Sometime back, in a Facebook group, someone asked this question: Was there a clear difference between highly sensitive people and empaths?
In this post, I want to talk about my reply to him and also elaborate on this difference a little bit. I self-identify with both these words – HSP and Empath. It’s been a journey for me to think of what these words mean to me, and maybe sharing some thoughts will help you make sense of your own journey. You might be asking these questions: Am I an empath? Am I an HSP? What exactly does this all mean? Without further ado, let’s begin.
From what I have experienced with other sensitive people, it seems like all HSPs are not empaths but all Empaths are HSPs.
My journey with the word Empath began when I came upon it online some years ago. By then, I already knew that I was an HSP and was learning more about how to deal with the gifts and challenges that came with this. At first, the word Empath had a distinctly new-age feel for me. It felt very “alternative,” a little too out there for me to follow. But the more I read about people’s experiences as an empath, the more I realized that while the words and language that were being used to describe these experiences felt foreign, they were essentially talking about my own experience.
As an emotional empath, I tend to feel other people’s experiences in my own body. Their emotions, their curiosity, their anger, their fear, often jumps out at me and I feel it intensely. Because of this, things like setting boundaries becomes that much harder for me. Obviously, if you feel someone’s discomfort in your body when you set a limit, you will find it harder to deal with this process. A lot of my challenges around my own sensitivity are directly related to being an empath.
I talk about my experiences of being an emotional empath in this post on the Sensitive Evolution website.
In more alternative, “spiritual” circles, people call this kind of empathic ability, feeling other people’s energy in your own body, clairsentience or clear sensing. I talk about clairsentience in this post.
There is a certain overlap between the terms HSP and Empath.
I self-identify as both an HSP and an Empath. I think there is a certain commonality of traits shared by people in both these categories. For example, in Dr. Elaine Aron’s self-test for determining whether you are a Highly Sensitive Person, you will find the statement “Other people’s moods affect me.”‘ In Dr. Elaine Aron’s DOES model for summarizing the aspects of high sensitivity, E stands for Emotional Responsivity/Empathy.
Emotional empaths or clairsentients seem to take this intense feeling a step further. Not only do people’s emotions affect them, like it does for HSPs, they also feel these emotions in their own bodies. This can feel really problematic. Emotional empaths can feel like they are taking on other people’s problems, that they are drowning in their stuff. In this piece on Anna Sayce’s website, I share a real-life story from depth psychologist Bill Plotkin’s book Soulcraft. In it, he talks about how our soul wound and our soul gift are closely linked. If you feel like you are an empath, you might get a different perspective from reading it.
Emotional Empaths like me are just one kind of empaths.
The word, empath, I think, is a catch-all term for many different kinds of intuitive experiences. Some empaths get visual information when they meet people. Some feel into letters of the alphabet or numbers and have a very intuitive, empathic connection with them. I talk about these different kinds of empaths in this post on the Sensitive Evolution website.
As far as I know, there is not enough hard science on what it means to be an empath, unlike the HSP trait, which has been studied and validated over the last few decades. It veers off into the “alternative” category. That doesn’t, of course, mean that the “empath” experience isn’t real. For all those of us who resonate with this word, it’s because there’s truth in it. I think new knowledge is always at the edges of science and science is always catching up with it.
So, to sum up, there is no “definite” definition of an empath at this point. It seems to be a catch-all term, the best we have right now, for people who intuitively pick up on different kinds of information outside the realm of the five senses. For me, it’s been a process of learning and reading and coming up with my own understanding (such as it is today).
If you have challenges that come from being an empath, you might like this post I wrote on the difference between empathy and compassion.
I hope this little post gave you some insight on what it means to be an empath. What do you think? What are the gifts and challenges of your own path?
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