Mastering empaths and relationships require an empath to grow. The struggle empaths face in an intimate relationship is the deep desire for a loving connection that conflicts with a deep desire to be alone. When single, you long for a soulmate. When in a relationship, you become overwhelmed and long to escape. The conflict can only be reconciled with self-development through emotional competency.
When you find someone and commit to an intimate relationship without working on your emotional competency, you may experience these challenges common to empaths and relationships.
Three Challenges of Empaths and Relationships
Challenge #1: You feel your partner’s emotions without knowing it
If you are an untrained empath, you may feel your partner’s emotions as your own. You may be unaware that you are sloshing around in his emotional stuff. The relationship will be messy because you will be confused.
Challenge #2: You know you are feeling your partner’s emotions and you want to fix them.
You feel your partner’s emotions, see some brokenness, and have an impulse to fix it. If your partner is emotionally unavailable or shutdown, you face a train wreck. You have to fix him, while he doesn’t want you anywhere near that pain. The conflict can be epic. Empaths and relationships fail when you do not control your urge to fix things.
Challenge #3: You feel your partner’s emotions and start taking on his behaviors.
You might unconsciously take on your partner’s behaviors. When he is frustrated and lashes out, you become frustrated and lash out, probably at your kids. The emotional boundaries vanish. You do what is broken in him. You experience confusion and self-loathing.
Solutions for Empaths That Struggle in Relationships
Find Your Center Every Morning
Finding your center means experiencing who you are by yourself. Centering yourself should be an early morning practice of simple meditation or contemplation. Sit in stillness and experience the spark of divine energy that is the essential you. Click here for a meditation on centeredness created for empathically sensitive people. Learn what you feel like when you are aware of this energy. Practice holding onto it. As your day progresses, recall the morning experience to bring yourself back to your center.
Become Emotionally Available
Most empaths are emotionally unavailable, despite being sensitive, intuitive, highly emotional, empathetic, and caring. Blaming others for their lack of boundaries, discomforts, and pains, as though no fault of the empath is a form of emotional unavailability. The inability to label your own emotions with precision and speed is a form of emotional unavailability. Taking on the role of victim or martyr is a form of emotional unavailability. Just because you have empathic sensitivities does not make you a master of emotions. Becoming a master of empaths and relationships requires you to become emotionally available.
Emotional availability is at its core self-love. Embodying self-love is experiencing and expressing deeper accountability in one’s own future health and well-being.
Emotional availability allows you to be open for an accountable authentic relationship with another, rather than occupying yourself with defensive patterns that serve to protect you.
You become emotionally available by developing emotional competency.
Develop Emotional Competency
Emotional competency is a set of skills and knowledge about emotions. No one learns emotional competency in school or from parents because our culture focuses on rationality, thinking, and analysis. As an empath, you feel far more emotions that non-empaths. Sensibly, you should master what you naturally experience.
Emotionally competent people:
- Know the difference between affect and emotion
- Understand the basics of emotions and childhood development
- Understand and recognize emotional invalidation
- Can ignore the words, read the emotions, and reflect emotions of others and self
- Have a vocabulary of emotions linked and categorized with affective states.
- Understand the layers of emotions that all humans experience.
- Have explored their top 10 emotional triggers, uncovered the trigger sources, and have scripted new responses to reprogram their brains.
Create Space and Boundaries
You have a need to be alone in your own space. Explain this to your partner long before you commit to a deeper relationship. If you date someone who is needy and clinging, stop. He will never allow you your own space. Likewise, a boyfriend or partner who needs the world to orbit around him will not honor your boundaries.
Insecure men will violate your need for space; emotionally secure men will honor your needs because they will not need you to fill their needs.
What some indications of boundary problems? An expectation that you will return text messages instantly; that you will drop everything upon request; that you are never allowed your own space and time; and that your requests are dismissed. Empaths and relationships do not mix when boundaries are violated.
Claiming space and boundaries requires courage. As a child, you may have taught that asking for your needs is selfish and rude. You may have been guilt-tripped so that you feel shame when you need your space. Walk through those feelings. They are not comfortable, but when you sit with them and let them swirl without effect, you will gain power over them. Each time you ask for space and feel shame, let the shame wash through you. Experience it in its fullest. It will lose its power over you. Shame-avoidance gives shame its power. Shame acceptance takes its power away, especially when you are righteously seeking to meet your own needs.
Don’t Try To Please; Don’t Try To Fix
You feel your partner’s emotions. You have a tendency to please and appease. You drive to fix what is broken because you experience the brokenness as your own. Ignore these impulses because they do not serve you. When you take responsibility for making others happy by pleasing them, you give your power away. When you try to fix something broken that is not yours, you will fail.
The hardest lesson is to learn to let others suffer in their own brokenness, even when you feel their pain.
When you develop emotional competency, your need to please and fix will go away. You will see the brokenness of your partner and recognize that it is not yours. You will have compassion, not out-of-control empathy.
Empaths and relationships require emotional competency.
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