Ep.75 Empath Anxiety | How to Stop Absorbing Other People's Emotions

 If you walk into a room feeling fine and walk out anxious, heavy, or off with no idea why, this episode is for you. What you've been calling your anxiety might actually be empath anxiety, and it might not even be yours.

EPISODE SUMMARY For most of her life, Sari thought her anxiety was entirely her own. Turns out a huge piece of it wasn't. This episode is about empath anxiety: being highly sensitive and absorbing the moods, grief, and stress of the people around you so completely that you lose track of where they end and you begin.

Sari walks through her own realization, including a raw, recent moment sitting with grief that wasn't hers to carry, and breaks down why this isn't weakness or drama, it's how some nervous systems are actually wired. She gives you the exact question to ask when a feeling shows up out of nowhere, plus real tools  to let go of what was never yours.

If you've spent years managing anxiety that never quite made sense given your actual life, this might be the missing piece.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

• Why some anxiety, sadness, or anger isn't actually yours, and how to start telling the difference
• The one question to ask the moment a feeling arrives out of nowhere
• Why being highly sensitive or empathic is a nervous system wiring, not a personality flaw
• Simple tools to release energy that isn't yours: grounding, water, and a spoken release
• Why the people closest to you (partners, kids, roommates) can quietly become your biggest source of absorbed anxiety
• How to hold space for someone without absorbing their pain

REFLECTION Think back to your childhood. Were you always the one who felt everything deeply?

What if some of what you've been calling your anxiety wasn't yours at all? What would that give you?

If anxiety shows up out of nowhere and you don't know why, grab the free 5-Minute Nervous System Reset. It's the exact tool Sari points to in this episode for releasing what isn't yours, something that actually helps tonight.

And if this episode made something click, that "wait, is that why" feeling, book a free Freedom Roadmap Session. Let's figure out what's actually yours to carry, and what you're finally ready to put down.

You're not broken. You're not behind. And you're not alone. If you made it here, that means something.

TIMESTAMPS 

02:27: Realizing absorbed energy isn't yours, and the moment with her daughter's mood at home 

04:52: Sitting with her best friend after losing her mom, and almost spiraling into everyone else's grief 

06:50: Learning to discern: is this mine? The awareness step, without turning it into a label 

08:48: Feelings don't come with a name tag. How absorbed anxiety gets mistaken for your own story 

10:39: The key question: how to know if a feeling is actually yours 

11:58: Why this has been happening since childhood, and why no one taught you the tools 

13:39: What it felt like to finally realize so much of it was never hers, and the tools to release it 

16:08: Grounding, hugging a tree, and letting the earth take what isn't yours 

18:34: The "gold suit" visualization, and why this sensitivity is also a gift 

20:30: Why so much client work is really about untangling carried energy from your own story 

