Greetings Deep Digging Friends!
In previous posts, I wrote about how empaths are highly sensitive, absorb other people's emotions and can easily become overwhelmed and drained. Each of these traits tie into the trait I am writing about today: Empaths can easily be overwhelmed by a partner’s emotions and energies in intimate relationships.
If you’re an empath or highly sensitive person, you already know this all too well. And if your partner is also an empath you both know how difficult it can be to navigate this energy minefield. One that often materializes out of nowhere after your own past and experiences automatically throws your own interpretation on the energy coming from your partner.
Full transparency here, I have been reading and studying about Bowen's Family Systems and have found it so impactful for both my intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships that I have begun to automatically incorporate Bowen's concepts into all of my reflections and efforts for improvement in my interactions with others.
There’s a lot there and the concepts and terminology take some time to unpack and wrap one’s brain around but the nutshell that I can offer is this: People typically react out of emotions that are both ingrained in us as humans and developed further in our family of origin. I’ve written before about the formative years of childhood and how deeply those first 16 - 20 years affect the entire rest of our lives. This relates to the idea that we develop these automatic emotional reactions that highjack the logical and thinking part of our brains.
We could go down a rabbit hole with that entire subject, but I want to get back to how empaths get overwhelmed in intimate relationships.
In empathic relationships, the challenge of separating these emotional reactions from logic is at its highest level of difficulty. When a person has not only their own emotional reactions to address but also is absorbing emotional signals from the others and interpreting them, remaining emotionally regulated can seem like an impossibility. Both parties often become overwhelmed and either erupt and lash out or emotionally distance from the other.
Neither of these outcomes brings healthy togetherness. (Yes, there is an unhealthy togetherness and it’s really easy to see in other’s but difficult to see in ourselves).
There are a couple of really important steps I feel like empaths need to embrace to learn to interact in relationships in the healthiest way:
1. Acknowledge that emotional reactions are happening. This is one of those areas where the knowledge that this is happening leads to an increased ability to recognize when it is happening.
2. Accept that the stimulus receivers of every empath everywhere are often unreliable and deceptive. This is a very hard thing for most empaths to accept. There is a tendency for people to see their empathy as a super quality without acknowledging that there is a very impactful shadow side. Emotions are feeling and every feeling has to be held up to the light of reality and logic.
It will be tempting for empaths to blow off the whole idea that feelings need to be evaluated against what is actually known (aka the realities of the situation) and instead to elevate the concept of intuition onto a pedestal. But though intuition is very real and is often an indicator to evaluate the situation more closely, it can also be influenced and shaped by experience and attitudes and can be wrong. In fact, is often wrong. Yes, it should be listened to. But not indiscriminately. There has to be an evaluation process. And only acknowledging that this process is necessary will give a person the head start to be able to deal with the feelings and emotions that come out of nowhere and hold them up to the light of what actually is happening.
I feel like I could write on and on about this but I don’t want to beat anyone over the head. I just want to hopefully cause some reflection for those who may come across this post and who like me (and my partner) are empathetic and become easily overwhelmed in our relationship as we try to deal with our own as well as the other’s energies as exhibited in words, tones, body language, eye movement, sighs, etc.
Keep in mind that sometimes, the evaluation process of emotions requires a pause of interaction and some alone reflective time. Please remember not only that this is healthy and perfectly reasonable to ask of your partner but also that it’s important for you to be able to give the other person this space when you are wanting to forge ahead with the conversation. One of the important keys to this is clear communication of this need and to as much as is possible, be specific about when you both will reconvene on the subject (Sadly, I have much work to do with being specific on the reconvening part). Also keep in mind with all of this that there may be a tendency toward complete emotional cutoff during the reflective pause and that is not healthy. But digging into that is a subject for another blog. 😉
In closing, thank you for taking the time to read and I hope that all will practice both acknowledging that we tend to react emotionally, separating those emotions out from what we actually know has happened and seeing all through the lens of what we know to be true about the character of the other.
Peace to you my Fellow Reflective Souls!
