Empaths at Home
Creating a Sanctuary Where Empathy Can Flourish
EMPATHY IS A strongly receptive skill, and empathic people are nearly always sensitive in many different ways—emotionally, aesthetically, multisensorially, socially, and so forth. As you learn to engage perceptively and empathically with others, I want you to also become comfortably receptive to your environment and to the emotions, circumstances, needs, and wishes of others. Empathy requires receptivity, so it’s important to surround yourself with nourishing and nurturing influences that will help you balance all of this necessary receptivity.
In the previous chapter, you learned about empathic mindfulness skills that you can access at any time and in any place. These resources will help you increase your intrapersonal skills, become more emotionally aware, and perform your empathic work in comfort and safety. They will also help you choose how much receptivity you’ll engage in at any given moment. Your empathic mindfulness skills give you options in regard to your empathy.
In this chapter, we’ll look at your home from an empathic perspective and discover if there are ways to make your home a more supportive and nurturing environment for an emotionally aware, grounded, focused, well-defined, and healthy empath. It’s possible that you’ve already created an absolutely wonderful empathic sanctuary in your home (if so, congratulations!), but if your home is not currently a sanctuary for you, or if you’re not sure what a sanctuary would feel like, it’s worth taking a close look at your most intimate surroundings.
With your empathic Einfühlung capacity fully activated, I’d like you to observe your home as if you were an anthropologist, or perhaps as if you were a nosy visitor (being fascinated by and nosy about the social world is a prerequisite for cultural anthropologists and other scientists). It will be helpful to take a notebook with you so that you can jot down your observations—but understand before you start that there are no right or wrong answers to the questions I’ll ask you.
As you walk around your home, step outside of yourself and ask, “Who lives here?” What kind of person lives in your home, and what is important to this person? Is this person studious or active, solitary or a part of many social groups, organized or free form? Is this person artistic, scientific, romantic, reserved, or gregarious? Who lives here?
Starting from the most social areas and judging by the way you’ve set up your front room, what’s important to you? Does all of your furniture face toward a central television, or have you created conversation areas where people can sit and talk? Do you have a lot of books, or is a computer or a sound system a central feature? Is your front room a kind of meditative space, or is it a very social space? If you live with a mate, are your styles and needs represented equally in this room, or does one person dominate? If you have children, is this room a kid space—and if so, is there any room for you here? If this is a home you’re sharing with your parents, is there any space for you in this front room? If you’re in a roommate situation, does this room welcome you? What do you (or the people who live in your home) value? And do those values truly represent the way you want to live?
Do your windows look out onto greenery or nature? If not, do you have plants in your home? Nature and greenery create a soothing atmosphere; simply placing a plant in a room can make it feel homier. Art and music can do that, too. Do you use art and music to bring a sense of beauty into your home? Using your Einfühlung capacity, can you identify any themes or leading emotions in the music you love and in the art you like to have around you? What is your color scheme, and what does it evoke for you? Do your musical and artistic themes—and your chosen emotions and colors—speak to you in a healing and welcoming way? If not, why not?
As you continue to investigate your home, do you find that you like order, or are you looser and more free form? What does the presence or lack of order say to you and about you? As you look at photos displayed in your home, are they of single figures or groups? Or are they all of landscapes or buildings? Does your photography identify you as a solitary person, a group member, or a lover of structure or of nature? If you could identify some leading emotions or themes in your photos, what would they be?
As you move into your kitchen, ask yourself about the social nature of the person who lives in your home. Is your kitchen orderly and spare, or is it overflowing with cooking gadgets and colors and places to relax? Is food preparation easy in this kitchen, or is it somewhat of a chore? Are the cupboards and the refrigerator filled with foods you love, or is there more of a mishmash of things you should eat but don’t actually like? Does your kitchen nourish and support the real lives of the people who live here and gather here? If not, why not?
As you move through your home, continue to observe and explore. You’ve been leaving clues for yourself in your home; you’ve been displaying your true nature, your wants, your needs, and your dreams. With your anthropologist’s eyes and your empathic capacities, you can begin to pull these clues together into a unified whole. Who lives in your home, and is he or she comfortable, welcomed, and supported here?
I’d like you to end your tour in your bedroom and, if you have one, in your private bathroom. We’ve gone from the most social areas of your home to the most private areas, and I’d like you to take a close look at the colors, photos, art, organization, and emotional tone of your private rooms. Look at the things you’ve chosen to place nearest to your private, unclothed, unguarded, and sleeping self. Is the emotional tone of your bedroom different from the tone in the rest of your home? If you have a private bathroom, what’s the emotional and artistic tone here? Does it differ from the rest of your home? If so, what’s different? What do these rooms say about you? What’s important to you in the most private recesses of your home? Who lives here?
CREATING A PERFECT EMPATHIC TERRARIUM
I like to focus on your living situation because if you don’t have a warm, supportive, nurturing, and replenishing home environment, it can be pretty hard to develop a healthy and happy relationship with your empathic skills. This is true for everyone, but it’s especially true for hyperempaths, who may burn out if their homes aren’t sanctuaries for them. In the next chapter, we’ll focus on the importance (the crucial, game-changing importance) of healthy love and family relationships for empaths because without that, they have no empathic downtime anywhere. But it’s equally important for anyone who wants to develop and nurture their empathic abilities to have a home environment that’s filled with comfort, real nourishment, beauty, and relaxation. This kind of environment is especially important for you if you’re currently working to develop stronger emotional awareness and a keener empathic capacity. If you want to be able to live happily as an empathic person in a fairly unempathic world, your home truly needs to be your sanctuary.
Your home can act as a kind of threshold between you and the outside world. It can act as a supportive backstage area where you can rest, recharge, replenish, and take a break from the emotional needs of others (and from emotional commotion in general). Your home can be an extension of your boundary-setting practice; it can help you learn how to set and maintain boundaries in the physical world as you learn to define yourself and set boundaries in your interactions and your relationships.
