by Ora North
Identify Your Traumas
You’ve already done a lot of work in identifying your traumas. You’ve done this when working with your core wounds and triggers. Have you noticed that certain parts of this work have been harder to deal with than others? Were there some exercises that brought up more pain than others? Now is the time to create some more space for those tough-to-digest feelings of trauma. In the Do the Work section of this chapter, you’ll have the opportunity to identify and revisit those.
Creating Safe Spaces for Trauma
By doing this kind of emotional digging, a lot of old trauma can surface. That trauma needs a safe space to exist. A safe space is an emotional container that’s free of judgment and which allows your experience to unfold naturally. For your safe space, first create the actual physical environment. Go somewhere you feel protected and comfortable. Get away from people who don’t understand what you’re doing. When you create a physical environment to protect the trauma that comes up, you automatically set a precedent—that it’s okay to feel your feelings.
Next, limit your trauma exposure while in your safe space. Even though you are setting yourself up to experience your triggers and your trauma, you don’t have to experience more trauma and triggers than you’re prepared to handle. Knowing your limits is crucial. Emotional work is hard and it really opens you up, which makes you much more raw and vulnerable than usual. Don’t think that you always have to face your trauma head-on in the boldest way possible. You’re a beautiful, sensitive being, and sometimes you need time to face it with courage. If triggers of your trauma are simply too much to handle, attempting to face them head-on may actually retraumatize you.
If you’re working through the trauma of being physically assaulted, avoid watching violent movies and TV shows. If you’re working through the anxiety of your trauma, avoid large crowds or situations that you know will trigger that anxiety. If you’re working through the trauma of rape, stay away from those pop-BDSM books. Get off social media for a bit. You don’t need to be exposed to similar trauma as you’re processing the initial trauma.
There is no shame in avoiding known triggers to your trauma. You need to take care of yourself, and that often means you need to be extra sensitive to and protective of your vulnerability. It’s okay to avoid situations that you know trigger you. It’s okay to avoid places, people, or activities that could potentially retraumatize you. Forcing yourself into a stressful or traumatizing situation is not strength—it’s disrespect. You don’t have to prove to yourself or anyone else what you can handle. You don’t have to prove to yourself or anyone else that you’re an indestructible force of nature or that you’re “overcoming” your trauma. It’s important to remember that you don’t simply “overcome” your trauma. You develop a relationship with it, a loving understanding of it, and then it plays less and less of a role in your life as a result. Your safe space should be free of expectations like overcoming trauma or being strong. In your safe space, you’re allowed to simply exist in your feelings, however they want to show up.
Your next step is to do some focused work with your trauma. Exercises like journaling, personifying your feelings, tracing your triggers back, and having conscious pity parties can help you work through some of that trauma while in that safe space. Letting yourself grieve is an important step, since our trauma is often pushed down to the extent that we may not even realize its depth. Screaming and crying for three straight days might be just what your trauma needs. Writing a book about your experience could be just what your trauma needs. Whatever you can do to feel that grief and express it safely is what you need to do. Since trauma changes you, you may need to mourn a version of yourself that you once were, or that you cannot be, when you’re working with your grief. In the Do the Work section of this chapter, an exercise will help you process this kind of grief.
It’s important to know that, even if you have your own safe space, you may need additional support. None of us can be strong and capable all of the time, especially when working with our own trauma. Sometimes the grief is too strong and the feelings are too real, and we can’t do it on our own. Sometimes we have to know what our limits are for going it alone.
If the trauma is too much, there is no shame in seeking support. Whether that support looks like staying with your mom for a few days, working with a healer, or seeking medical attention, all support is good support. Trauma and grief are difficult and complex processes, and it’s natural to feel completely destabilized by it all. If you have a history of complex trauma, or prolonged or multiple traumatic events, it’s even more important to have extra support, since that’s harder to deal with on your own. It’s always a good thing to find support in whatever way you can, whether you call a compassionate friend or you pay an amazing healer or therapist to hold the space for you.
When you go through this kind of emotional work, you allow yourself to be a caterpillar in a cocoon. Inside, you’ve broken down into a big pile of conscious goo, and you need that cocoon to protect you while you’re so vulnerable. Having that cocoon in the form of supportive people and a dedicated safe space will help you become the gorgeous butterfly that you really are.
Feeling Is Healing
Pulling up so much of your past pain can be jarring to your system. If you’ve been repressing so much of your pain for so long, that pain will rage as it rises up to be validated and cleansed. This emotional work actually causes energetic healing, and as that healing takes place, it pushes out the old pain you don’t need anymore. When it’s being pushed out, you have to feel it being pushed out. All of those raw emotions that clutched your pain are being released, but you will feel the intensity and purity of those raw emotions. If you release a lot of rage, you’ll feel that rage coming out as if it were brand-new. Because you’re an empath, and emotions are magnified for you, that rage will feel even stronger and sharper.