22:34: Journaling questions to sit with

5 minute nervous system reset ad for midroll

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Fuck anxiety. It's a bottle cry to all the women out there who are so tired of continuing to let anxiety keep them imprisoned in their own lives. If you wake up already exhausted, even after a full night of sleep, taking care of everything. Responsibilities. Show up with a smile. Thank you. Have you ever been around someone and suddenly you feel angry, sad, or overwhelmed out of nowhere? Do you absorb the moods of the people around you so deeply that you don't even know where they end and you begin? Have you spent your whole life feeling everything so deeply that sometimes it's completely debilitating? If so, if any of these resonated, then this episode is for you. Because what I'm about to share changed everything for me. A lot of the anxiety I was feeling for most of my life wasn't even mine. And this information, knowing that it wasn't mine, gave me so much solace, so much relief, and really gave me a tool and an opportunity to start really looking and listening and discerning what is mine and what isn't it. So let's jump in. Let's start off with just saying I am one of those people who feels things so deeply more than most people around me. And looking at back at my childhood, this was definitely happening to me as a child. And I didn't have anyone to name it, um, voice it to really help me understand what was happening. And so as a child, I was probably just thinking it was my own because I didn't know that something else was going on. I was just a kid absorbing everyone's energy with no tools, no understanding of how to release it. And when I finally understood this is happening, and this was honestly only like five or six years ago, everything really started to shift because when you realize that you were absorbing everyone's energy and it's not mine. And just like I said in the beginning, all of a sudden now you're anxious, or all of a sudden now you're sad, or all of a sudden now you're angry to realize that that was actually never yours. It was someone else's, and you just kind of picked it up in their own energy field. Then because it's not ours, we don't have to hold it. We can let it go. Now, granted, we can always let go any sort of energy that's with us, even if it's our own. But to know that it's not ours makes it even better because then you're not crazy. Then you're not the one who's like all of a sudden just like pissy. You know, sometimes this happens even with um our household. Like my daughter will just be in a shit ass mood when she comes home. And then all of a sudden, I'm yelling at my kids and I'm like, oh my God, this isn't even mine. This is hers. Let it go, let it go, let it go. And so another thing I want to share is that this past weekend, I was my with my best friend. Unfortunately, she lost her mom in a tragic accident. And as she's been like my ride or die my whole life, we've been with each other through everything. Um, I went to her and I went to be with her. And um, her mom's obviously been in my life a long time as well. And but ideally, you know, she lost her mom to lose a mom is something. And I wanted to be this um space of light for her, this space of support. And so I went. But um, one of the last days that I was there, that we were really saying goodbye, there was a lot of family and loved ones in the room, and it was sad. It was so sad. And while I also felt her mother's spirit and just this unconditional love and joy the first time that we went and saw her, this was different. This was grief, this was sadness. And to be honest, like it was so overwhelming that I almost began to spiral until I kind of realized, oh my gosh, sorry, this isn't yours. This is all of the grief and the sadness of everybody in this room. And so in that moment, just internally, I said to myself, this is not yours. Whatever energy is not yours, release it now. Let it go. And let's start with what it is like to be highly sensitive, because being highly sensitive is real and it has a name. Highly sensitive people and empaths don't just feel their own emotions, they absorb the emotional energy of the people around them. And this is not a weakness, and it's not us being dramatic, like, oh my gosh, Sari's just making a big deal because all of a sudden she feels everybody's grief. No, this is literally how some nervous systems are wired. And there are people who are meant to be more empathetic, more compassionate, more understanding. I think that that's what makes me such an amazing spaceholder for all of my clients. And, you know, even my ability to understand what each of you that are listening to this episode are going through, because I can feel what you feel, but it's also a switch that we can turn on and turn off. It's a gift that you can feel deeply, connect deeply, love deeply. And then some people believe it's a curse. And if you don't know what you're working with, if that, if that you're carrying all of these feelings that were never yours to carry, it could feel like a curse. And sometimes your body doesn't know the difference of whether it's yours or whether someone else's, you're just feeling them. And so I what I really hope that you walk away with today is an ability to really start to begin to discern. Well, first it comes with the awareness point of I'm feeling this thing right now. I'm feeling this sadness right now. I'm feeling agitated right now. I think we live in a big world where it's so easy to get agitated or annoyed a lot of the time, or because we need to be in some form of control. And so if you recognize that just out of the blue, you are agitated or annoyed or angry, could you begin to become aware of that? And then just start really asking yourself like, is that mine? Am I someone who's really usually annoyed at a situation like this or agitated? You know, and and it doesn't have to, I don't want you to think that, like, oh, you're a highly sensitive person. Now that's like become part of your identity. It's more just information to be feedback for you. It doesn't have to be a label. It doesn't have to be anything that is putting you in a compartment and saying, oh, all of the highly sensitives over here. No, this is it's a gift that you have this thing. But could this thing also be leading to more anxiety? Could it be leading