I don’t want you to think that I’m promoting the creation of a silent monastery, because your home can certainly be a colorful, music-filled social space and a fun party home. Healthy interaction is good food for your empathic nature, and good friendships can help you develop and hone your empathic skills in a safe and friendly environment. A home that is healing and welcoming for you can be very healing and welcoming for others, as well. However, what we’re focusing on in this chapter is how to make your home into a kind of terrarium that can nurture a sensitive, emotionally aware, and healthy empathic organism.
I asked earlier whether your home looks out onto any sort of nature or greenery, because greenery and natural environments seem to have a specific healing function for our bodies. At one point in my earlier career, during a five-year period when I wrote ten books and audio learning sets and toured constantly, I reached a point of such overwhelm that my health started to slip away. A counselor I spoke to prescribed hiking to a secluded spot near water and lying down on the ground under some trees. It seems strange, but that was a specifically healing activity. First of all, I was alone and away from the commotion of other people and their needs. Second, I was in a beautiful place where all the sounds were natural and unconnected to me (no phones, no alarms, no voices). Third, I could lie down and feel the grounding support of the earth underneath my entire body—I could let go of everything. And fourth, as I lay there, I realized that nature didn’t need me—I wasn’t central to the functioning of this place. Unlike my career or my home or my family life, in this place I was welcome but unneeded. The wind didn’t require anything from me. The water flowed downstream whether or not I was there. The trees grew and the animals managed their lives—completely without input from me. In this place, I could be a part of nature without needing to do anything. I could just exist.
As you observe your habitat and your home, I’d like you to be aware of beauty and nature around you. Is greenery and growth visible to you? Do you have sources of fresh, clean air? Can you open your windows freely? Do you have plants in your home? Are there places where you can get away and simply be a part of nature—where you are unneeded but welcome, and nurtured but basically ignored? Are you connected to the natural sounds of the nonhuman world? If not, you can create many aspects of a healing natural environment for yourself.
When I have lived in noisy urban areas, my bathroom became an oasis where I created a sense of being enveloped in quiet, natural sounds and sensual delights. Hot baths or long showers with low lights and soft music (if you like music), wonderful scents (if you’re not scent sensitive), and soft, clean towels can bring you a sense of release and relaxation. Think about how many of the gifts of sadness you can access during bathing. You can let go of lots of things that aren’t working anyway, like dirt and grime, mental clutter, and muscle tension, and you can intentionally rejuvenate yourself, your skin, your mind, and your musculature. Water can be wonderfully healing and relaxing, and it’s readily available. If you’re surrounded by noise and bustle, even inside your home, your bathroom can become a mini-spa and sanctuary. Water, nature, and greenery are wonderfully healing, yet if you can’t get to nature, you can still create a small healing oasis inside your home.
Relaxation is such an important part of a whole and healthy life, yet I find that it’s not something many of us make time for, which is why I created such simple grounding and rejuvenation practices. I noted earlier that most meditation and relaxation practices use sadness without realizing that they’re doing so; it’s fascinating to me that instruction in how to access the gifts of sadness has become a kind of cottage industry. I mean, it’s a good industry, but it’s remarkable that people actually need direct instruction in how to access the gifts of their own emotions and that people need to be taught how to relax. As you observe your home, make a note of how many areas are relaxing or are set aside specifically for you to relax. If there are few or none (besides your bed, of course), ask yourself why.
For very empathic people—or for people who are learning to increase their emotional and empathic abilities—interaction and emotional availability are vital learning activities. You have to get out and interact, engage in relationships, use your empathic skills, and be willing to be intimate with others or with your interests out in the world. These are wonderful activities, but they’re activating (and sometimes fatiguing); you need to balance all that activation with relaxation, grounding, self-care, and rejuvenation. This is why we’re focusing on your home, because it can be your empathic recharging station.
THE HEALING POWER OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION
As you observe your home and think about how it can support, nurture, protect, and replenish you, look at your artistic practice, if you have one. Have you created a space in your home for your artistic or musical expression? Artistic expression is wonderful and soul-expanding for anyone, but it has a particular healing quality for empaths—it helps you express and channel emotions intentionally. Whether you write, draw, paint, sing, compose, play an instrument, design, do metalwork or paper arts, work with fabric or jewelry, create with wood or ceramics, dance or do martial arts, do graphic arts or photography, do math or science, or work in your garden or your kitchen, artistic and creative expression will enable you to connect with yourself and to tangibly symbolize emotions, thoughts, and ideas.
Artistic expression is specifically healing for empaths because it helps us bring balance to our highly receptive bodies, and it helps us use our empathic Einfühlung skills in self-nurturing ways. We empaths spend a lot of time in receptivity, and if there isn’t a healthy way for us to express and channel all of the emotions, sensations, and impressions we receive, we can become overwhelmed and exhausted. We can head toward burnout if we have no expressive practice to balance our natural tendency to be highly receptive to our environment and continually aware of the emotions, needs, difficulties, and wishes of others. Artistic expression can help us express things in a sensual, visual, vocal, intellectual, tactile, or kinetic way, and it can help us develop an internal dialogue and deeper intrapersonal awareness. Artistic expression can also help people with low empathy develop the intrapersonal skills and awareness that lead to stronger Empathic Accuracy and Emotion Regulation skills. Artistic expression is a vital aspect of empathic self-care—and luckily, the art doesn’t even have to be any good.
When I was a hyperactive and emotionally volatile little hyperempath, I was fortunate to have artistic parents. My dad was a writer and musician, and my mom was a painter and singer. Art and music, wordplay and singing—these were normal parts of every day in our home. We had a piano, and when I was completely overwhelmed, I’d sit at it to try to learn a song I had heard somewhere. I’d play parts of the melody over and over again, training my fingers and my ears to memorize the song—and once I got it, I’d play the entire song over and over again to get the right cadence and emotional expressivity. I’m talking hours on one song. It must have been excruciating for my family, but no one made fun of me or complained, because artists understand that practice—and that being bad at first—is a part of the process.
