If You Sense The Vibes In A Room, You Just Might Be A Highly Sensitive Person
Based on Dr. Rita’s book: The Dysfunctional Dance Of The Empath And Narcissist
It is challenging for you to be in big crowds, go to the mall or even be in a crowded bar? Do you often feel overwhelmed by the people around you? Have you found yourself feeling happy around happy people and sad around sad ones? Do you sometimes feel as if you catch the emotions of people around you or your environment?
If this has been your experience, then perhaps you are a highly sensitive person.
Highly sensitive people are able to pick up on “vibes” that others usually don’t. They feel everything more intensely. A highly sensitive person has a unique sensory perception system. They are able to tune into the emotions of others and the energy their environment more readily than most others. They are particularly sensitive to anger, conflict, depression, and unhappiness in others. This input can often leave these sensitive individuals feeling easily irritable, angry and overwhelmed.
Highly sensitive individuals may think that there is something wrong with them. They may assume that they have anxiety issues, are shy, prefer to stay out of crowds and away from a world of chaos. This may have led these highly sensitive individuals to believe they are innately flawed. This is far from the case. Highly sensitive people are deeply empathic and have a powerful sense of intuition.
Being A Highly Sensitive Person Is Natural
Being a highly sensitive person is an innate trait that you were born with. It is not something that needs fixing. It is part of who you are and how you naturally interact with the world around you. Surprisingly, Psychology Today has estimated that 1 out of 5 people are highly sensitive.
When you are a highly sensitive person, you feel what is going on around you stronger than other people. This tendency can lead many highly sensitive people into taking on the feelings of others and making them their own. Often they do not understand how in one minute they can be happy and in the next feel sad, or depressed or angry. It is because they are so in tune with their environment and other people it can leave them at a loss to understanding why they feel the way they do.
Research Into The Highly Sensitive Personality
According to researchers such as Elaine Hatfield, a highly sensitive person is more susceptible to what she describes as an emotional contagion. An emotional contagion, according to Wikipedia, is the phenomenon of having one person’s emotions and related behaviors directly trigger similar emotions and behaviors in other people. She theorizes the thoughts and feelings of sensitive individuals can be influenced by external sources, which can ultimately result in mood changes.
One theory regarding this inborn skill is that it is an ancient survival strategy. This skill is primitive, automatic and unconscious in nature. Social animals, in the wild, for the sake of self-protection, are very sensitive to the mood and behavior of other animals in their group. If, for example, a herd of animals is grazing in a field and one detects something frightening, the fear that the animal experiences is transmitted through the pack. This emotion quickly spreads throughout the heard and sends them all off running to escape the potential danger.
We Are Designed To Pick-up Emotional Energy
Humans are naturally social beings. We, like other social animals, are built with the capacity for sensing emotional changes. We are designed to synchronize our emotions with other human beings. Some people are just more sensitive at perceiving and responding these internal changes.
We can all dance, or draw a picture. Some people excel at it while others may struggle. The same holds true with our ability to detect changes in the emotional energy around us. Highly sensitive people are just better at it.
Elaine Hatfield further explains that two people can interact, with one individual acting as a sender and the other as a receiver. The emotional energy of the sender is projected and ultimately received by the receiver, where he perceives the transmitted emotions. The capacity to send and receive emotional energy and non-verbal information has been understood for millennia. In the east, it is associated with the seven chakras.
Highly Sensitive People & The Chakras
The chakras are energy centers in the body that are designed to send, received and process information from the world around us. The chakras of highly sensitive people, it is believed, tend to be more open and receptive to changes in energy. They have the capacity to receive emotional energy from the world around them easier. This capability is often described as empathy, intuition and is directly tied to psychic abilities.
Sending & Receiving Energy Via The Chakras
Our chakras act similar to a radio. The broadcasting studio sends invisible radio signal out across the airwaves at a very specific frequency. We recognize these frequencies as stations such as 98.5, 102.7 or 107.9 on the radio dial. The sender, like the broadcasting studio, can transmit an array of emotion including love, joy, anger or fear.
The receiver, in turn, acts similar to the radio in your home where he, via his chakras, can tune into these emotions. A highly sensitive person is just someone who is better equipped at tuning into the various broadcasted stations.
Many highly sensitive people experience this talent a blessing or a curse, depending on what is going on around them. This keen aptitude to sensing energy can provide them with intuitive insights, which can be a blessing. On the other hand, they can become easily overwhelmed by the ongoing influx of emotions that are traveling the airwaves. There are, thankfully, a vast number of things a highly sensitive person can do to deal with this challenge.
What You Can Do If You Are A Highly Sensitive Person
Many people are not aware of what they are experiencing in their daily lives. They are not aware that the mood changes or feelings of overwhelm they encounter may be tied to this phenomena. They are not aware of their own delicate nature and tend to suffer its effects.
One way of learning to address your sensitive nature is to begin recognizing and understanding yourself, especially how you process emotional cues. It is important to come to know yourself, how you feel at any given moment and recognizing when you are being affected by some outside energy.
Is This Me?
Asking, “is this my energy” or “is this about me”, will help you to begin to recognize what emotions are your and those of others. This will help you to distinguish if the chaotic, imbalanced or uncomfortable energy you feel is yours, from other people, or your environment.
If you find yourself overloaded or overwhelmed by other people’s energies, perhaps taking some quiet time by isolating yourself can help. Quiet time can help to cleanse your body. It can support you as you discharge the effects other people’s energy has on you.
Visualization Can Help Highly Sensitive People
Grounding
Grounding your body, via a grounding cord, is another method to discharge energy that does not belong to you.
There are also a number of visualizations you can use to help protect you and make you less porous to the dynamics going on around you. They include a cosmic egg, a protection mirror, and a solid brick wall.
Cosmic Egg
Imagine in your mind’s eye a see-thru luminescent egg that is surrounding your entire body. Set the intention that the transparency of the egg will allow good energy to come in and keep bad or discordant energy out.
Protection Mirror
Visualize a mirror that sits about 12 to 18 inches away from your body (on the edge of your auric field). Imagine any negative energy that is directed towards you is reflected back to the sender. This method works especially good if you have a specific individual who you believe is sending negative energy all of the time. It can also be used to protect yourself from an energy vampire.
Brick Wall
The visualization of a brick wall or other solid surface can be especially useful in challenging situations. Unlike the permeable surface of the cosmic egg, the brick wall blocks out all energy. This can be a good thing, but it also keeps all of our energy trapped inside as well. So use it sparingly.
Can being a highly sensitive person be challenging? Yes! But once you are aware of how your body works and what kinds of people or situations trigger negative responses in you, you can begin to free yourself of the chaos and changing moods happening around you.
Today, many people desire to be able to tap into their intuition or to have some kind of a psychic ability. If this is you, then you are in luck. Highly sensitive people are naturally born this way.
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