Why I’m No Longer Attached to the "Empath" Label

The word empath once gave me language for experiences I had never known how to explain. It helped me feel understood, and I’ll always be grateful for that.

But these days, I’m less attached to it as the full explanation for who I am.

Not because I’m rejecting the word (I wrote a whole book called The Empath Detox), but because I’ve come to see empathy as just one expression of a much broader sensitive nervous system.

In this episode, I walk through the stages the label took me through: the relief of finally feeling understood, the sadness of recognizing where some of my hypervigilance came from, the anger of connecting old patterns to real experiences, and the realization that self-protection had quietly become the destination instead of the doorway.

Understanding yourself matters… protecting your energy matters… but neither is meant to be the place where you stay.

This episode explores what can happen when you stop treating sensitivity as something to manage and begin asking what it makes possible.

This Episode Dives Into:

• Why I'm less attached to the word "empath" 
• The stages the label took me through
• Where hypervigilance often comes from, and how it shapes us
• Empathy as a capacity, not a character reference
• Moving from "how do I protect my energy?" to "what becomes possible?"
• How understanding yourself is the invitation, not the destination

Who This Episode Is For:

• Highly sensitive people, empaths, and deep feelers
• Anyone who found relief in the word "empath" and has started to outgrow it
• People stuck in the protection-and-boundaries stage who sense there's more
• Quiet leaders and thoughtful creators ready to expand
• Sensitive people tired of treating how they're wired as a problem
• Anyone ready to ask what their sensitivity makes possible

Links & Resources For This Episode:

• Subscribe to my Weekly Newsletter
• Visit My Website
• Book a Storyboarding Session / Messaging Audit
• Get the Book: The Empath Detox
• The Empath Detox Oracle Deck

