5 Signs You Are A Damaged Empath and 8 Liberating Ways to Heal

How Do You Know If You Are A Damaged Empath?

You Are Always Drained and Exhausted.

Damaged empaths are so attuned to other people’s emotions, that often the only way to save themselves from the constant overwhelming onslaught is to numb out. A protective shield comes up to block out the never-ending waves of hurt, worry, despair, anger, and other emotions that incessantly slam into empaths. Many feel that they only have two options in situations like this: put up walls up,or burn out.

When a damaged empath is so attuned to what everyone else is feeling, she suffers from severe anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and even physical pain. None of it originates inside you! It’s like a thundering torrent of external influences thumping into you from all directions, and it never seems to let up. You experience empath shutdown.

You Find Yourself In Co-Dependent Relationships

When you enable another’s addiction, poor mental health, immaturity, irresponsibility, or under-achievement, you are in a co-dependent relationship. Your fixer tendency puts you in relationships with unhealthy partners. You believe you can fix everything and make life blissful. Worse, you put yourself into deep misery. This is a sign of a damaged empath.

You Are Frustrated and Confused

The more you try to help, the more you are hurt. You do not understand why people don’t get you. No matter how hard you try, your efforts are met with anger, resentment, and hostility.

You Attract Overt Maladaptive Narcissists As Lovers

Overt maladaptive narcissists express the qualities of rage that you, as a damaged empath, disown. The narcissist exploits your repressed rage (see below) to keep you hooked into a relationship and capable of being manipulated. You are sucked into a relationship pattern of idealization, devaluation, and discard.

At first, you are the perfect partner and showered with love and adoration. Eventually, your narcissistic partner turns on you, devaluing, humiliating, and demeaning you. Since you feel responsible for his well-being, you work harder to become even more understanding, empathetic, and tolerant, neutralizing your unreleased rage.

You do everything you can to please, and nothing works. Ultimately, you are discarded. Then he comes back, and the cycle repeats.

Narcissists, to avoid the pain of their own rage, will shift the anger onto a damaged empath as long as she denies her own rage and her boundaries.

You Are A Pleaser

You hate unpleasantness and conflict. To avoid that, you do everything you can to please everyone around you. If people around you are content, you feel their happiness and are happy.

You Are Sucked Into Other People’s Drama

Because you feel everything around you, when people argue, get into conflicts, become depressed, or otherwise become cynical, you experience it as your own. You may try to fix it and, in the process, get sucked into the drama.

The Rage Of The Empath

Rage is an expression of despair, fear, disgust, shame, and overwhelming anger. It is a visceral and emotional experience triggered by a perceived or real boundary violation, threat of abandonment, or threat of harm to you, someone, or something you care about.

Many empaths experienced childhood trauma and emotional abuse. This abuse created a deep sense of rage at being hurt, unsafe, abandoned, and unloved. As a child, empaths could not express anger for fear of losing what little security and safety they had. They suppressed it deep within themselves.

The capacity to feel another’s pain emerged as a way to override the grief and terror of causing harm and disconnection if the rage were released.

As adults, many empaths are afraid of their rage and suppress it to avoid the fear of abandonment. They may feel humiliated or shamed because rage does not line up with their identity as a healer and an empath.

Bottled up rage may come out as co-dependency, over-accountability to others, self-imposed perfectionism, self-denial, self-hatred, addictive behaviors, and self-dis

missal. Empaths continually have to prove themselves as worthy of connection. Thye disown their capacity for rage and hatred towards others.

Empaths may also use their spiritual practice and their capacity to generate more loving, accepting, and compassionate states, as a way to bypass their rage. They identify with the healer in service to others to avoid falling into depression, to maintain peace and to feel a connection. Often times, empaths fall into the trap of spiritual arrogance.

This is the essence of the damaged empath.

How Can You, A Damaged Empath, Heal Yourself?

Express Your Rage

The trick to healing from a damaged empath is to fully feel your rage. Accept that you can cause harm and are allowed to feel anger, lose your composure, and lash out.