Although my early music was probably a form of water torture for any listener, the process of creating music was magical for me. I was able to train my hands and my ears to hone in on specific sounds and actions, I was able to exercise my memorization and sequencing skills, and I was able to express emotions in many different ways as I played and replayed my songs. I was also able to spend significant time away from the needs of others and to focus on the exact ways that I wanted to express myself. Art gave me a way to use my intense Einfühlung capacities in safe, intentional, manageable, tangible ways. Art and music helped me learn about myself as an individual, and they helped me develop grounded intrapersonal empathic skills in the way that animals in my neighborhood helped me develop safer and more grounded interpersonal empathic skills. Artistic expression is a specific healing practice for empaths, and it’s a wonderful way for people with currently low emotional and intrapersonal awareness to engage with and develop their interior lives and their emotional awareness.
As you observe your home, look for your artistic practice, which can be as elaborate as having a large weaving loom in your front room or as compact as the special journal you use to write haiku. Your art form can be movement based or it can be located in your meditative practice. Your art can be cooking, baking, or home design. It can also be your mathematical or scientific activities, because both of these fields can engage you completely as you work to organize, describe, and express your understanding of natural phenomenon. When I speak of art, I’m looking for something that allows you to express your thoughts, emotions, ideas, dreams, hopes, and visions in an intentional and tangible way. I’m looking for a practice that helps you express your entire self, honestly and ceremonially. We already have expressive practices for your emotions—we have Conscious Complaining, Burning Contracts, and Conscious Questioning—but those practices are specific to situations that trouble you. You also need an expressive practice for things that delight you, for things that puzzle you, and for the wordless concepts you can’t quite grasp until you see them expressed in your favorite art form.
Artistic expression can deepen and coalesce you. It can expand and focus you. And it can embolden you so that you can take the joys, excitements, pains, and troubles in your life and immerse them in the beauty and depth of your soul. Art can be a sacred, alchemical healing practice—and, as such, it’s a specific practice for empaths.
As you search through your home for your artistic practice, don’t be too upset if you don’t find anything except some old art supplies at the back of the closet, covered with a layer of dust, hope, and faint shame. Very few of us were raised by artists, and very few of us have ever been able to set aside time for an artistic practice. Even my heavily artistic friends have unfinished projects that collect dust for months or even years. Modern life is busy and hectic, and there’s always something dragging us away from self-care, from interiority, and from our art.
Fantasies of perfection are also a big impediment, because many people don’t want to do art unless they can do it perfectly. If that’s what’s stopping you, then please burn your contracts with art as perfection. Unless you’re out there trying to make a living as an artist, you don’t have to be concerned with perfection; the point is to use art as a supportive expressive practice that is uniquely healing for your empathic self. You need as many forms of healthy expression as you can get, because empathy is a highly receptive process. Expressive practices will help you create balance, and they’ll help you avoid (or heal from) burnout.
If you don’t currently have any art or craft that engages you, take some classes. Supporting other artists and helping them make a living is a wonderful way to perform empathic activism, and it’s a great way to meet people who share your interests. Of course, classes are social activities where you’ll need to be empathically receptive for at least part of the time, but gaining artistic tools and skills will help you embark on your own artistic practice. If you can’t make time for a class, then try a simple expressive art form and discover what you like and what speaks to you. Even if it’s dancing around the living room to your favorite song, writing a short poem, or creating an interesting display on your refrigerator, find a way to express yourself through art and movement, and find a way to make time and space in your home for art. Art heals.
MOVEMENT AS AN ART FORM
Movement is another expressive art form that is specifically healing for empaths. It is also a way to become more aware of your body and your emotions if your empathic awareness is currently low. If you don’t have time for a traditional artistic practice, you can work with your existing movement or exercise practice to bring some of the specific healing aspects of art into it. Besides improving your muscle tone and your metabolism and warding off the diseases of inactivity, movement practices can provide you with the opportunity to get away from everything, so you can let your mind and your emotions wander freely while you express yourself physically. Of course, if your movement practice is highly social, like team sports, exercise classes with blaring music, or gym workouts in front of a television, they’ll tend to be too activating for our purposes. Instead, see if you can bring some of the flowing, expressive, and intentional movements of dance and martial arts into your existing movement practice. If you can, you’ll create a three-for-one: good exercise, artistic expression, and a specific healing practice for empaths. Score!
I want you to notice that I’m not exhorting you to exercise. You know and I know that exercise is absolutely imperative. However, the busy, hectic pace of modern life often means that self-care, relaxation, and movement get pushed to the back of the closet, right next to those dusty art supplies. Sleep also gets thrown into that closet and I’d like to take an empathic look at what many of us do with whatever extra time we have. If we’re not relaxing, exercising, doing our art, or sleeping, what are we doing?
I notice that many of us use entertainment as a relaxation and self-care activity—TV, movies, or the Internet—and those can certainly be a good way to wind down. However, all of these entertainments are interactive, visually stimulating, and somewhat noisy. They also require that you stay in a receptive mode—even though watching TV and movies can feel relaxing, it’s activating for your brain, and the lights, movement, sudden sound shifts, and action on a monitor can keep your fear-based orienting skills activated. As such, screen-based activities can be more distracting than truly relaxing. Distraction, which is a form of emotional repression, is a nice skill to have—it’s a nice thing to be able to do every now and then—but if it’s a regular practice for you, I’d like you to take an empathic look at it.
