compassion practice.  

If you’re an empath, it can be helpful to “plan” space into your life ahead of time. You can give yourself “time outs” after teaching a class or seeing clients, down time after social engagements, “recovery periods” at the end of a workday, or extended intervals of being alone as a matter of course. If your job requires any degree of public exposure, or you work as a healer, you may need stretches of alone time to reestablish your equilibrium.

Change Your Emotional + Social Currency

Empaths have an extraordinary capacity for union. They’re great in a crisis; people in deep need call forth their most advanced abilities. They make gifted, intuitive healers. They see others deeply, well beyond the surface. They have a magnetic quality that draws others to them. And they solve others’ problems with ease and help them restore equilibrium. (Though often, it must be said, at the expense of their own energy stores.)

Yet there’s a shadow side to these seemingly wonderful qualities. Often, empaths do their “empath thing” out of a fear of what would happen if they didn’t.

In other words, empathy is a form of emotional and social currency. Over-giving, intense intuition, and the drive to remove others’ discomfort can become something you do to “earn” (read: obligate) another person’s love.

This makes it difficult to feel appreciated for who we are—or even to know who we are.

Empath Rx: Find yourself.

This goes back to inhabiting your own innerness through interoception, movement, embodiment, art, music, nature. And this both requires and strengthens boundaries.

Empath Rx: Create Healthy Boundaries.

Boundaries aren’t a matter of mental discipline, of “just say no.” They happen in and through our bodies. When you’re an empath, limits need to be integrated into your physicality.

One of my favorite places for reestablishing my outlines is connective tissue self-massage. Your own connective tissue matrix isn’t just a physical structure; it can carry dehydration or inflammation on the one hand, or hydration and integration on the other. Committing to a regular connective tissue self-bodywork practice strengthens the intelligence and solidity of the web of fascia that links every cell in your body. This can give you a much-needed experience of cohesion and inner integrity.

All this can seem like hard work. And yet, being an empath is also a gift: It acts as a continual call to embodiment.

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Box Breathing

Here, you’ll be breathing in, holding the breath, breathing out, and holding the outbreath, in equal measure. If breath retention (holding the breath) induces anxiety in your nervous system, please leave the holds out.

Assume a comfortable position: You can stand and play with wall support behind or in front of you. You can sit, with elevation under your sitting bones. You can choose to lie down, with a bolster under your knees and a blanket placed under your spine. If you’re lying down, you can also experiment with adding an eye pillow over your eyes and weight on your abdomen.

It may take a few tries to find the breath ratio that works best for you—and which often changes from one practice to the next. You can try starting with a count of 4, and then adjusting from there.

Inhale slowly and evenly for a count of four; hold your breath for a count of four. As (if) you hold, relax your ribs so your lungs feel less pressure.

Exhale slowly and evenly for a count of four. Then hold your breath for a count of four. Here, you can try lifting your ribs a little so the hold doesn’t put pressure on your abdomen.

When you inhale again, do so slowly and evenly, even if you’re tempted to suck the breath in quickly. (If you are, consider reducing the count to 3.)

Repeat for several rounds.

If this form of breathing doesn’t feel nourishing to your body, try working with a nasal inhale and exhale, using any count that feels comfortable to your diaphragm.