An Empath's Guide to Embodiment Pt. I
Yes, there is such a thing as sensory contagion
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.
What does it mean to be an empath, and why is it riddled with these basic life challenges?
Derived from the Greek “em” (in) and “pathos” (feeling), the term empathic means you’re able to “feel into” others’ feelings. But for empaths, this sensitivity is magnified to the nth degree. An empath is more tuned in, more empathic, and more sensitive to others than the average empathic person.
Being this tuned in, empathic, and sensitive is an asset, but it comes at a cost. Empaths can struggle with basic life skills, like knowing their own wants and needs, regulating their emotions, and setting simple boundaries. They are also vulnerable to emotional contagion, to “catching” others’ emotions in much the same way that you’d catch a cold or flu. As a result, they tend to have a higher degree of anxiety, depression, chronic stress, and professional burnout.
Empaths are vulnerable to emotional contagion, to “catching” others’ emotions in much the same way that you’d catch a cold or flu. As a result, they tend to have a higher degree of anxiety, depression, chronic stress, and professional burnout.
But it doesn’t stop there: Empaths get more physically ill and suffer more from mystery inflammatory illnesses, unexpected pain, and exhaustion than their less empathic counterparts. And those engaged in healing work—yoga teachers, yoga therapists, bodyworkers, psychotherapists, or healers—do so to an even greater degree.
Why might this be, and what can we do about it?
As a clinical psychologist and yoga therapist, I’ve supervised psychotherapists, yoga teachers, and yoga practitioners for more than two decades—and a great many of them are empaths. I’ve helped them identify who they are and develop the skills to lead more balanced and healthy lives.
And as a “recovering empath” myself, I’ve had to walk a parallel path. From this personal and professional immersion, I’ve found that it helps just to name the issue, to hammer a frame of understanding around it. But the emerging field of embodiment offers something more: a set of life-changing tools for empaths.
In the first of this multi-part series, I’m going to address the basics of being an empath and the foundational tool that acts as a wellspring for any other tool you might use. In a later column, I’ll cover personal and social relationships, and how to cultivate healthier connections. And, of course, we’ll look at all this through the lens of embodiment.
So let’s dive in. First, are you an empath? Here are five signs that you might be—and that your wonderful qualities, when left unchecked, can compromise your health.
The Empath Checklist
1. You’re vulnerable to emotional contagion and empathic distress. You absorb the emotions of others, from your boss and colleagues at work to your family and friends, and even the check-out person at the grocery store.
2. You’re prone to nervous system overdrive. It doesn’t take much—sometimes just a draining conversation or a party that’s loud and over-populated—to propel your nervous system into alarm mode.
3. You’re often not present in your body. For empaths, all that “feeling into” the experiences of others means that you dissociate: as a matter of course, you leave your body or “shuttle” out of your own direct experience into that of others.
4. You struggle with boundaries. It’s tough to know where you leave off and others begin, which experiences are yours and which come from others, and when to open your channels for connection or to close them.
5. You have trouble regulating intimacy. Your relationships are filled with intense bonding and equally intense separations. You can merge with others at the drop of a hat, but get so entangled that an “emotional exorcism” of someone you care about is often the only way to get your space.
All this can lead to multi-level overload. It explains why one of the most often-Googled searches for empaths states, “Being an empath is killing me.” And yet, there’s hope.
Emotional Contagion Begins with Sensations
Empaths, as we’ve said, are vulnerable to emotional contagion, to catching other people’s emotions—think anger, sadness, fear, or disgust—as readily as one might catch a cold or flu.
This can happen in such a primal, reflexive way that empaths don’t see it coming and therefore, don’t often think to question where an emotional reaction comes from.
There was a time when my personal self-care and my professional work with empaths focused on mitigating emotional contagion directly. But over the last decade, several things happened that expanded my approach.
The first: Training teachers and yoga therapists highlighted several patterns endemic to empaths. My assisting modules, for example, focused on therapeutic methods of assisting that centered practitioners’ embodied experience and de-centered hands-on assists. Yet each year, as soon as a few highly empathic aspiring teachers laid hands on a practitioner, they would be overwhelmed by a tidal wave of sensory, emotional, and social input. For these empaths, refraining from hands-on assists reduced the contagion. This made me reflect deeply on the alchemical reactions induced by fleeting physical contact. What was happening at the point of contact, this juncture between self and other? What made it so diffuse?
Then I led a monthly yoga therapy supervision group in which we gave equal weight to practitioners embodied sense of their clients. Several yoga therapists in training reported in case presentations that after session, they experienced a variety of novel health issues and even injuries. On further inquiry, these reactions happened to mirror issues that their clients were experiencing.
The generosity of my training community led me to the following insights: First, empaths experience a kind of sensory contagion. Second, this contagion wasn’t induced by physical contact, but occurred somewhere “in the ether” of a session. Third, sensory contagion precedes emotional contagion. And finally, sensory contagion is more primal and non-verbal, and harder to detect than its emotional counterpart.
Put another way, empaths incubate other people’s sensory experiences in our own bodies.
How Contagion Lead to Physical + Emotional Illness
So how do we draw the connection between permeable boundaries, sensory and emotional contagion, and emotional and physical illnesses?
Imagine for a moment that a loved one is in physical, emotional, or spiritual distress. A brief interlude of distress (for them or for you) can be helpful, particularly when followed by a return to balance. But prolonged distress is different. As I mentioned in my first book, countless studies show that strong emotions, mental rumination, and negative self-reference cause a cascade of neurobiological events, including high levels of inflammation; this is common in anxiety, depression, chronic pain, addictions, and even gastrointestinal disorders. (Consider the fact that anxiety makes the stomach more acidic and alters the gut microbiome, and that anxiety, depression, and chronic pain relate to gastrointestinal distress.)