If you spend a lot of time in front of a screen, and if that’s your central relaxation technique, just check in with yourself. When you’re engaged in screen-based entertainment, is it grounding for you? Are you able to let go of the tensions of the day and refill yourself with calm and focus? Is your screen time truly rejuvenating? Does it fill you with delicious, full-bodied beauty in the way your rejuvenating practice does? Do you come away feeling refreshed and refilled? If not, can you think of other relaxation activities that would refresh and replenish you? Would movement work? Would artistic expression work? Would a short nap work? Would your empathic mindfulness skills work?
Entertainment and the Internet are central to many of us, and I’m not suggesting that you banish them. However, if you notice that they take up the time you could spend on movement, relaxation, art, and home tending, then I want you to gently ask yourself why. If you scan yourself empathically when you’re in front of a screen and you notice that your screen-based activities keep you activated or even hyperactivated, it might be good to set some boundaries around them. This is especially true with interactive electronic activities such as texting, social media, and checking your e-mail continually. On one hand, this kind of interactivity is awesome for your empathic skills, because it keeps you engaged with many people. On the other hand, this engagement—especially texting and IM-ing—can become a type of addictive distraction that is actually overstimulating and ungrounding for you. As we see every day in online commenting flame wars, people can get so riled up and ungrounded by social media that they completely lose their social skills and their Emotion Regulation skills.
As you work to create a life that will nurture you as a healthy and happy empath, take a close look at your electronic interactions. If they’re supporting your emotional awareness in a welcoming and healthy social environment, then hooray! But if your social media interactions are troubling or conflict based, or if they’re pulling your focus to a screen pretty much every minute of the day, then it’s time to set some time limits on social media so that you can have some privacy, reduce your receptive activities, and restore your equilibrium with healthy, intentional expressive practices like art, movement, or your empathic mindfulness skills.
It’s especially important to be aware of your social media and screen-based activities in the hours before bedtime, because the social engagement, the sounds, the visual stimulation, and the flickering lights can tell your brain that it’s still daytime and that you should be up, active, and fully engaged. For many people, screen-based interactions and entertainment can actually interfere with healthy sleep. The suggestion from many sleep researchers is that you should shut down your electronics at least an hour before bed (two hours is better, but I’m being a realist here).
So, as we create a healthy home environment for you, let’s look at possibly the most important contributor to your health and well-being (and of course, your empathic skills), which is the quality of your sleep.
When you observed your bedroom, what did you find? Did you find a private, comfortable, quiet, peaceful sanctuary where the primary activity is sleep? Or did you find an entertainment space, a family space, or a room where the clutter gathers? Your answer will describe what sleep researchers call your sleep hygiene. How sleep-supportive is your bedroom? How sleep inducing is your bed?
In the past few decades, research into sleep has blossomed, and new findings about the importance of sleep seem to appear every week. Good sleep has been found to increase your cognitive skills, help you integrate knowledge, strengthen your memory, help you heal from injuries, help children grow, help you reset your circadian rhythms and regulate your hormones, and help you regulate your mood. All of these positive benefits of sleep are necessary for your whole and healthy life, but for your empathic skills specifically, the mood and cognition benefits of good sleep are particularly important. Good sleep helps you think clearly, and good sleep helps your emotions stay balanced and well regulated.
In his book The Promise of Sleep, pioneering sleep researcher William Dement focuses on the essential benefits of good sleep hygiene so that your sleep architecture (the process of falling into sleep, sleeping, and waking) will be ideal. In his book, Dement asks these questions to help you decipher how sleep smart your lifestyle is:
1. Do you carefully avoid caffeinated drinks in the evening?
2. Do you typically schedule your evening meal at least three hours before you go to bed?
3. Do you have a regular bedtime, which you follow with rare exceptions?
4. Do you have a bedtime ritual, such as a hot bath and perhaps reading a few pages, relaxing, while drowsiness sneaks up on you?
5. Is your bedroom generally a quiet place all night long?
6. Is the temperature of your bedroom just right?
7. Do you think of your bed, particularly the mattress and pillows, as the most comfortable place in the world?
8. Are your bedclothes (blankets, quilts, comforters) exactly right for you?
These questions help reveal how you approach sleep. Is sleep a thing you do because you have to, or do you treat sleep as one of the key contributors to your physical, mental, and emotional health? Is your bedroom primarily sleep-focused, or is it a catchall room? Do you take your sleeping life seriously and practice good sleep hygiene, or is sleep an afterthought for you?
Although Dement doesn’t suggest that you have to answer yes to all of his eight questions (we all have different sleep needs), these are questions to ponder seriously. Is your bedroom a sleep-focused room? Is it dark? Dement also asks about the light pollution in your bedroom. His book was published in 1999, but recent studies42 have suggested a link between light in your bedroom, poor sleep, cognitive depletion, and depression—and that idea has certainly caught on, because you can now buy room-darkening blackout curtains in almost every home store. The relationship between sleep and health is something we’re now more aware of, and a tremendous amount of research suggests that sleep is beneficial for your memory, learning, heart health, emotional health, blood pressure, weight control, and endocrine balance.
Everything we’re looking at suggests that good sleep is vital for your health, your emotional balance, your cognitive abilities, and your well-being. So my questions are: How sleep-smart is your lifestyle? And how sleep-supportive is your bedroom?
As you observe your bedroom again, look at it in terms of protecting your sleeping body from light, noise, extremes in temperature, and commotion. If there’s a lot going on when you’re sleeping, your body will still have to be in a receptive mode, and that means you won’t have a sensory break or a chance to fully relax at night. That’s a problem, but it’s a problem you can address with good sleep hygiene. Creating darkness with the use of blackout curtains is pretty easy, but what if some of the light sources emanate from within your bedroom itself? If you have a TV or computer in your bedroom, Dement would tell you to take them out (most sleep researchers suggest that your bedroom should be focused on sleep and sex, and nothing else). But if that’s not workable, at the very least, cover your electronics at night so that none of the lights shine on you while you sleep. Also, if you have a glowing clock, turn it to the wall or cover it.
