Awhile back, one of my students mentioned that she’d been talking to a friend about what she was learning from class. She said that her friend had disagreed with something I was teaching her.
“What part is that?” I asked, not surprised, actually, that someone might take umbrage with something I’d said (particularly out of context), but curious, nonetheless.
“The thing where you said that other people’s pain and stuff isn’t my problem,” she replied. “My friend said, ‘Oh, I just don’t agree with that.’”
I blinked, having one of those ‘back story’ moments where I knew perfectly well why I’d said it—and I knew that I’d stand behind my words. But I could also see clearly that I didn’t mean what the girlfriend thought I’d meant. Not entirely. So I took a deep breath and dove into an explanation.
Here’s the thing; usually by the time people find me and get their butts into a class, quite often it’s because they’re exhausted and overwhelmed, if not in overt pain. They didn’t get that way in a day—it’s taken them most of their lives to manage to take on so much of other people’s energy that they can’t squirm around enough to be comfortable in their own skin—but they want to be out of pain immediately.
I’ll soon be offering posts on the difference between sympathy, empathy, and compassion and on the ‘reality’ of energy in a body, and all of those things play into my explanation, but if you’re living in one of these sensitive creatures, I’m pretty sure that you already have an idea of how visceral; how real other people’s energy can be to someone in a highly sensitive body—sometimes so strong as to be disabling.
Before I learned the skills I teach, I wasn’t able to walk through a mall without coming out the other side with a blinding migraine that would wipe me out for the rest of the day. The impact of everyone’s energy—usually their fears, pains and anxieties, but sometimes their ebullient moods as well—would hit me like a tide and just take me under.
That’s the “down” side to being an empath. You can not only just feel other people’s emotional state—that’s clairsentience—but you can Hoover them up and take them home with you. It’s a dubious gift, but I was born this way.
What I didn’t realize at the time, of course, having been an empath from birth, was that not everyone sucked in energy the way I did. That other people had boundaries and baffles in place to keep other people’s energy out. I didn’t. I could feel everything, all of the time. It was pretty unpleasant, and as a result, I would try to control my environment and manage my discomfort levels by making the people around me as comfortable as I could. Often, I did that by drawing their pain into my body.
In a weird way, it felt safer. Once I’d sucked out their pain, I knew that, if I could handle what I was already fielding, they weren’t likely to hurt me any more than they had already. It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it was the only one, at the time, to which I had access. It was the only way I knew to feel even moderately safe. And if I had a finger in every ‘pie’ in the room—or the mall, or the store—if I was intimately connected to their energy system, I knew instantly whether someone was going to shift their energy into someplace uncomfortable or threatening. I could make a quick exit if I needed to—or just drain off a little more of their ‘charge’ to calm them down.
It was like drinking sewage so that the people creating the sewage could drink clean water.
There are two dynamics that I see in action when I see highly sensitive people trying to manage the energy of a space or a group like this, and unfortunately, neither of them works very well. The first is to absorb as much pain as possible, as I often did. The second is to try to control the people in the environment. Sometimes, this is as direct as just pushing your own energy into someone’s space to try to influence their behavior and make them behave in a way that’s less distressing for you.
If they think about it, most people know at least one or two people in their lives who are constantly doing this. One woman I knew—who, by the way, thought the psychic stuff I was into was absurd—nonetheless gave me a sharp look one morning and said, “Uh-oh…my mother-in-law is thinking about me.”
When I laughed and said, “What?” she also laughed, a little self-consciously, and said, “Whenever she starts to think about my shortcomings, I get this weird feeling that I’ve been scolded, like a child.”
The reality of this energetic “push” was validated when the phone rang a few minutes later. It was the woman’s mother-in-law, calling to say that she’d be dropping off some clothes she’d picked up on sale for her young grandson. After disconnecting from the call, my friend rolled her eyes and complained, “She doesn’t like the way I dress Brian. She’s always trying to dress him in yuppie-wear.”
My friend, of course, saw this as “coincidence.” I saw it as a very real, very potent piece of energetic communication. In a very self-righteous and highhanded way, the mother-in-law had shoved her energy—and her opinion, and her sartorial judgments—smack into her daughter-in-law’s space.
“But what’s so wrong with buying a kid some nice clothes?” I hear the grandmas out there complaining. “I love getting gifts for my grandkids.”