to more fear? Could it be leading to more stress because you haven't recognized what's going on, that it's not yours, that your body is just more open to feeling emotions deeper than other people. And you're also feeling them because they're someone else's. And, you know, with that, when the feeling arrives, it doesn't come with the label on the jar that says this agitation comes from Chelsea. It doesn't say that. It just arrives, and then your body responds. And now all of a sudden your heart is racing, your chest is tight, you're overwhelmed out of nowhere. And then maybe all of a sudden your anxiety is triggered. Except the trigger was never yours. So you then you spend years trying to fix an anxiety that was never rooted in your own story. And think about this, right? If you're someone who lives with a roommate or you live with a partner, and that partner is someone who is always anxious, and then you're wondering why all of a sudden you've become an anxious person. It's kind of like this ripple effect. It's kind of like each of your own energetic fields, your own energy bubbles are overlapping, and you're feeling what they're feeling because you're someone who's living with this person all of the time. My husband does this for he did this for so long. He would come home from work and he would automatically feel that like I was in a bad mood. And so then he was just like trying to almost like fix because he feels a lot too. And again, it's like he uses that to fix things, which can create anxiety because then you don't know what you need to do to help this person, and you're just looking for the reason, the thing to fix it. So, how to know if the feeling is yours? This is absolutely the key question that you need to start asking yourself. And one simple signal that we kind of already talked about is if you're having a great day and suddenly out of nowhere you feel anxious, angry, sad, self-conscious, that is the clue. And at this time, ask yourself, is this mine? Did something happen to me just now to cause this feeling? Or did I walk into a room, get off a phone call, sit next to someone, and boom, there it is. Strong feelings arrive so suddenly and don't match your moment. When they don't match the feeling that you had before this thing, oftentimes they're not yours. So start getting curious about the shift from one emotion or one state of being to another that happens really quickly because oftentimes it's the shift. And instead of just drowning in the feeling, you get to ask yourself the question is it mine? And then another thing I really want you to start thinking about is most likely this has been happening your whole life since you were a child. And as kids, again, we don't have language for this. This is something I try to teach my own children now, but it's really something that comes as an awareness tool that you have to really begin to open up. And this is great because, you know, so much of the work that I do starts in awareness. We have to start observing ourselves, witnessing how we're behaving, how we're acting. And this is just another pathway that you get to be aware. Because no one's gonna sit you down when you're five years old, when you're eight years old, when you're 12 years old, and say, love, you're absorbing someone else's energy. And here's what to do. No one said that to us. But we get to teach ourselves now, we get to reparent ourselves now. And at the time, we just felt it, all of it. And we probably even thought something was wrong with us because there was anxiety, there was overwhelm, there was this sensitivity that just felt like too much. Maybe you were someone who's like overstimulated all the time. There's a good chance that a lot of it was never yours to begin with. And this is also not about blame, it's just about understanding what's happening in your body. And again, just to bring back to even my best friend and her situation, like the last day I was with them, the grief was just so much, the sadness so much. And I was starting to feel overwhelmed. And I was starting to feel, you know, I'd left my family, I left my husband, I left my girls to go be with her. And it was, I'd already been there for four days. And I was kind of starting to have this own grief of like, why the fuck am I even here? I miss my family. I just want to be with my husband. I just want to be with my people. Not that my best friend isn't my people, but like she was with all of her loved ones and her family, and I was supporting her. And she was super grateful that I was there. But I just had this influx, this flushing of emotion that was so much. And I just realized in that moment, oh my God, this isn't mine. This isn't mine. And so as I walked to my car, I literally just imagined myself being washed away, like just letting every every piece that was not mine being washed away from my body. So with that, once you recognize it, I want you to be able to release it. It's the tool. So here's a couple options that you can start incorporating now. So one of the simplest ones is to go outside and ground. Maybe even hug a tree, right? Like you see people that hug trees. Well, I my guess is they're not hugging a tree because like they just love the tree, which we do love the trees. They're sentient beings, but the trees absorb our energy. So if you see someone hugging a tree, maybe even just give them compassion because you know that maybe they need to give their energy to something, and that tree just happened to be it. So go outside and ground, whether you hug a tree or you just put your bare feet in the earth, literally grass, dirt, sand, and just let the earth pull what isn't yours back down. Nature wants to absorb it. That's why being outside resets your body, resets your nervous system. And just imagine when you go out there and you step into the grass, imagine the earth just pulling all of the sludge, everything that isn't yours into the earth and transmuting it. The next tool is take a shower. Water is incredibly cleansing energetically. Imagine that everything that isn't yours is being washed off your body and going down the drain intentionally. It's simple and it's powerful. And if you want to add another little thing to that, you can even kind of imagine that it's purple water because purple is very cleansing as well. And sometimes it can be as simple as stating out loud or in your mind, that's