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Energy Exchange, a podcast for deep feelers and quiet leaders. Here, we explore what happens when we start working with our natural energy in both our business and personal lives. I'm Colleen Wallach. I'm a highly sensitive professional with years untangling patterns of overthinking, people-pleasing, and playing small just to feel safe. Now, I help others like me step more fully into their power without losing the superpower of their softness. We don't have to be allowed to be seen, and we don't have to push to be powerful. Everything is energy. Let's start this exchange. Welcome into this week's episode of the Energy Exchange. Today I wanted to talk about something that has been on my mind for a long time. Now I have this forum, so I'm gonna do it. I'm not personally as attached to the word empath as I used to be. There was a time when I was really starting to understand my sensitivities that it gave me language for experiences I hadn't known how to explain. And I'm super, super grateful for that. I'm not rejecting the word or suggesting that other people should stop using it. I'm simply less attached to it as the full explanation for who I am and how I show up in the world. These days, I tend to see empathy as just one expression of a much broader sensitive nervous system. So today I'm diving into why the empath label was once so helpful for me, what changed over time, and why I'm a little less attached to it now. I would say that the word really came on my radar, gosh, maybe 10 years ago. I was in a time of self-discovery. I had just left a very structured life in the DC area. I was expanding into South Florida, and I was really just discovering who I was as a person without all of the external influences that I'd had for the past 20 years. So the discovery and the processing of the impact label happened for me in stages. The first stage was relief. Like I'm finally understanding myself. I had a point of reference, and it was a collective point of reference. There were resources, things I could read. I actually knew what I was looking for. Like before that, I think I was kind of looking at very specific individual traits. You know, why do I feel this way? Why do I respond this way? But now all of a sudden I could see the full picture. It was almost like a diagnosis. It helped explain why I experienced the world the way that I do. Why my natural tendency is to hold space for people at my own expense, why I cry at the drop of a hat, why I notice other people's stuff, their emotions, their energy, and why I dip so deeply into my own. It really helped me feel understood. But then the more I learned, the more I dipped into a stage of sadness. I started understanding where some of this came from for me. And I was doing some things at the time, like landmark forum, if you've heard of that, things that that do kind of mesh the logic of the real world with some of our internal stuff. And if you've lived a lot of your life in hypervigilance, in that, you know, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, a lot of that can come from childhood. And that doesn't necessarily mean you experienced trauma in some huge dramatic way. Sometimes it's just the way life was presented to you by your early caregivers, those experiences that shaped your sense of self and taught you how you needed to show up in the world. And I want to be clear, I don't believe that our sensitivity is necessarily something that a difficult experience created, but those experiences can shape how we learn to use it. Sensitivity can become hypervigilance. Awareness can become constantly monitoring the room. Your empathy can become adjusting yourself around everyone else. I had always felt misunderstood, and now I finally had something I could point to. But I was also starting to look at other parts of my life through this new lens. Even my relationship with my body and my weight. That began to make more sense. Not because my sensitivity automatically made me gain weight, right? But because I could finally see the relationship between stress, shame, coping, and living for years in a body that rarely felt fully safe. And that realization bummed me out. And that's just one thing that I was really looking at through a new lens. And then over time, something else interesting happened. I started to get angry. I was learning more about unhealthy relationship dynamics, and I'll dive into this in a few minutes, but there's a lot of conversation around, you know, the empath narcissist dynamic, toxic people, all of these labels. And while I think those can oversimplify people and relationships, they were giving me a framework for looking back at my own experiences. And I was seeing it in those, you know, romantic relationships, friendships, work relationships. I started connecting the dots backwards, and I could see patterns I hadn't seen before. I could attach real people and experiences to those patterns, and I got pissed. I had always been hyper-vigilant, but now I had language for a lot of new things and a whole new list of things to watch out for. So everything became about boundaries, energy, shielding, you know, clearing toxic people, making sure no one ever got one over on me again. I leaned so hard into boundaries and self-protection that it's almost like that became my entire focus. And to be clear, that work matters, energetic practices, grounding boundaries. Those things can help you recognize what is happening and begin trusting yourself again. I wrote an entire book about this called The Empath Detox. And to me, that work is almost Empath 101. But I think a lot of people unintentionally get stuck there. And I definitely did. Protection is supposed to create enough safety for us to move forward. It's not supposed to become the place that we live. So that was the journey, the path that really attaching myself to the empath label took me through. Eventually I began to realize that the conversation around impacts was too narrow for what I was actually experiencing. These days, I see empathy as one expression of a much broader sensitive nervous system. And that broader sensitivity includes all the things: deep processing, emotional responsiveness, our creativity, conscientiousness. And then, of course, that ability to notice subtleties, patterns, and connections that other people might miss. Like those are really the traits and the superpowers of that sensitive nervous system. It can also mean becoming overstimulated more easily, needing a lot of peace and quiet, and requiring more time to maybe process and recover from social interactions. I was really noticing that disconnect for me when it came to marketing myself. In my work, which is based on brand strategies, storytelling, I do attract a lot of highly sensitive people. And at the time, I was really using the word empath a lot. And it just wasn't the full experience. I think a lot of the people I attract share a lot of those traits, even if they would never use the word empath to describe themselves. They do process deeply, they can read a room, they notice what other people miss. But that word that I was using a lot doesn't resonate with everyone, even if the underlying experience might. So