You’re looking at the wrong end of the stick. It’s not the clothes that were the problem—the painful end was the disapproving, energetic Whack! that was dished out along with the judgment of inferior parenting. That’s the part of the dynamic with which I would have taken umbrage, had I been in my friend’s shoes. And it was wrapped up all nice and pretty as a “gift” of clothing from a “loving” grandmother. Well, the exchange certainly hadn’t looked very loving to me.
Gifts given freely from love or generosity are wonderful. They’re clean. Gifts given from spite, judgment, or to engender a sense of reciprocal obligation have too many strings attached. They’re energetically ‘sticky;’ soiled with unspoken expectations. To accept the gift is to accept the weight of the unpleasant, often unwanted obligation. But the topic of conscious motivation is just an aside. It was that ringing Whack! that was rude. She was literally slapping my friend in order to try and control her behavior.
Everybody does this, by the way—it’s not just keyed-up psychic types. Very few people I’ve seen are respectful enough to allow others to run their energy—or their own lives—the way they like. Everybody feels entitled to express an opinion or ten with regard to the behavior of the folks around them. Whether it’s a mother sending subtle (and not-so-subtle) cues to one of her grown, adult children to straighten his posture, or a wife who keeps interrupting her husband because she doesn’t like his communication style with guests and is afraid he will embarrass her, or a father who keeps yanking his adolescent son’s chain because the kid’s getting too independent and it’s making him feel anxious, most of the people I’ve met are quite casually rude and disrespectful when it comes to energetic respect. No one’s ever taught them energetic ‘manners;’ and although I can understand the oversight, it can be very difficult for those of us who can sense fifty layers of undercurrent in a simple exchange of greetings.
One lady I met at a party kept pushing her point of attention right into the center of my freakin’ head, and when I finally asked her outright to stop, she smiled coyly and said, “Oh, but I can’t help it! I find the whole ‘psychic thing’ you do so fascinating! I just want to see what’s going on in there!” Then she gave a brittle, tinkling laugh and flashed me this big, bright smile, like she was being cute—all while it felt like she was trepanning a hole in my skull. She stuck to me like a burr. I finally had to leave, just to get away from her incredibly invasive insensitivity.
This is really common, and I hope you can understand that I’m not being judgmental when I say that the majority of the population isn’t particularly conscious of what they’re doing from one minute to the next. Some are, of course; but people zone out and float out of their bodies with such appalling regularity that often, when I’m driving, I’m unnerved to notice that I’m the only one in visual range who’s actually in my body. Half of the folks around me are already at the office, or arguing with someone on the phone (or in their head), or just bored and daydreaming, floating around like little blobs of colored light ten feet up over their cars. While it’s not at all difficult, mindfulness takes focus. It takes discipline. And most folks really don’t give a hoot whether they’re oozing energy all over you.
People will frequently try to control other people’s energy when they’re scared—and not only do they not realize they’re being controlling, they usually don’t even realize that they’re afraid. For a lot of people, admitting to feeling fear makes them feel weak or vulnerable, so they keep it under wraps—hidden even from themselves. But the control game end of the dynamic is a reflexive, unconscious reaction in most folks; it activates whether or not they’re conscious of it. And the greater their unconscious fear, the more tightly they try to control the people around them. Like the wife, above, who was constantly on guard that her husband would tell a joke she considered ‘inappropriate’ and embarrass her in front of her friends.
When, after watching that dynamic play out for a few minutes, I laughed in an aside to her and said, “Relax! He’s actually kind of funny, you know?” She was at first startled, then puzzled, then a little angry, when I explained what I was seeing, thinking that I was insulting her. She stomped off, frowning.
But after a couple of minutes of introspection, watching her husband from under lowered brows, she sidled back over to me and said, “I think you’re right. My dad used to tell dirty jokes to my mom’s friends all of the time, and man, she just hated it. My stomach’s in a knot. I—well, I almost feel like I’m trying to squeeze him so he’ll stop talking.”
For the rest of the evening, at least, her control game lightened up considerably, and she stopped trying to energetically squelch the poor man. Her hubby had had no idea that he’d been the subject of an energetic lesson in manners, but towards the end of the evening, he came over to his wife and gave her a big kiss, telling her what a good time he was having and thanking her for getting folks together. As he wandered off, she blinked and said, “Well, that’s a first!”
