If you’re an empath, you feel the energy and emotions of people and animals. You’re sensitive to your environment, including noise, clutter, brightness, and the overall feeling of your surroundings. Being an empath also means that you have unique struggles, including a tendency to feel lonely. It’s not hard to understand why loneliness would be an empath’s safe zone.
When you feel the emotions of those around you, it’s tough to know where their anxiety and pain ends and yours begins. When it comes to closer relationships, you may feel a constant sense of emotional overload.
Dr. Judith Orloff, Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA and bestselling author, explains that empaths are “super-responders; our sensory experience of relationship is the equivalent of feeling objects with fifty fingers instead of five.”
Just as massage therapists can feel fatigue in their hands and wrists, an empath’s “emotional fingers” can tire and seize up. Feeling and processing the emotions of those around you is so exhausting that you begin subconsciously pushing people away as a means of self-protection.
You put up walls to protect yourself
You may only allow people to get so close before you put up walls. It’s like you have an intricate system of gates surrounding your heart. Only those you love and trust most are allowed into your inner court. But even they can’t get through the armour you wear day in and day out to protect your energy and emotions.
It’s ironic because there’s a myth that empaths are the most giving and openhearted people. And that may be the case for some empaths, but there is another side to the story.
A damaged empath
For empaths who grew up in emotional chaos, isolation is a hardwired coping mechanism. Imagine a hypersensitive child who can feel every mood and predict every teardrop, living in a home where there is constant arguing or even violence.
Imagine if the people she must rely on to protect her are unknowingly drowning her in a sea of anxiety and depression. The girl doesn’t have the tools, nor is it her responsibility, to heal the situation. She feels helpless and heartbroken. From this young age she learns that the only safe space is within herself.
How to deal with chronic loneliness as an empath
The irony about empaths is that you spend so much time dealing with other people’s emotions that you don’t know how to process your own emotions.
You might be highly emotionally intelligent and aware of your feelings. But knowing what to do about said feelings, as well as the ones locked away in the basement of your subconscious, is the biggest challenge.
Much of what you feel today is linked to unprocessed emotions from your past. They are the feelings the little girl stuffed down as she focused on surviving.
Today, those unprocessed emotions leak out—and sometimes explode out like fireworks—when you’re emotionally triggered. When someone starts to get too close and that self-protection button gets pushed…when they criticize your decisions and your sense of self-worth unravels in an instant…when another person’s depression reminds you of the sadness that engulfed your childhood home…
When any of these emotional triggers are activated, it’s like accelerating a car on a dusty road. Before you know it, you’re choking on a cloud of emotions all getting kicked up at once. It’s an overwhelming feeling that you just want to escape. Isolation seems like the best solution. But it’s only a temporary one.
How to better manage emotions as an empath
When I do deep transformational work with my clients, they inevitably get triggered emotionally. The truth is that this is a necessary part of the process if they are to be free of any kind of lifelong pattern like loneliness.
You see, as painful as it is to have suppressed feelings of unworthiness, shame, fear, or anger come up, it’s really an opportunity.
There is immense power locked up in your unprocessed emotions. Think of it this way. We are energetic beings and all emotions—even the ones we ignore and hide—are made up of energy, too. Release those emotions and you free up A LOT of wasted energy.
There are countless ways that you can be supported as you deal with unprocessed emotions and overcome a pattern of isolation. I personally have worked with energy healers and hypnotherapists.
When I coach my clients through their transformations I draw on a wide variety of tools, including neuro-linguistic programming, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), visualization exercises, and other techniques to create pattern interrupts and release emotional blocks.
I recommend that you also develop a dynamic toolkit of rituals, exercises, and supports to process difficult emotions. Start now before you’re emotionally triggered and feeling so lonely it hurts. This way you’ll have solid support systems in place before you feel like your life is falling apart.
Over to you
Are you an empath who struggles with loneliness? Please feel free to share your story in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.
Love,
P.S. If you’re new here, or you haven’t seen my face in a while, here are 5 things you should know about me:
1. My name is Michaela and I’m an HSP, INFP, introvert.
2. I LOVE apocalyptic movies (currently obsessed with The Rain on Netflix).
3. I’m the author of The Irresistible Introvert.
4. I help introverts gain confidence, self-love, and fulfilling friendships in their own innie way.
5. I share some of my best insights, wisdom, and free ebooks with my subscribers. Join my Innie Tribe and get a free Introvert Connection Guide here.
Thank you for a helpful article that addresses why I have limited my interactions with people. You have provided much needed insight and excellent suggestions for healthy coping with life.
You’re very welcome Roger <3
Very relevant and helpful article, Michaela!
Certainly rings true for me and my experiences: I have needed to be very selective about whom to share time with so that I have the resources to do so with the people I care about. And when alone there is a noticeable drop in stimulation / activation so sometimes I have noticed that change and called it “loneliness.”
Thanks for sharing that, Rob. Good to hear from you. 🙂
I can relate, very much so. Thank you for being able to put into words what many of us can’t. For me, knowing anyone can relate to how I feel as well, makes me feel less isolated in the world.
Love, Light, & Blessings.
I live in a senior community where almost every interaction can be present: hostile, funny, kind, sad, depressed, joy, etc. What an emotional ride…
You really do understand!
I have worked and been friends with a wide variety of people and have taken on a lot of different feelings from them. It has been hard to block out the negative and I still struggle so have distanced myself from quite a few people while still learning what I have to do to not take everything on. Still a long way to go…
Much needed article…thank you ❤️
This is a very helpful article my niece is an empath. At first, I used to think that she is an Introvert but I feel sometimes that there is more to it so now I fully understands
It is hard to find people to talk to about being an empath. I dont know how todeal with sadness. I have a spouce that i cant be around all the time. He is diabetic , has sleep apnea , and presently waiting for diagnoses on cancer testing. As an empath i cannot be around him without feeling his sickness, sadness, etc. I feel lonely. We stay separated often because i cant handle it all. He understands but it is sad. Im upstairs he is on the lower level. We are prisoners in pur home. Confined and lonely.