what I did in the car this past weekend, is I release whatever energy is not mine. I let it go, I return it with love to where it belongs. Simple, direct, say it like you mean it. And that can be spoken aloud through your mouth, or it can just be internal, whatever feels best. If you feel like you're in a situation where you're like, people think I'm fucking crazy if I said this right now, just think it in your mind and imagine that all of that energy is leaving your body. And again, the big tool is asking the question in the moment. When that big feeling arrives suddenly, before you spiral, pause and ask, is this mine? Where did this come from? What shifted right before I felt this? Who was I around? And then, you know, the last tool is really just creating this as a daily practice. Especially for impasse and highly sensitive people, this can't just be a once-in-a-while thing. It really helps if every day, morning, evening, you take a moment to release, right? I love, I've created such an oasis in my backyard that I just love it so much that like it's imperative that I go out there every day and protect your energy before you walk into the room, conversation or situations. Sometimes I imagine myself in the morning that I'm putting on this gold suit. And this gold suit isn't so much protective, but it's just so that I am walking in my own energy and I'm not absorbing anyone else's. So let's talk about the gift side of this really quick. When you know how to use it, being an empath, being highly sensitive, being someone who absorbs other people's energy can be one of the greatest gifts you could ever have. And I guarantee you, if you're one of these people, you're probably a really compassionate person. And to me, compassion is one of the highest emotions we can have. Because you can feel people. You can really feel them. You can feel what they're experiencing, you can feel the emotion that's in their body. And that allows a certain amount of understanding. When you walk into a room and you know what's happening beneath the surface, you feel it. Your body feels it, and you connect in ways that other people can't. And it's beautiful. You love deeply and you show up so full. And this goal here is to not stop feeling it's just to feel what's yours, feel it fully, and release what's not. And when you are open to holding space for someone, allowing yourself to feel it and also not absorb it. So this is a huge piece of what comes up with a lot of the clients that I work with because this is an integrative piece of so much of our life revolves around the things that we're experiencing from other people. And so many women come to me thinking their anxiety is about their life, their circumstances, their past. And of course, a lot of it is, but some of it is energy they've been carrying that was never theirs. And this is so fun to go into a hypnotic imagery journey and to really teach your body how to use these tools. And in our sessions, we go into the subconscious and we start to unroll. What actually belongs to you and what doesn't, and what you've picked up along the way and what you're ready to let go of. And then we release it at the root, not just on the surface. And if this is landing for you, I want you to understand what you're actually carrying right now and ask yourself if you need support and how this could work better for you, how this could feel better for you, feeling more freedom from it. And that's literally why I have a free session called a freedom roadmap session, where we just get to talk about what the road looks like to your ultimate freedom. Let's figure it out together. And let's figure out what's yours and what you can finally put down. So I want to sit with some journaling questions for you if you care to dive in. One of them being, think back to your childhood. Were you always the one who felt everything deeply? What do you remember? And just let that stream of consciousness go. And another question is: who in your life do you feel the most drained by after spending time with them? Think about the last time anxiety, anger, overwhelm, something like that came on suddenly and out of nowhere. What were you doing? Who were you around? And what if some of what you've been calling your anxiety wasn't yours at all? What would that give you? What would it feel like to give yourself permission to release what doesn't belong to you? Who lights you up and who drains you? And what is the one daily practice you could start to clear your energy and protect it now with all the tools we talked about? All these questions will be in the show notes. If you want to revisit them, feel free to pause in between each question and actually write it out. And remember that there's a free nervous system reset, five minutes, and you can go to thegrowthgoddess.net slash reset to download that free five-minute nervous system. And this is a great tool too if you're experiencing overwhelm. Because in that five-minute nervous system reset, you can just say, like, also, like, I just want to release anything that isn't mind and let your nervous system, let your nervous system come back to that base level to homeostasis. And again, this was so powerful for me when I learned this about myself. And I hope that you hearing this episode today, this podcast, gave you some sort of insight about yourself that you knew, or maybe you didn't know at all. But either way, I'm here to support you. Please go share this with someone that you know might need this. That is someone who's highly sensitive and maybe they don't know any tools. Bring them to this episode. Let them feel some freedom, some relief from what they're experiencing. Thanks for tuning in. We'll catch you guys next episode. If this episode felt like it was speaking directly to you, share it with another woman who might need to hear this too. And please leave a rating and a review. This helps boost the podcast so women just like you can find it and find real-time support and belief also. Stay tuned for more episodes with stories, tools, and real hope. Because you're more than just the identity of a woman who has anxiety. And when you begin to heal your relationship with anxiety, you're not just changing your life. You're changing what gets passed down to your daughters, your granddaughters, and the women who come after you. You are not. And this is where we get to take.