She was talking about his reaction—but the real first was that she had blown a ‘control’ picture and let the poor man breathe. Of course he’d been enjoying himself!
For sensitive people—people who can feel everyone’s social discomfort—it’s almost a survival response to try to orchestrate all of the energy in a room. They start manipulating group energy when they’re young, and it becomes so second-nature that, for the most part, they’re not even aware that they’re doing it.
For me it was a double-whammy, as I’d been born able to, not only sense, but to actually absorb, other people’s pain. And unfortunately, raised in a fundamentalist, old-Testament religion, I was also taught to believe that it was my job to sacrifice myself for other people’s comfort. So I’d walk into a room and just start in, even with people I’d never met—energetically ‘managing’ the spat between the folks in the corner, peeling the two feuding siblings off of each other, absorbing the painful insults of a snarky bitch-session between neighbors—the usual. Within minutes, I’d be feeling sick and lightheaded. I usually couldn’t stand it for more than an hour, and I’d have to leave.
And people always wondered why I didn’t like going to parties. “It’s always so much nicer when you’re there!” they’d tell me. Of course it was. I was Hoovering up the dregs of interpersonal chaos and social discomfort from the second I walked in the door.
This was my baseline programming—as it is with many highly sensitive people. Again—they often don’t even know they’re doing it. I didn’t.
So, when I was first introduced to the concept of “Not My Problem,” I honestly had no idea how it applied to me. After all, I was such a nice person! I helped people, didn’t I? I took care of them! But as the days and weeks unfolded and I began to consciously look at my own knee-jerk reactions to the dynamics of interpersonal relationship, I began to realize just how much of my focus and energy was flowing out of my space to try and “fix” other people’s lives, moods, and attitudes because it served me. I really didn’t give a rat’s round bottom about them—I wanted to feel safe. So I reached right into their space and took away whatever unsettled me.
The boss walks into the office annoyed with his wife? Dang! Gotta grab that energy right quick, lest he set someone else off. Angry client on the phone? Suck that up before it gets passed on—or before he starts to “hit” me again. Frustrated co-worker? Well, if I tease out her frustration, maybe she’ll go away, leave me alone, and let me get my work done before I miss my deadline.
It was a never-ending plethora of juggling energetic sewage, but in spite of the fact that I didn’t know how to get rid of any of the garbage I absorbed; despite the fact that it caused me physical and emotional pain, it still gave me the feeling of being in control. Since I was so highly attuned to all of the energy around me, most of the time everything around me felt completely chaotic. Trying to control/heal/fix folks gave me a tenuous, albeit painful, sense of stability.
But on top of being self-destructive, it was flat-out rude.
Totally taking the concept of privacy out of the equation—I mean, were any of these things really even my business?—the fact is that you can’t “fix” people. They’re not broken. They’re learning. There’s a big difference. And the way that they’re choosing to learn is perfectly valid—even if it isn’t what you would do. After all, you’re not the expert on their lives—they are.
My boss was working on how to be in relationship with his wife. The client was learning how to communicate effectively. My co-worker was learning to speak up for herself to someone who could actually change her circumstances; an authority figure—not me. But because I’d been trained to see them all as my problem, I stepped in and truncated their lessons.
How would you feel if you signed up for a photography course, and although you wanted to learn the material, at first you found it a little difficult to absorb? How would you feel if someone you didn’t even know came in, looked at your struggle, kicked you out of the classroom, and took your seat to take the class for you? It’s like that. Rude.
Allowing people the courtesy to choose and complete their own life-lessons is what I call respect. It’s the most basic tenet of my ministry. It’s looking at every other person on the planet and realizing that every single one of the fascinating little buggers has the exact same relationship to the Supreme Being that you do. That they’re here to learn, just like you are. That they are every bit as entitled to their unique mode of expression as you are. That they’re entitled to make their own mistakes—and learn from them—just like you. That they’re not wrong if they don’t want to do what you think is better for them. They’re just learning their own lessons in their own way.
Bottom line, how they live their lives is not a problem. It’s certainly not your problem.
“Oh, come on,” you protest. “Does this mean that you shouldn’t help a friend?”
Hang on, hang on—I know; this is getting involved. But this is a complicated set of dynamics, and I’m still trying to lay a little groundwork here.