Noise is somewhat harder to deal with, but earplugs can help, as can moving your bed away from windows, doors, or walls that you share with noise sources. However, if one of the noise sources is your snoring mate, know that snoring is often a sign of sleep problems in itself, and it can interfere with sleep for both of you. In his 2012 book Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, journalist David K. Randall reports that many married couples who sleep separately report feeling better because they no longer have to spend uncomfortable nights struggling with mismatched sleep patterns, snoring, kicking, or blanket-and-pillow requirements that simply don’t mesh. Randall reports that there is some loss of intimacy when couples sleep apart—men reported feeling lonelier about nighttime privacy than women did (these were heterosexual couples). Some counselors suggest that partners who sleep apart should set aside time for cuddling, skin-to-skin contact, chatting, and lying down together to reconnect, because even if their shared sleeping times were miserable for both of them, cosleeping can be very important for intimacy and empathy.
Commotion in the bedroom will also be an issue if you have young children (who often love to spend a part of each night in their parents’ bed, flailing their limbs around and heating up the entire bedroom) or if you allow your pets to sleep with you. Sleeping with children is an important bonding experience, and every parent has his or her own boundaries around cosleeping. I simply ask you to look at the quality of your sleep. If it’s not good, perhaps find a way for your child to sleep in a bed near yours rather than in your bed with you. It’s not the same, but it may help both of you get much-needed sleep. It’s the same with pets. Some people feel more relaxed with their pets in the bed, even if their sleep is regularly disturbed.
As you consider your sleep needs, know that you can choose to make your bed into a social gathering space, but that will probably reduce the quality of your sleep. If that trade-off is worthwhile for you, then I support you in making it. However, empath to empath, I would ask whether the trade-off is truly something you have chosen. If it is—if a bed full of pets or kids or a snoring, kicking mate is necessary for your happiness—then no matter how much sleep you lose, I’m all for it. But if the social nature of your bed is a function of runaway healing and hyperempathy—where you can’t say no to the needs of others, and you wouldn’t dream of turning off your receptivity, even when you sleep—then I’m going to raise a red flag and ask you to look at this situation very carefully. We’ll focus on the often swashbuckling and self-abandoning nature of empathic relationships in the next chapter, but for now, remember that self-care and concern for others must and should coexist. Your sleep quality, your privacy, and your comfort have direct effects on all six aspects of your empathic capacities and all six dimensions of your emotional style. Sleep is a magical healing balm, and your bedroom can be a nightly recharging station for your body and your well-being; so please take your sleep hygiene seriously. Thank you!
WHEN HEALTHY EATING GOES WRONG
In the area of self-care, many of us can be pretty unfocused about our relaxation practices, our art practices, our mindfulness practices, our exercise, and our sleep hygiene. This lack of self-care is a fairly common tendency that’s not restricted to empaths—pretty much everyone could do a better job with self-care practices. However, in the area of diet and eating behaviors, I’ve noticed that highly empathic people can sometimes swing in the opposite direction. For many sensitive and hyperempathic people, an overly focused and rigidly ideal dieting behavior called orthorexia is almost an occupational hazard.
Your diet and nutrition are vital aspects of your health, your self-care, and your ability to greet each day with energy and focus. Eating a healthy and varied diet is a wonderful way to take care of yourself. However, there’s a form of obsessive, super-healthy eating that Dr. Steven Bratman saw among his patients and half-jokingly named orthorexia nervosa.43 Bratman was making a connection between the intense health-food obsessions he saw in his patients and the intense food obsession-and-avoidance behaviors that characterize the eating disorder anorexia nervosa.
The idea of orthorexia caught on and is a very helpful concept, especially for sensitive and empathic people who don’t currently have many other self-care skills beyond controlling their diets. In the empathy inventory in the first chapter, I included a question about the effects that food and changes in diet have on you, because I notice that highly empathic people are often deeply food sensitive. Foods affect some people very strongly, and it’s natural to be careful with and choosy about which foods you eat. But for empaths, food often gets valenced into distinct camps, where some foods are toxic, addictive, and frankly evil, while other foods are exquisite, restorative, and miraculous. As a former orthorexic, I’ve seen that extreme healthy eating can be a way to create strong boundaries around food that may act as a kind of surrogate protection from problems that don’t have anything to do with food at all.
We all use comfort food to soothe ourselves after a rotten day, or when we’re lonely, or when we’re anxious or angry or bored. Food is delightful, and it can be a surrogate for just about anything—love, happiness, friendship, emotional regulation, relaxation, freedom . . . anything. What I notice in extreme healthy eating is that food can become not just a comfort but also a kind of magical talisman that creates order, structure, and the appearance that you’re managing your life and taking top-notch care of yourself. The problem is that orthorexia isn’t self-care; it’s an obsession. The way you can tell the difference is to look at the rest of your life. If your eating behaviors are standing in for other forms of self-care or if they’re taking a tremendous chunk of your time, just stand back and take an empathic look at your kitchen, your medicine cabinet, and your refrigerator.
In your anthropological observation of your kitchen, I asked: Are your cupboards and refrigerator filled with foods you love, or is there more of a mishmash of things you should eat but don’t actually like? Does your kitchen nourish and support the real lives of the people who live in and gather at the house? If not, why not? When I consult with people, I ask about their eating, their exercise, their sleep, their emotions, their art practice, the quality of their relationships, their work life, and their social justice work. We focus on areas where there is trouble or confusion. In many cases, people report trouble in every area but their eating, which leans into an orthorexic condition that they actually view with pride. It’s almost as if they’re saying, “The trouble in the rest of my life is clearly an aberration, because look how perfectly I’m eating!”