We could even take this a step further, and link excessively-permeable interpersonal boundaries with excessively permeable intestinal boundaries. Both cause chronic inflammation in the brain and bloodstream.
Now imagine that you take on the stress and mind-body patterns of a significant other; you wear their patterns inside your own body. This requires you to note, get rid of, or otherwise metabolize their distress. Either way, the boundary violation itself activates your neural-immune system.
Sensory and emotional contagion are a form of invasion, a taking in of something that is not you. Your immune system detects the presence of foreign pathogens, and may even mount an additional inflammatory response. This is how something mild in someone else’s experience is amplified in your own direct experience.
Because you’re focused on the other person’s well-being and less likely to tend to your own direct experience, the inflammation you’re incubating can become prolonged, even chronic.
Connecting with the sensations of contagion in our own bodies can be difficult for empaths, and for good reason. First, there exists a strong connection between trauma and empathy. People who survive physical, emotional, and sexual trauma do so in part by becoming uber-empathic: They imagine and anticipate what “powerful others” are thinking and feeling and anticipate others’ needs and imminent actions, which helps ensure their own safety. This takes an inordinate amount of almost telepathic focus on the sensations, emotions, and inclinations of that powerful other. (A similar dynamic also occurs to child empaths in high-conflict families.)
As a result, when empaths try to check in with their own sensations, emotions, and experiences, they often dial into the preferences of the powerful other instead. Once this pattern gels, it permeates other relationships later in life. The powerful other is later replaced by a partner, parent, or friend—even a non-malevolent one.
And then there’s the fact that over time, people come to rely on and even expect empaths’ intuitive, empathic abilities, Being an empath becomes not just a pattern, but a form of social and emotional currency. In a lock-and-key kind of way, empaths are often drawn to people who need them, and to the experience of feeling needed, which keeps the pattern going.
The good news: We can balance our empath tendencies. And embodiment holds the key to doing so.
The Key to Sensory and Emotional Immunity
In a previous column I reviewed interoception, the ability to receive, accurately interpret, and respond to—and also relate to and trust—signals that come from our bodies. Understanding the basic science of interoception offers powerful tools for well-being and fosters a greater sense of self-determination.
The neuroscience of interoception tells us that the brain processes sensations in three stages. The first stage involves raw sensations, such as temperature, pain, inflammation, gastrointestinal input, or breathing. The second stage reprocesses these into feelings or valences, like pleasant or unpleasant. The third stage adds flavors from other brain regions and capacities, including proprioception and social awareness. Here in the final stage, the brain alchemizes sensations as personal emotions like anger, sadness, or fear and as social emotions like distrust, envy, or atonement.
In other words, sensations are the origins of feelings, emotions, and social emotions—and therefore, of sensory and emotional contagion.
This means that we can “reverse engineer” emotional contagion back to its raw sensory stage, and return to the sensations that underlie it.
Empaths are so attuned to others’ bodies that we often vacate our own. At first, it’s hard to battle the gravitational pull of this pattern. But over time and with practice, we can get to know our own internal landscape.
Hard though it may be, returning to the terrain of our own sensations, and doing so over and over again, is where our empowerment lies. As it grows more robust, sensory presence gives us agency, a sense often missing in empaths.
Revitalizing One’s Own Sensory Landscape
Let’s bring this right into an exercise called “Sensory Differentiation.” The prelude to a check-in can seem insignificant when compared to the “main event.” But it carries extra weight for empaths because it fosters rootedness.
Find a comfortable space to stand, sit, or lie down. Whenever possible, use support. If you choose to stand, having a wall behind you can help you feel your foundation. If you sit, elevation under your sitting bones can do the same. If you prefer to lie down, a bolster under your knees can help your spine settle into the ground beneath you.
Begin to breathe slowly, in and out, through your nose.
As you breathe, consider any or all of the following nodes of inquiry:
Am I in my body in this moment—and to what degree?
On a continuum from flat and unresponsive to full-on overdrive, what’s the arousal level in my nervous system? (If this is difficult, note the speed of your thoughts and the pace and depth of your breath. In nervous system hyperdrive, thoughts often move rapidly or are frozen in time—and breath is often shallow and rapid.)
Is there any narrative happening right now, a story looping over and over in my mind?
What’s my emotional state; is there anger, sadness, or fear?
If so, do these emotions feel like part of my experience, or might they have come from someone I’ve recently interacted with?
Do I feel an immune response such as heightened inflammation, a flood of histamines, or the feeling of a cold or virus coming on?
Am I experiencing any discomfort or pain in muscles or connective tissue?
Do I feel rooted in my feet?
Can I tune into sensations that occur in my body such as warmth or hunger?
What do I notice in my abdomen or digestive system?
Do I feel a sense of agency in my body?
Am I able to sense my intentions and act or move in a way that matches my intentions?
Can I sense where I end and others begin?
Add anything else you notice that feels important to the laboratory of your own direct experience.
When you emerge from this sensory attention practice, what, if anything, feels different? (Sometimes you won’t feel better or even calmer, but instead more aware of what’s been incubating inside you, which is vitally important for empathic progress.)
The Reward
Gradually, you’ll come to realize that there is a marked difference in the tone, quality, color, flavor, texture, and location of your own native sensations and the way they manifest in your body that differentiates them from the direct experience of others. You become aware earlier, and with more nuance, of sensations that are not your own. And you can choose, over time, not to incubate them.
This is sensory immunity, which is the foundation for emotional immunity and the wellspring of boundaries of all kinds.
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