I want to pause here and talk more specifically about what I mean when I use the words empathy and empath and where they fit into the speaker conversation. Empathy is just that ability to understand another person's perspective. And when we talk about an empath, this is a person who is actually absorbing those things, those external feelings, into their own experience. Their body can feel it, their mind is circling around it. So an empath is a person who experiences the emotions, energy, and sometimes physical symptoms of others as if they are their own. There's a deep absorption there, there's sensory overload, a lot of times strong intuition, and then also that need for isolation to reset and get rid of that emotional energy. But empathy is just our nervous system's ability to notice and to feel. So once we understand empathy as a capacity, rather than a character reference, we can have a more honest conversation about how that capacity gets expressed. One of the reasons I really started getting turned off by the word empath is what's going on in social media around this word. A lot of people think that if you say, I'm an empath, that you think you are of some higher moral standing, that you're a kinder person, a more generous person. But having those traits, you know, being able to read a room, understand what someone's feeling, holding space, none of that automatically means your response will be healthy, boundaried, or self-aware. You know, you could read a room and use that awareness to help other people feel safe, or you could use it to monitor everyone's emotions and constantly adjust yourself to keep the peace. You can hold space beautifully for other people while having zero idea how to ask for space yourself. The empathy is there in both situations, but what changes is the place you're operating from, how supported you feel, how grounded you are in yourself. When you feel unsupported or insecure, empathy can turn into overgiving, people pleasing, rescuing, maybe needing to feel needed. But in all of those examples, we're just talking about capacity. Saying you're an empath is not a character reference. But because the online narrative around empaths does lean into that, I just started feeling a little icky about the word, to be honest with you. And that kind of led me down this path of really seeing it as just this one little piece of how I show up. Another piece of the conversation that was really starting to turn me off was that a lot of it begins with protection. What's draining me? Who do I need to avoid? How do I protect my energy? How do I keep my sensitivity from overwhelming me? And those are very valid questions, especially when you're first beginning to understand yourself and your sensitivity. Those kinds of questions can help you recognize patterns, create healthy boundaries, and then feel safer in your own nervous system. But eventually those questions have to evolve. How do I understand my nervous system? How do I support it? How do I work with it instead of against it? And my favorite, what becomes possible because I'm wired this way? The same traits that can show up as problems when you are overstimulated or emotionally affected by the world around you, those are also the traits that, in their highest vibration, help you create, teach, lead. They aren't separate qualities, they're just different expressions of the same sensitive nervous system. And that shift took a lot of time for me. When it comes to workplace confidence, I think I started to get there around 35. I was feeling more established in my role. I was more comfortable. And I think, though, that at that time, that confidence came from believing I had learned to manage, hide, or disconnect from my sensitivity. I still saw it as a burden. It really wasn't until maybe seven or eight years ago that I realized or I understood that the qualities I'd spent years trying to manage were also the qualities that opened the biggest doors for me in my career. They weren't obstacles to my work. They were the reason people trusted me in the first place. In my work in marketing, that might look like hearing what someone is trying to say underneath the words they're actually using. It's noticing the subtle disconnect between how a person describes their work and what makes them come alive when they talk about it. My favorite is being able to help people feel seen and then helping them translate that into a story other people can understand and connect with. Now I understand that those two things are very deeply connected. So, yes, it's helpful to understand the ways sensitivity has maybe made life harder. If we can't see those patterns, we can't change them. But that can't be the only conversation. And I feel like that is a big part of the online conversation. At some point, we also want to look at what sensitivity gives us and what we're able to do because we are wired that way. And that's the lens I'm speaking from in every episode of this podcast, always. I'm speaking to people who feel deeply, who process deeply. These are the quiet leaders, the thoughtful creators, people who have always sensed the world a little differently and are ready for expansion. Those are my people because I am all of those things too. What I'm not interested in doing is treating the way we naturally show up as a problem or keeping us focused only on what has been difficult. Yes, we need to understand ourselves. Yes, we need language for our experiences, but understanding ourselves is not the destination. It's the opening. I don't want to talk forever about what we didn't receive, what went wrong, or how our sensitivity held us back. I want to talk about what is possible because of who we are. There is more. And maybe more means better relationships, more confidence, work that feels meaningful, stepping into leadership. Maybe it's teaching, creating, starting a podcast, or just finally showing up more fully. Whatever more means for you, the point is not to stay focused on how do I survive being a sensitive person, but what am I able to do because I'm wired this way? How do I step into the leadership that my sensitivity makes possible? Those are the kinds of conversations I'm super interested in. So all of that to say that I don't reject the word empath. I think labels can be useful, they can bring a relief, they can help us make sense of our past and recognize patterns we couldn't see before. That word, empath, did that for me. But at some point, understanding myself really became the invitation. I opened up to the idea that my sensitivity wasn't just the reason life had been harder. It's also the reason I'm able to do the work I was meant to do. And this deep empathy that I feel for people does come through in my work. I think it's one of my best qualities, but it's not the whole story. Your sensitivity is the gift. Empathy is just one very beautiful, helpful expression of that gift. All right, I'm gonna leave it at that. I'm super curious what you guys think about this. Is empath a word that deeply resonates with you? Does it feel icky to you now? Send me a note on Instagram at the dotenergy.exchange. I'd love to hear your take. All right, thank you so much for listening, and I will chat with you next week.