The classes that I teach start with the basics—Meditation 1—and the skills a student learns build on the foundation of the prior class. You have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. And you have to give your body time to adjust to the process; bodies live in dimensional time—spirit doesn’t. When you learn techniques to shift energy from your body, you have to give your body time to ‘catch up’ and stabilize at the new vibration before you move on to the next technique—or else you’ll very likely slide back into all of your old habits and not clear anything at all.
In part, the classes are a place to learn a shared vocabulary describing psychic energies you already experience, but may not know how to talk about. In part, it’s a place where you are asked to slowly start putting yourself on the priority list of your life—by allocating “me” time to meditate daily and feeling the changes you create over the weeks as you add new ‘tools’ to your psychic home-maintenance kit.
But it has to move forward one step at a time. You have to learn to ground and be able to relate to your body’s energy system before you can start using your clairvoyance and “looking” at energy. If you start trying to see the unseen before you can ground and clear your body, your body won’t feel particularly safe—there’s a lot of weird stuff out there. And you’ll very likely scare the bejeezus out of yourself and snap shut like a clam.
And as you learn—possibly for the first time in your life—how to release old, stuck energy, you also want to be at least attempting not to take on any new stuff; to not get embroiled in any new wrangles. You want to break off as cleanly as possible from the old, fearfully disempowering ‘control’ habits that clogged your ‘pipes’ with sewage in the first place.
Hence, “Not My Problem.”
“Not My Problem” isn’t a flat imperative to withdraw interest and concern from the whole of mankind forever, becoming a solitary, self-absorbed hermit. It’s only a first-step mantra in the process of growing self-awareness. It’s the cold-turkey wake-up call that says, “Hey! You’re doing it again! Back off!” It gives you permission—again, sometimes for the first time in your life—to be your own #1 priority. To be your only priority. To worry about clearing your own space and developing your own grounding and becoming conscious of your own motivations and your own issues—acknowledging that other people are here to learn their own lessons and that they can take care of themselves. It’s a clear and direct, “Let. It. Go. Now.”
It is, to paraphrase J.C., to “Cast the log out of your own eye before worrying about the speck of dust in your brother’s.”
I mean, God’s pretty capable, don’t you think? I do. I see this step as acknowledging that God’s the one in charge—not me, and not you. This first step is one very potent, very real way to hand back the reins. (And in any case, the guy in traffic that you think is driving too slowly can get along just fine without you trying to ‘push’ him to go faster.)
I will confess that “Not My Problem” was quite a struggle for me. I was stumbling to catch up from the proactive learning end, finding the techniques and developing the skills I needed to make my body feel safe once I’d given up trying to control the known Universe.
And it took a long, long time. Years. I hadn’t realized how much ‘insider’ information I’d always gleaned about people and their motivations by having glommed onto their energy like grim death; the first time someone asked, “Why did he do that?” and I could honestly say, “I have no idea,” was something of a revelation.
Not only did letting go of all of the control games I was playing stop the paralyzing migraines I’d experienced cold and give me back a huge chunk of my life-force energy, it helped me access different psychic skills. It was only after I’d released all of that 1st and 2nd chakra survival fear associated with controlling others and had created safety for my body in a new, more pro-active way that was I able to ‘move up’ in my skill set and realize the neutral clarity of my clairvoyance—a 6th chakra skill. It was a case of ‘calm and clear the body, then re-engage the spirit.’ I felt like I’d dropped twenty years.
Huh! I probably had. I’d dropped off twenty years’ worth of other people’s junk!
Is this making sense?
And to be honest, at first while I was playing with “Not My Problem” I really wasn’t able to listen to other people bemoan their fates or itemize their life issues at all—much like a drug addict, the temptation to jump in and ‘fix’ them was almost unbearable. I found myself limiting my interactions with folks who’d been using me as their “psychic toilet” for a long time. But now, after years of working to validate other people’s right to their own experience of life, I can listen, and sometimes even lend a hand or suggest a helpful shift of viewpoint—without needing to interfere with how they were running their energy.
Because now I don’t need to manipulate their energy to make myself safe. I want to help them—to celebrate the coming together of their creativity with mine in order to spark a new, possibly unique perspective.
It’s conscious. It’s clean. It validates a person’s strength; it doesn’t capitalize on their perceived ‘weakness’ or attempt to manipulate them. It’s neutral. It’s respectful.
And man, it feels so very much better, not having to control the world. I have plenty to deal with, right here inside my own skin.