I don’t usually address the eating first, because it’s often a lifeline and a surrogate. I address the rest of the situations and help the person develop skills, set boundaries, regulate emotions, find an art practice, and support his or her health with sleep and gentle exercise. When orthorexia is active, I suspect that I’m looking at a life in turmoil. Here in this book, empath to empath, we can talk about this frankly, but I want you to be very careful if you discover orthorexia in yourself or others. If you see extreme healthy eating; magical foods (that change regularly); endless herbs, vitamins, tinctures, potions, remedies, cleansing and purging practices; and unusual healing modalities, please put your anthropologist’s hat back on. Look around and identify whether this obsessive dietary behavior is standing in for healthy sleep, self-care, self-love, love from others, healthy relationships, a happy family, meaningful work, safety, empathic skills, healthy exercise, an art practice, Emotional Regulation skills, stability, or hope itself. If orthorexia is acting as a surrogate, let the dietary behavior be as you work on those other things.
Sometimes, orthorexia might exist in a person whose life is otherwise healthy. It could be a situation ignited by true food sensitivities that get intensified by peer pressure and the hypnotic quality of compulsive health seeking itself. Once you get into miracle foods, for instance, you could spend years in search of the perfect berry or the perfect herb. Orthorexia is often a socially learned obsessive-compulsive behavior, and it is possible for it to exist in an otherwise healthy life. (I haven’t seen that situation yet, but I’m still looking, and I don’t want to rule it out.) If you find orthorexia in yourself or others, and you empathically study the conditions that surround it and don’t find trouble, then fine. Let it be. If you’re the orthorexic person, gently focus your Einfühlung capacities on your eating and ask yourself what’s going on. If you have an otherwise balanced orthorexic in your life, you can practice grounding and refocusing yourself when your orthorexic friend starts extolling the virtues of special Andean mold tinctures, magic water, and massive quantities of this year’s miraculous leafy greens.
I grew up in the 1970s in the alternative healing culture of Northern California, where orthorexia was and still is a required social behavior. A lot of people outside the culture laugh, criticize, or mock the people within it, but as an insider, I can tell you that most of my peers were highly sensitive people, outsiders, and hyperempaths who were never comfortable in the conventional world. In many cases, these unusual people found their first sense of belonging, their first true relief from their symptoms and hypersensitivities, and their first sense of hope in the outsider beliefs and orthorexic extremes of the alternative healing culture. And nowadays, many orthorexic practices have moved into the mainstream, where this year’s magical food gets inserted into chips and sodas (acai berry coconut water, anyone?), and people at the grocery store talk casually about fasting and cleansing. The benefits of orthorexia, which give people some sense of control over their bodies and hence their lives, can be valuable for just about anyone.
When I challenged my own orthorexia, I swung to the opposite pole—and I absolutely do not suggest that anyone follow my lead. I burnt all of my health and diet books on a pyre (this is huge; I revere books and don’t ever write in them or even bend their pages); I stopped taking all of my vitamins, herbs, and tinctures; and I stopped fretting over the perfection of my meals. And nothing happened. Nothing at all. I didn’t feel worse; I didn’t feel better—my digestion didn’t change, my skin didn’t change, my sleep didn’t change. Nothing happened. But I did soon become aware of the multiple sources of misery in my life, which I had ingeniously hidden from myself with obsessive decades of extreme health behaviors. Orthorexia is awesome for hiding painful issues from yourself!
So be gentle if you discover orthorexia in yourself or others. It may be a surrogate for any number of currently uncontrollable or seemingly unobtainable (yet vital) aspects of a truly healthy life. It may also be a specific response to hyperempathy, and for people with few empathy-moderating skills, orthorexia may be a lifesaver. When orthorexia is active, gentleness, empathy, and compassion are called for.
DEVELOPING BODILY SOURCES OF STABILITY, COMFORT, AND EMPOWERMENT
I support any practice that helps sensitive and empathic people feel comfortable and empowered, which is why I don’t challenge orthorexia in people who consult with me. If it’s helping, I say let it help. However, when empathic people are able to ground themselves and focus on their inner lives, on their own emotions, and on their empathic skills, they’ll often become able to question any obsessive or compulsive practices they may have. This is great, but because obsessive and compulsive practices exist for a reason, suddenly halting them can be a shock to the system. This is especially true with physical practices that stand in for things like Emotion Regulation, grounding, boundary setting, relaxation, self-love, healthy relationships, meaningful work, or hope. Simply ceasing a practice like this is rarely a good idea, and it can actually make your body feel stripped of its defenses and resources.
Luckily, there’s a wonderful and simple practice that I derived from the Somatic Experiencing therapy, created by trauma-healing expert Dr. Peter Levine.44 This practice can help you find healing resources inside yourself. You can perform this practice anywhere, and you can complete it in less than a minute—or you can extend it into a luxurious practice and take as long as you like. It’s called resourcing.
HOW TO RESOURCE YOURSELF
At any time of the day or night, no matter where you are or what’s going on, there are places in your body that feel strong, stable, capable, and resourceful. Even if you’re in pain and even when you’re dealing with extreme difficulties, there are strong, calm areas in your body that you can access intentionally. Let’s try this now.
Sit quietly. With your eyes open or closed, use your Einfühlung capacity to feel into the words strong, stable, and resourceful. Locate an area in your body that feels this way right now. This can be a large area, like your abdomen or your thighs, or a small area, like your left foot or the upper part of your right arm. Where does this feeling reside in your body in this moment? Right now, where do you feel strong, stable, and resourceful? Focus on this area and breathe deeply as you feel into this innate and effortless sense of strength and stability that already exists inside you. Use your intrapersonal skills to empathically interact with this area and with these qualities. They belong to you. They’re available to you at any time and in any situation. This is resourcing. It’s very simple, and yet it’s nearly revolutionary, because very few of us ever learned how to connect to the preexisting strength, calm, and resourcefulness that exist inside our own bodies.
