On Being an Empath and a Highly Sensitive Person

I have always known I am sensitive.  Sensitive to everything.  My feelings are hurt easily, my skin is sensitive, I am sensitive to cold and heat.  I can feel the days of the week. I avoid crowds.  I am sensitive to smells, especially bathroom smells.  You get it, I'm sensitive.  I am also an Empath.  I only just learned what this is recently.  An Empath can feel the emotions of other people.  Until recently, I never really thought about this, it just was.  Mostly it is just with people I am close to, like my family.  I didn't realize until recently that not everyone else feels these things.  I used to get seriously upset with my husband because he couldn't feel that I was mad or sad, or whatever.  I would always think geez, I know how YOU are feeling pretty much all the time!  Sometimes I get the emotions wrong, but I know when somethings is wrong, especially with my kids.  And yes, I know we are all intuitive to an extent, but with me, it is like getting hit in the face.  Or hit by a truck.  I hate it.  So when something very traumatic happens, it affects me very deeply and it can take days or weeks for me to recover, depending on the situation.  So I decided to get some help for this.  To help me learn how to not get wrecked from other people's stuff.  

This past Friday I had an appointment with a therapist about my sensitivity/empathness, to try to learn how to somehow protect myself.  I was a little nervous and didn't really know what to expect.  Well let me just say that the appointment turned out to be NOTHING like I thought it would be, but in a really good way!  It turns out that my therapist is also highly sensitive, and also and Empath!!  So she TOTALLY gets how i often feel like I am bled dry, and so emptied that I can't function.  And she gets that this is a real thing and that I was born this way.  We talked for a while and then she asked me if I was familiar with chakras.  I said yeeeees, because over the past year or so I have been working on clearing my chakras.  And she asked me if I was familiar with crystals and I again said yeeeeess, because I have just recently begun to understand how crystals work, and have recently felt better from using them.  They work in a very subtle way that works really well for me, because I am so sensitive.  So anyway, she tells me I should be carrying crystals around with me all the time and I am thinking I must be in a dream because this agian, is nothing like what I was expecting!  And then she tells me to close my eyes and that she is going to take me on a guided chakra meditation!!!!!! I closed my eyes and I just started laughing because this was everything I have been wishing for.  Someone to put all this stuff together that I have been gathering, along with some psychology.  So then she takes me on the guided chakra meditation and it is AMAZING.  I mean seriously.  And she says she wants me to do it every day, and whenever I need it.  The really cool thing I learned from my session was that my energy is infinite, not something that can run out.  This is a concept that I know is going to shift the way I think about things.  

As a sensitive person, it is really important to take time for myself, to rest, to recharge, to be a little selfish.  Being selfish has always sounded to me like a really terrible thing to do.  Like really unattractive.  But taking this time to take care of myself is really important.  This is not an easy thing to do when you have a family and work a full time job.  But over the past few years I have gotten better at slowing down, asking for help, and taking better care of myself.  These things are so important. So here I am, in this picture, with my daughter.  I chose this picture because I think i look really good in it.  But this is obviously not my daughter's best picture, even though she is beautiful no matter what she does!  I am learning to be a little selfish in baby steps :)

What does this have to do with MTHFR?  Well, I'm pretty sure that being highly sensitive has to do with my compromised nervous system, due to being born with a two mutated MTHFR genes.  The same compromised nervous system that lead to my being a bed wetter.  Hey, you know what?  I just read that Sarah Silverman was a bed wetter!  Maybe she is a mutant as well!  Good night.