Acknowledge in your rage the powerlessness around being repeatedly manipulated into performing empathy and care up against an impossible, double standard of being nice all of the time. Embrace that you sometimes must use aggression and force to get others to back off if they have felt entitled to your energy, time, and resources.

Accept that this does not make someone you narcissistic, irresponsible, or entitled, but expresses your self-love and dignity.

The more you embrace being royally enraged, the less power others have over you. They cannot use your fear of your fundamental human nature against you to manipulate you any longer.

Your righteous rage will release any unrealistic integrity, over-accountability, and self-policing you unconsciously employ to redirect your rage inward.

You will become empowered, whole, and emotionally available. You will re-establish appropriate boundaries and be cared for while being more genuine and authentic.

You have my permission to release your rage on the world. Go for it!

Dive Into Your Painful Emotions

You have a cauldron of pain inside you stemming from childhood abuses. These emotions are overwhelmingly hurtful. As a child, you could not experience them and process them. As an adult, you can and must. They will not annihilate you. They are simply waves of energy bottled up deep within you.

Sit quietly and let the waves flow. For a few moments, you will be overwhelmed. Sit with it. Let yourself be carried into the energy. In less than a minute, the wave will pass and the emotion will be released. Do this over and over, fighting your fear and anxiety. Trust that you have the inner strength to survive the waves, and you will.

Become Empathic

Just because you are an empath does not mean that you are empathic. Being an empath is not the same as having empathy. Empathy is the ability to look beyond the superficial façade of what a person says and does, understand their situation, behaviors, beliefs, feelings and values and reflect it all back with a “you” statement. Empathy is a learned skill, whereas being an empath is a kinesthetic, physical, and emotional experience.

Acknowledge Your Imperfection To Find Your Perfection

You are human. You have the right to be imperfect and make mistakes. Acknowledge this imperfection to find your perfection. As long as you deny your faults and deep self-hatred, you will never uncover the perfect you.

Disown Your Spiritual Arrogance

Damaged empaths over-rely on their spirituality to create identity. They get caught up in new age ideas that are not grounded in truth. Worse, because they feel so much, they develop a sense of superiority over non-empaths. This is spiritual arrogance.

Disown it. Cultivate spiritual humility. You are not better than others. You do not have a monopoly on spiritual experience or knowledge. Empowered empaths have no need to judge others as spiritually inferior or immature.

Give Responsibility For Other People’s Feeling Back To Them

You may feel other people’s feelings, but you do not have to take responsibility for them. Give the responsibility for those feelings back to the person who owns them. Do not take them on as your own. You do this by simply saying, “I ask that all feelings that are not mine be returned to their rightful owner.” It is that easy. Try it.

Stop Identifying Yourself As A Fixer Or Pleaser

You became a fixer and pleaser as a way to soothe your own anxiety over other people’s feelings. Acknowledge those feelings as belonging to others and stop trying to fix and please. That is not your job. Even if you were successful, you wouldn’t get the credit for it so why take on the responsibility in the first place. You will feel shame and guilt around being selfish. This childhood programming no longer suits you.

Allow yourself to feel deeply into the shame and guilt you were told to feel as a child. Let it wash through you like a wave and clear out of you. Every time you feel compelled to please or fix, stop. Allow any shame or guilt to emerge. Embrace it, and it will pass harmlessly out of you. Resist it, and you will suffer.

No More Double Standards

Finally, stop setting unrealistic expectations. You do not have to better than anyone else. You do not have to be perfect. You do not have to accept abusive behavior from your partner while being an ideal person yourself. This is all offensive programming from childhood. You have permission to set a reasonable standard of conduct for yourself and for those around you. If you mess up, apologize and move on. If other people mess up and it affects you, call them out.

Do The Hard Work

If you are a damaged empath, you can heal. You have to do the hard work. Allow yourself to feel your buried rage, grief, sadness, and frustration. Cry hard and long. Run into those old emotions like you were plunging into the surf. Set reasonable standards for you and those around you. Learn the skills of empathy and emotional competency.

The work is not easy, but healing is the result.

We are putting together a series of courses that will guide you through many of the steps in this article and the others you will find here at empath.help. Tell us what your problems are, and how you feel about what we write about in the Comments section below.