I learned how to resource myself in only the past few years, and I notice that it’s sort of the opposite of how I used to behave around pain and trouble. In the past, the pain and trouble would pull all of my attention, and I’d focus everything on it. There’s a way that pain and trouble can sort of dampen or silence the parts of you that feel fine, strong, and resourceful; in the presence of pain and trouble, it’s easy to hyperfocus on difficulties and lose your awareness of the fact that you also have sources of comfort inside you that are fully accessible, right now.
With resourcing, you can learn how to pay attention to more than one thing. So, if you have a horrible headache, you use resourcing not to pretend that your headache is gone, but to open up your focus to include the comfort that exists in, for instance, your arm or your knee. Or if you’re dealing with intense emotional upheaval, you can focus inside yourself and find an area in your body that feels stable and grounded right now. You aren’t repressing the upheaval with this practice; rather, you are opening up your focus to also include the physical sense of stability that exists inside you during upheavals.
When you’re in a social situation filled with emotional trouble that you can’t read, or if you feel yourself being dragged into hyperempathy or runaway healing behaviors, you can quickly focus inside yourself and locate an area in your body where you feel grounded, resourceful, and stable. The point with resourcing isn’t to repress the fact of what you’re experiencing. Instead, resourcing helps you connect to another set of facts, which are that more than one thing is going on and that you always have the resources you need to address and deal with whatever confronts you.
I’ve found in my own life that resourcing is a workable and healthy replacement for compulsive orthorexia. Instead of applying extreme discipline to my eating in order to enforce structure, I simply locate sources of structure within myself. Resourcing is a wonderful self-soothing behavior that can and does coexist with difficulties. It can also help you learn that one condition doesn’t erase the other. Resourcing can help you open your focus to include trouble and difficulties in the full-bodied narrative of your whole life, rather than hyperfocusing on the troubles and losing your perspective and your skills. Resourcing is a wonderful way to unvalence your inner world.
Resourcing is naturally grounding and focusing, and it helps you set internal boundaries around emotional and social stimuli. With resourcing, you can feel a very strong emotion, and you can sense the calm groundedness of, for instance, your calves. Or you can have a headache and feel the flexibility, ease, and gracefulness in your right hand. Or, when you’re in the presence of someone who’s in emotional turmoil, you can experience intense Emotion Contagion, and you can connect to internal sources of grounding, peace, and stability. Resourcing gives you ways to clearly identify difficulties and clearly identify your extensive internal resources at the exact same time.
Resourcing is also a wonderful practice to use when you’re unable to sleep. Instead of struggling to clear your mind or fretting about how you really need to get some sleep, resourcing can help you locate the areas of your body that are tired and ready to sleep. You can feel your bed underneath you and let yourself sink into your mattress. Even if you don’t immediately fall into sleep, resourcing is a wonderful way to achieve relaxation during sleepless periods. Resourcing helps you open up your focus, and at the same time, it helps you create a kind of boundary or threshold between your difficulties and your resourcefulness. Resourcing can help you learn to identify multiple internal states and to transition gracefully between them, which will help you create and maintain a healthy terrarium environment for your empathic self, even when you’re not at home. Resourcing can help your body become a portable support system for your empathic awareness—an empathic sanctuary that’s available wherever you go. The skill of thresholding can help you in a similar way.
LEARNING TO CREATE THRESHOLDS
Defining Boundaries, which you learned about in the previous chapter, helps you create a kind of threshold between yourself and others, between your emotions and the emotions of others, and between your ideas, attitudes, and behaviors and those of others. Establishing your boundaries is an imaginal way to create a sense of privacy and sacred space around yourself so that you’ll have the internal security, self-awareness, and emotional flexibility you need to empathize skillfully.
In this chapter, we’ve been expanding that sense of sacred space to include your home and your most intimate surroundings. As we move forward, we’ll work to create a sense of boundaries for you in many different environments and situations. For instance, on my website, an actor posed a question about finding ways to access different internal states quickly, and it really got me thinking. This is an excerpt of the question:45
One of my biggest struggles, though, is how to make the transitions between situations in which it is not safe to be my fully emotional and empathic self (e.g., many business environments) and situations in which I am in a safe place (e.g., with a close friend) or in which I need to tap into my emotions fully (e.g., as an actor).
I immediately thought of the threshold, which is a clear physical or behavioral boundary between one thing and another. For instance, a physical threshold at a door tells you that you’re moving from one space into another, while a behavioral threshold (such as becoming silent before saying a prayer) tells you that you’re moving from one behavior to another. Thresholding of one kind or another is an important part of almost any ritual you can name. A threshold tells you that you’re entering into a new space (think of ornate church doors), a new attitude (think of removing your shoes when you enter a Buddhist’s home), or a new position (think of the aisle in a wedding, where the wedding party walks in a deliberate cadence toward the threshold of the altar). Even when you’re not consciously aware of them, thresholds tell some part of you that a change in behavior, demeanor, or position is required.
I view our threshold awareness as an empathic skill, and I’d say that we all have it, to some degree. Therefore, when I need to be in an area where emotional awareness is low to nonexistent, I create thresholds and physical boundaries around myself, as if to say, “Yeah, there’s disorder or emotional trouble all around me, but inside my area, there’s order, calm, emotional awareness, and freedom.” Thresholding is a physical form of setting my boundaries, but it’s also a part of my resourcing practice, because it helps me find sources of calm and freedom within myself—especially when those things are not available in the external environment.
So, for instance, if I’m working in a cubicle (for some reason, writers are often put into cubicles in noisy rooms, sigh), I might create a threshold by posting funny or beautiful pictures at the entryway, so that anyone coming in will get a sense that they’re entering a new area where new behavior is required. I set more thresholds by making sure my cubicle is orderly and appealing. Then I set a behavioral threshold around myself with the respectful and appropriate use of the gifts of anger and shame. (I set clear behavioral boundaries for myself and others without violence.) When I create good thresholds, my area sets boundaries for me so that I don’t have to work so hard fending off unaware people and their random demands. Through thresholding, my personal workspace seems to tell people that this is not a place for shenanigans or disruptive behavior. Thresholds are awesome.
