[LISA LEWIS] The Am I Ok? Podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Faith Fringes, the Holistic Counseling Podcast, and Beta Male Revolution, go to the website, www.practiceofthepractice.com/network. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast, where you will discover that being highly sensitive is something to embrace and it’s actually a gift you bring to the world. We will learn together how to take ownership of your high sensitivity, so you can make positive changes in your life, in the lives of others, and it’s totally okay to feel this way. I’m your host, Lisa Lewis. I’m so glad you’re here for the journey. Welcome to the Am I Ok? Podcast with me, Lisa Lewis. This is a podcast for highly sensitive people in deep thinkers and this is episode three on how to stop taking on other people’s energy as a highly sensitive person. So we’re going to explore what that looks like, and I’ll give you some background from myself. So as a highly sensitive person, it’s really innate like something that we’re born with. It’s part of our personality and the environment that we live in may contribute to how we and others react or respond to our sensitivity as a good thing or not so good a thing. Some families may embrace being sensitive and other families may not embrace that. And also gender may have a big part of it too. And our society, it’s more acceptable for girls than boys to be sensitive. At an early age, we learn to take on other’s energy. So you may ask, “Well, how do we do that? Why do we do that?” And family conditioning teaches this. Maybe a parent is sensitive, a child wants to make it right, and the family wants to make the family happy. So we learn to take care of the other, the other people in our family, and if they are happy, then we are happy too, because we’re sensitive. We really just want everyone to be happy. And as we get older, we learn that these coping skills that we learned as children are not really serving us and taking care of others can really be a distraction from our needs that are not being met. And they may not have been met because no one ever asked us and we just expect others to lead first. And even in the best of parenting situations, no parent can parent any child perfectly. So even with families that are healthy, that children, or all children can not get all of their needs met, but there’s an adaptive, there’s coping strategies that we learn in our families to help us get through or to be that happy child. In my own clinical practice, what I’ve noticed with clients who are sensitive, I just get really curious about their family dynamic situation, specifically what’s going on with the other siblings in the house. What I came to discover in my own observation with clients and in my own life, is that usually there’s another sibling that needs more attention because they have, let’s say a learning disability, or they have a chronic medical condition, or they have like a neural developmental disorder like autism. So highly sensitive people often are the least difficult child. They can be afraid to show their emotional or physical pain. They may feel that they’re not as important or their feelings don’t matter and this can be all very subtle. We learn to put other people needs first before our own needs and we also can be sensitive to our other siblings needs because we care about them and we care about our other family members. So we tend to put others first before our own needs. And this is all like, we may not even realize it until much later on in life. My own family growing up, my brother, who is my half brother, he would go to visit, stay with his biological dad on the weekends. And I remember him, I must have been so young, like maybe five years old and I would see him go off and probably like missing him too, because I would, he was my only sibling, so I would be there, just me and my parents and maybe when he’s having some of that too. And he also had allergies, he didn’t do so well in school and he was always getting in trouble. So he got a lot of attention, maybe negative attention, but negative attention can be just as good as positive attention. So putting my attention on him too, as well as my parents, and even though I have my parents, are very receptive of me and took care of me, it’s like I’m saying before that. Even the best set of parents cannot meet all of our needs as children. So how does that stop taking on other people’s energies, especially their emotions and feelings? And the first thing is to just to be balanced and centered in your body. And what does your own energy feel like to you? This is a really good question because even when I first started learning and in therapy and about what does it feel like to be sensitive and not even knowing, like what does my own energy feel like and how does it feel different from other people’s energy? So really learning about myself in that way and like, okay, maybe my energy feels light, or maybe it feels more prickly or more tingly and just being checked out of my body for so long. So it was really quite nice to get to know myself better in that way. And now it’s like the differentiation about what I feel like and what other people’s energy feels like. So when things are happening, especially you’re having conversations with people, really hard conversations that are uncomfortable, knowing like, okay, what’s mine and what’s theirs and I don’t have to hold other people’s energy. I can give that back to them. I can set a container for myself or a boundary where I don’t have to take in other people’s emotions. So I got to know what big emotions feel like to me, about what is right and true for me and what is right and true for another person. And you can think about having a container for yourself or what we call a boundary, is think about just how a shell, like a turtle has a shell around its body to protect it. So we want to think about same thing for ourselves, having some kind of shell to protect ourselves, but also a shell that doesn’t, it’s not going to block out also all the good things too. So we want to be aware of that. And if you’ve seen the documentary, My Octopus Teacher, it’s an excellent documentary, and especially I think sensitive people really like it, it’s how they octopus lives when it feels very safe and comfortable in its surroundings. It just swims freely and smoothly and then when there is a predator, when it’s in danger, how smart it is, and it will put, it will actually collect shells with its legs and put like hundreds of shells around his body to protect it from a predator, like a shark. Like, wow, what a smart thing to do. So we are like porous, like a sponge. So protecting your body with the covering. Some people I’ve worked with, like to think of it, of like wearing a raincoat or using an umbrella to protect you from the rain or from like other energies that you don’t want to take in to your own bodies. And the second step is to have a mindset shift in your body and mind to prioritize yourself first, which can feel selfish. And I like to think of the analogy of putting on the oxygen mask first. Like if you’re on an airplane and there is an emergency landing and they say, “Okay, you need to put on your oxygen mask and then you can go around and help all the other people.” So if we don’t put our oxygen masks first we’re not going to be able to either help ourselves or help other people. So we need to put it on first so that we will be present and be able to help others, which is so important to sensitive people. They not only want to help themselves, but they also want to help other people. The third step is to then make your own choices, instead of being in a reactive mode, being in a responding mode where you feel like you have a choice instead of not having new choice. And the question is, is it that easy? So if you liked the show, please rate, review and subscribe to my podcast at www.amiokpodcast.com. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening today at Am I Okay? Podcast. If you are loving the show, please rate, review and subscribe to it on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you’d like to learn how to manage situations as a highly sensitive person, discover your unique gift as a highly sensitive person, and learn how to be comfortable in your own skin, I offer a free eight-week email course called Highly Sensitive People. Just go to amiokpodcast.com to sign up. In addition, I love hearing from my listeners, drop me an email to let me know what is on your mind. You can reach me at lisa@amiokpodcast.com. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want to professional, you should find one.