Are you a highly sensitive person who gets flooded with other people’s feelings?

As a sensitive, you might have had an experience like this: You are talking to someone who is having a strong feeling — anxiety, anger or fear — and SUDDENLY, it feels as if you have taken on their feeling.

It might be that your friend is feeling anxious about a health issue or your dad is expressing anger at a boundary you’ve set.

In situations like these, you might find that you not only empathize with them, you also feel as if your body is overloaded with their feelings. You might get a headache. You might feel your energy sagging.

Their feelings feel so loud to you as a sensitive person that they drown out your own feelings.

And while you empathize with your friend & your dad and want to help this stranger who is telling you their deepest, darkest secret because you are “such a good listener,” you are also feeling as if you want to run away and hide under a blanket.

This is the dark underbelly of being sensitive.

At these times, it really can feel as if you are “too sensitive.” It’s really hard to remember all the talk about the gifts of sensitivity that people often talk about. And if the feeling you are feeling is directed at YOU, like in the case of your dad, then the tussle becomes even more intense.

It is anyways hard for highly sensitive people who are empathetic and often willing to put other people’s needs in front of theirs to say no or to set a boundary. But in situations where the other person’s anger is coming directly at us, it can feel like an energetic bomb exploding right under our skin.

And if you have any toxic, narcissistic people in your life, then the challenge becomes even harder.

These kinds of people will almost throw their rage or anger at you. As a highly sensitive person, you’ll feel overwhelmed by their energy & it’ll feel really hard to stand your ground.

Bullies and toxic people will often also try to hurry you along to make a quick decision — in their favor, of course. It’s almost like they are throwing all this energy at you, and if you don’t know what to do with it, you are energetically pushed.

In these situations, if you can’t access your own inner resources, it might feel easier to just go along in that moment. But later on, you’ll feel resentment burning inside you.

It might feel as if your frustration and your tendency to overgive is curdling something inside you.

Your friends and family may tell you, Why don’t you Just Say No? You just need to push back. You just need to put your foot down.

And of course, as highly sensitive people, we DO need to set these psychological boundaries. We do need to assert our voice. We do need to defend the position we are taking.

But all of this becomes really difficult and can even feel impossible when we don’t have good energetic boundaries.

Energetic boundaries are foundational.

Without them, it can be really tough to stand our ground. Without them, the other person’s feelings and expectations almost get inside our skin. And if we have deep-seated fears, their anger exploding in our own energetic space can feel really scary.

It feels like it can destroy you. It feels like it can annihilate you.

No wonder so many of us highly sensitive people who have a history of trauma or some other deep-seated fear become people pleasers.

We are caught between a rock and a hard place.

We want to set boundaries, but in that moment, faced with the gale of someone’s anger, it feels impossible to do.

And this is where energetic boundaries become important.

Most of us haven’t learned them. Many of us have also grown up in families or cultures that even encourage giving up our core self. For example: Little girls are often told, directly or indirectly, to be pleasing to others and take care of other people’s feelings instead of connect with their own.

So, the problem is not that we are highly sensitive. The problem is that we are highly sensitive people who don’t have good energetic boundaries.

If we did have them, if we could stay embodied in our self, we would still sense other people’s feelings, but we would also have a strong connection to our own.

That would automatically create a distinction between their feelings and our feelings.

It’s when our own self is hazy that other people’s feelings can just wander into our energetic space.

And it’s also a whole lot easier to say NO when can stay grounded and find a way to nourish ourselves on our own instead of looking at other people for nourishment and validation.

So, energetic boundaries are key for highly sensitive people (and in fact, they are key for everybody.) They are the foundational boundaries we need to practice so we can start setting those practical boundaries everyone is telling us we need to set.

As a highly sensitive person who has been on her own journey, I have been looking for the missing energetic pieces for years. I have thought about why things like visualizing a bubble work sometimes but then don’t work at other times. I have been disturbed by the thought that highly sensitive people are essentially weak and have to “protect themselves” with an energetic shield around them.

And I have, finally, after all these years of searching — of going to one talk after another, finding one energy healer’s work after another, and doing a tonne of research — I have FINALLY figured out the missing links.

And I am SO excited to start sharing them with you. They might just be the missing pieces you’ve been searching for in your own journey.

I’ll be talking a lot more about energetic boundaries in the coming few months. I am also considering starting an online group to practice energetic boundaries, so if you would like to get updates for it, please sign up for my newsletter if you are not on it already.

With energetic boundaries in place, we have a lot more power over our own experience. We have a way to construct an inner well of nourishment and give ourselves what we need without depending on anybody else, without resorting to short-term solutions, without becoming more and more dependent on someone outside us to heal us or fix us.

Energetic boundaries are a skill we can all learn. They are just like any other skill. Becoming more skilled just takes practice and a willingness to put in the time and the work.

If you are drowning in other people’s feelings, I want to tell you, you are NOT doomed to experiencing it. As a highly sensitive person, you can claim your energetic space in this world.

A patch of land belongs to just you, and you have as much right to belong on this earth as anybody else. Welcome home.

With love, Ritu.

Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which combines personal stories with practical tools to help highly sensitive people channel their deep sensitivity. Sign up for Ritu’s newsletter for two free chapters of The Empath’s Journey.