You can also use thresholding at home if your living space is not yet supportive enough, quiet enough, or spacious enough for your specific needs. Even if you only have a small room in a shared home, you can use your artistic and spatial skills to create beautiful thresholds that announce that yours is a private and unique space and that a new kind of behavior is required within.
FRONT STAGE, BACKSTAGE, AND THRESHOLDING
If you want to see a world where thresholds are central to just about everything, focus your Einfühlung capacities on live theater, which is where professional specialists in empathy and Emotion Contagion (actors!) work. In live theater, there’s a distinct separation between backstage (where you can slump over and read a book when you’re not in a scene) and front stage (where you have to bring all of your skills, project your voice, engage all parts of your self, and become someone new). When you cross the threshold from backstage to front stage, you’re actually supposed to become a new person.
Yet the act of thresholding doesn’t stop once you get onstage. There are unseen, but very real, thresholds between upstage and downstage, and between stage left and stage right. There’s also a strong threshold between the audience and the front apron of the stage itself. In a traditional theater, there’s another threshold, called the proscenium arch (usually, the curtains are a part of the proscenium), which delineates the stage proper from the front apron of the stage (where actors might come to break the fourth wall of the stage and intentionally break a threshold to interact with the audience).
Although I don’t think it’s entirely conscious, the theater world as an entity understands that intensive, multilayered thresholding allows actors to access the amazing behavioral, empathic, emotional, physical, gestural, and subtextual changes they must undergo in their work. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that without thresholding, live theater could not have evolved.
As you think about thresholds, remember that they don’t have to be large or obvious. For instance, some actors can switch personae simply by changing their clothing or their posture. Many athletes use a portable sort of thresholding, which anthropologists call fetishes—for instance, a lucky hat, a lucky pair of shoes, a specific preperformance meal or ritual, and so forth. These things can help a performer cross the threshold and make the behavioral leap from regular life to full-blown performance mode. In a way, these fetishes are make-believe tools, but in another way, they’re a potent imaginal signal to the performer inside that person: Regular life with all its distractions is now fading away, and I must now be intensely focused and at the absolute peak of my abilities.
Many performers create entire personae that can act as fetishes and thresholds. For instance, the singer Beyoncé, who’s a shy and quiet person in her real life, created a performance persona named Sasha Fierce. Sasha, the world-class performer, is a fetish and a threshold for Beyoncé, the person, and she’s brilliant. So this imaginal process truly works.
As you travel through the emotional landscape of modern life, play with the idea of thresholds, personae, and fetishes. Skillful and subtle thresholding can help you signal to yourself—and to others—that no matter what’s happening on that side of the room or with those people over there, you have a private, protected, sacred space in which to feel your emotions, understand the emotions of others, engage in skilled empathy, perform at the top of your game, and access your intrapersonal skills and resources at the same time.
As you become more comfortable and skillful with the six aspects of empathy, you can also use thresholding with your empathic skills so that you can have some privacy in social interactions. If you look back at my scene with Joseph and Iris in Chapter 1, you’ll see me thresholding when Iris looks over at me, and you’ll see the place where I could have actively entered into their interaction. Right before Iris dropped into a submissive gesture in response to Joseph’s shock and anger, I was preparing to stand up and don a more outwardly empathic persona (if things had gone sour). But Joseph and Iris handled everything beautifully, so there was no need for me to move into that persona. Thresholding gives me options.
As you consider the physical forms of thresholding you already use (we all create thresholds in some way), go outside of your home and look empathically and aesthetically at the threshold you’ve created at your real front door. Does the threshold to your home say everything you want it to say to others? Is it orderly, inviting, and attractive? And most important, does it help people make a clear distinction, as they cross your threshold, between the bustle of the outside world and the empathy-supporting sanctuary of your home? If not, why not?
EVALUATING YOUR EMPATHIC SANCTUARY
Your home can be a getaway and a sanctuary for you—a place where you can live openly as your real self and be surrounded by the uniquely healing influences and practices that refresh, delight, and rejuvenate you. Your home can be the recharging and resourcing station you need if you’re going to develop and maintain your emotional awareness and your empathic skills in what can be an emotionally confusing world. Your home can be a specifically nurturing habitat for the specific needs of your unique organism; it can be a threshold between the outside world and your inner sanctuary.
Notice that I qualified each of the sentences in the preceding paragraph with the word can. Yes, your home can be these things, but if you’ve never seen yourself as an empathic healing presence in a world that needs you—and if you’ve never considered that you have the right to be a happy and healthy empath—then your home might be kind of a drag right now. It might be yet another thing that’s always clamoring for your attention. It might be a place that doesn’t honor your unique needs or your unique sensitivities.
If that’s true, congratulations. You’ve discovered trouble in an environment where you actually have control and where you have the right and the power to make changes. When we look at your workplace in Chapter 10, you won’t often have that power; so at work, we’ll have to make whatever changes we can in an imperfect situation. But in your home? We’re golden. In your home, even if you share it with parents, children, or roommates, you can carve out a private space for yourself and start to create a specific terrarium that will meet the needs of your unique empathic self.
If you can’t—if your home environment is currently unsupportive and there’s not much that you can do—you can still use your empathic mindfulness skills, resourcing skills, and thresholding abilities to create a portable empathic sanctuary inside your own body. You can also reach out for the support of sensitive and empathic relationships—through artistic expression, intellectual pursuits, movement, nature, animals, and other empathic people. Empathic and social support can be lifelines that will help you transition out of a currently unsupportive environment and into a place where you can live and breathe as your authentic self.
As we move outward from your body, into your home, and into the social world, we’ll focus on the quality of your relationships. When they’re healthy and supportive, your relationships can facilitate your emotional and empathic development in marvelous ways.