If you feel rage, allow yourself to feel the rage fully. Releasing your pain is uncomfortable, but it has to be done, and just because you feel those emotions are out of control, that doesn’t mean you’re not on the right track. It doesn’t mean you’re going insane. It doesn’t mean you’ve lost all your progress. It means you’re exactly on track, you’re doing the right things, and you have to let these things pass through.
This process can last longer if you’re releasing a lot, and it can often feel like you’re stuck in the grieving of the emotion and you can’t get out. But this part is not forever.
This part is the necessary mess of healing. Healing is not a pretty process, contrary to what gurus may tell you. Healing is brutal and honest and raw and destructive. There is a beauty in that destruction, but it’s not easy and it’s not calm. Know that this part will pass, even if you feel overwhelmed by those emotions.
This emotional storm will pass, and you’ll be surprised to find how calm you are on the other side of it.
Integrating Trauma
It might be difficult to imagine a life without latent trauma causing all sorts of problems. Integrating trauma is rarely easy, as it requires so much work, attention, and vulnerability. After doing any emotional work on your trauma—whether it was identifying it, energetically feeling it, or expressing it in a sacred way—time for integration is needed.
Energetic integration is fairly simple in what it needs: lots of water, rest, and permission. It needs to cry when it feels like it; it needs to laugh when it feels like it; it needs to sleep as much as possible. You may even find yourself hungrier than usual after some intense emotional work, as the food you eat can help ground you during integration. Being gentle with yourself is necessary, especially since you may have a lot of different feelings popping up unexpectedly at different times. Allowing the feelings to flow through you will ease the integration and will naturally lead you into the next phase of integration, which is likely more water and more sleep. Because you’re especially sensitive to the energies of others as an empath, it’s a
lso important to make sure you’re getting enough alone time so that your process isn’t being confused by too many other energies.
Integrating our trauma doesn’t mean we rid ourselves of it. It doesn’t mean we’ve defeated it or destroyed it or will never have to deal with it again. Integrating it means that it won’t run our lives anymore, and that we can use it to better understand ourselves and the way we see the world. Integrating it helps us express our stories in a sacred way, without losing power to them. Integrating your trauma will actually give you more personal power in the world.
There is a Japanese art known as Kintsugi, in which broken pottery is repaired using a special lacquer dusted with powdered gold. This process gives the repaired item seams of shining gold, emphasizing the places where it was once broken. Kintsugi translates to “golden joinery,” and its alternate name, Kintsukuroi, translates to “golden repair.” The Japanese believe that items which have been broken are more interesting, and that their brokenness offers a beautiful history of the item. Repairing such a piece with gold shows a respect and an appreciation of that history, without the need to hide or disguise it. Many would agree that these items are far more beautiful and unique after having been broken.
Kintsugi is an amazing physical reflection of how to integrate trauma. Imagine how much better the world would be if we could all treat our trauma and brokenness the way Kintsugi treats pottery. What if we didn’t have to hide the places where trauma has broken us? If we could see the beauty in the places we’ve been broken, call back those broken pieces with love, and use gold to repair ourselves, the voices and stories and histories in this life would be astonishing, life-affirming, and incredibly healing. What if we emphasized our own broken history to make our life more beautiful?
Most amazing causes are borne out of the pain of brokenness and trauma. Foundations are started by those who have lost loved ones to diseases and suffering. Movements are started by those who have been afflicted by injustice. Stories are written and songs are sung by those who cannot contain the pain inside themselves any longer. As Rumi said, “The wound is where the light enters.”
Integrating your trauma is like letting the light enter. It’s the practice of loving all your broken pieces and fusing them together with love, support, and community.
Do the Work
Working through your trauma allows you to move more fully and freely into your life. These exercises will help you process your pain.
Name Your Pain
Look back on all the exercises you’ve done so far. Look at your core wounds, your victim and your villain, your energy signatures, your triggers. Remember which ones were the most difficult for you. Was there a certain practice that felt much heavier than the others? Make a note of which parts were the hardest for you to process.
Each of those exercises was tied to experiences in your life. Allow yourself to remember the experiences that made those practices so difficult. Make a list of those life experiences. This is where your trauma is.
Mourn Yourself
Trauma changes us. Because we don’t ask for the trauma, it can be really hard to accept those changes. You may struggle to hold on to an idea of a person that doesn’t fit you anymore, a person that you can’t be anymore. If you hold on to these ideas of the person you can’t be because of your trauma, you will start to feel like a ghost in your own body. Acknowledging and crying over this person that you cannot be will help you move forward with who you actually are. These old versions of yourself as well as the desired versions of yourself that never came to pass need to die so that you can live in the present.
In your journal, write an obituary for the aspect of yourself that cannot be. Allow yourself the space to mourn yourself—the you that cannot be.