Thank you Michaela,
I have felt lonely for so much of my life, i even feel lonely when I’m with my boyfriend (ie, if we are disagreeing). Im reading about being an empath on your site and so much of it makes sense. At my last few places of employment, I have misrepresented myself and none of my coworkers knew me as the kind individual i know myself as, i felt very misunderstood at those places. I have a wonderful partner, and we agree on everything important, but out arguments (literally over gummi worms, once) devolve into these hellish yelling contests that go nowhere but last for two to four hours 🙁 we always make up and agree that we have emotional baggage that we both need to resolve but i never can seem to talk my feelings out. Feelings from my past and present come marching in every day and i cry over my dad, my ex, kids from fourth grade….it feels like Im confronting my feelings but then why dont they go away? It’s a journey, i bet. Im listening to a great hypnosis app called mindifi, but i definitely need more help!
Love, Anna
I am an Empath, hsp, introverted healer. And boy do I isolate. I always have. I have always questioned why I am like this. I have probably spent a good portion of my life alone, thinking. My mind does not shut off when i am awake, ever. The world is very noisy to me in the way that all the terrible things going on try to affect the way I feel, it is a constant struggle to remain positive, But I have learned it is sensory over load so I even went as far as to shut off my cable to limit what I hear daily. It helps.
I run a recovery-support group for women who have lived with domestic violence and for an Empath I have grown so much and I know my purpose on this planet now, which makes being an Empath so much easier. My group is online though so really even though I interact with women all day, I am still alone. But for me it is what i need after doing what I do. I have listened and consumed other members emotions all day, for some reason i can take a lot of people’s pain and guide them out of the darkness, but an Empath can only do that so long before they must recharge. So again being alone is probably best.
I have been told by many spiritual teacher’s that an Empath’s journey here on earth is a lonely experience. Not saying you don’t have relationships but many times those relationships end up abusive. So really an Empath has to educate themselves on all the dangers that are out there waiting for them, learn to apply boundaries and use them. We are prone to getting involved with narcissist’s and if you have ever done that you will understand that they destroy empath’s. So when all is said and done you are very cautious of people and who you let in your life, leaving you again, alone. I have been doing what I do for almost 6 years now and I have seen the patterns of abuse and it is the same every time. until an Empath educates and empowers themselves to not live in fear, Loneliness will be a problem. But once you heal your own wounds loneliness becomes peace and peace is the one thing an Empath needs to not feel so alone. I hope I explained that so it made some sense, I loved this article because I can totally relate. Sometimes I wish I could change the way I am, an introvert, but I have not figured that one out yet. thanks
Ok, where to start? Well I’m highly empathic I have learned how to filter out the emotions of others. It’s my own feelings I struggle with. I am a introvert but have also learned how to be in social situations. But what I have trouble with is feeling alone even with my closest friends . And I struggle with not having someone in my life that I can be close to that understands me. Not having love in my life that stays. I am lost and alone and have been 90% of my life.I hide it well. No one knows. But I always feel alone.
I think a part of my experience as a damaged empath [your description of that for me is precise and complete] reveals the depths of where it can take you if you don’t get a handle on it.
I grew up as an empath in extreme poverty, my knees bigger than my thighs and sores on my face most of the time. I was brutalized as a constant, and almost died on three occasions (drowned in a basement industrial tub at age 5, beat so badly, near death, having my my first out of body experience at age 8, and the last time, at age 15, in a coma in the basement for three days, and when I awakened my mother was looking into my eyes and said, “You have to leave and never come back”, which I did).
I became a hard-core New York City street kid, and at age 20 I was sent to what Dr. Karl Menninger claimed in his book, The Crime of Punishment, was the worst prison in America at that time. The main ingredient of that status was that you could kill anyone you wanted with the slightest finesse and not get an extra day of added time, because it wasn’t a concern with the guards: we were the “last stop” prisoners, those perceived as not reachable and better off dead for our sake and the sake of everyone else in and outside prison. The advantage of this horror story for an empath is that it was rare for prisoners to fight. It was always an anticipated second-to-second death match, never a fight: you could blink at the wrong moment and get shived, which created the most calm of prison environments (and I already lived in high anxiety and severe depression as my ground my entire life, so this rabidly dark and fear-based environment didn’t have such an impact on me as other prisoners — and I relished that peaceful environment).
Here’s the thing: I got released after ten years on parole. I still owed them 6 years. And I realized not too long after being out that my 5′ x 7′ cell was the best home I’d ever had, a place I could indulge other worlds, especially in literature, philosophy and psychology, and, most importantly, a place where I could minimize emotional environments with ease, and most of my time was spent in blissful isolation in my 5 x 7 cell. So I returned to prison, and then, after a year, they threw me out again on parole, and when I again chose to come back, they wouldn’t accept me. It was strange for them, no doubt, but I’m sure I wasn’t the first empath they had encountered.
You published a great description of what empathy is and how to deal with it. And I pray every empath who reads it takes it to heart. It is a precise and concise road-map for empaths, and thanks much for that.
I’ve been an empath my whole life, after realizing this at the age of 19 I somehow feel depressed. I try to go out to free my mind but end up regretting why I didn’t just stay in my room. Being social is hard for me. I really don’t know how to deal with this loneliness anymore 😔.