Epilogue
If you’ve read this far, you should feel incredibly proud of yourself. You’ve conquered what very few people will attempt in their lifetime. You have faced yourself and have reclaimed the power that facing yourself entails.
You’ve examined what it means to be an empath. You’ve flipped the script to focus on who you are for yourself, instead of just who you are for other people. You’ve approached your brokenness, your shadow side, and your inner child with open eyes and an open heart. You’ve built up your energy signatures and learned what messages your feelings bring you. You’ve learned to differentiate between your own energy and the energy of others, and you’ve used that knowledge to cleanse yourself of the energy that’s not yours. You’ve realized your boundaries are always in their perfect place, and you’ve learned how to communicate with your intuition to find and fine-tune those boundaries. You’ve seen the energetic patterns in your relationships and how they connect to your core wounds.
Most of all, you’ve learned to harness the power of the darkness that is your shadow side. All of those intense emotional ups and downs have revealed a source of clarity and stability in your own practice and your own growth. This kind of awareness will follow you for the rest of your life, and you will be able to handle your emotions and your relationships with a grace you never thought possible.
Knowing yourself this well creates solid stability in your abilities. Knowing yourself this well prevents others from messing with that stability. Knowing yourself this well means that no one will ever be able to take your power away.
My wish for you is that you go out there and show up in the world in a new way. You have a unique set of skills no one else possesses, and that’s what will change the world. My wish for you is that you’ll never stand in your own way again and that you will do what you came here to do. Whether you’re a healer, a teacher, a channeler, a parent, an activist, a friend, you can only be a force of unbelievable power and strength now. Owning and reclaiming all of the power that comes from integrating your darkness will change you and the lives of everyone around you.
Know that you can come back to this work and these practices for the rest of your life. Your energy will shift and change as you grow, and so the work will shift and change as well.
While you can’t make yourself not be an empath anymore, you can see how your life can change when you work with it rather than against it. Where you were once overwhelmed by everyone else’s energy, you can now sort it out, creating space for yourself. Where you were once frustrated with all the complexities in your relationships, you can now see the energetic patterns you’re a part of and decide to alter them or cut them off altogether.
You’re in control of your own life.
And I can’t wait to see what you do with it.
Resources
Energetics 101
For an empath, everything begins and ends with energy. If you are sensitive to other people and their feelings, what you’re actually sensitive to is energy. Energy affects us on all levels: emotional, physical, psychological, spiritual. Each level has its own way of processing and reacting to energy, which is why it’s so important to figure out the way you receive and process energy. Every emotion has an energy, and energy is constantly moving and changing. Anger is an energy. Love is an energy. When someone expresses anger or love, what they’re really doing is experiencing the energy of anger and love, and trying to find ways to share what they’re feeling. You know when you step into a room, and you get strange vibes from it? Or when you walk into a crowd and you suddenly feel overwhelmed? That’s because you’re feeling energy. You may feel strange vibes from an empty room because of the energy that’s left from whomever was in it before. You may feel overwhelmed in a crowd because you’re feeling the energy of everyone in the crowd.
Empaths are like barometers for energy. You can pick up on and read the energetic influences around you. You’re also reading the energetic influences within yourself at the same time. This explains why it can become really confusing or overwhelming for an empath to figure out whose energy is whose. And since you can’t control the way that others put out energy around you, it’s es
pecially important to control the way that you handle your own energy.
One way you can start working with your energy is by working with your chakras. Chakras are spinning wheels of energy in your body that are always working and processing energy. There are seven primary chakras.
The root chakra is located at the base of your spine. Its color is red. This chakra works with your basic instincts—your physical survival and your primary drives of hunger, thirst, sex, and safety. This chakra rules passion, anger, lust, and the fight-or-flight response.
Your second chakra, the sacral chakra, is located just below the naval. Its color is orange. This chakra works with your emotional well-being. This chakra is one of the most important chakras to work with when diving into empath shadow work. Here you’ll find the primary center for your emotions and how you process them.
Your third chakra, the solar plexus chakra, is located above your naval and below your rib cage, where your diaphragm rests. Its color is yellow. This chakra rules your willpower, your vitality, and your ability to confidently make decisions.
Your fourth chakra, your heart chakra, is located right in the center of your chest. Its color is green. Pale pink is also a heart chakra color. Your heart chakra rules your capacity for love, forgiveness, and compassion.
Your fifth chakra, your throat chakra, is located in the center of your throat. Its color is blue. This chakra rules your ability to speak your truth and use your voice.
Your sixth chakra, your third-eye chakra, is located in the center of your forehead. Its color is indigo, and this chakra rules your intuition.
Your seventh chakra, your crown chakra, is located at the top of your head. Its color is violet (or white), and this chakra rules your connection to higher powers.