Learning to drown

Yesterday morning, I couldn’t get myself out of bed. My limbs literally felt paralyzed underneath the sheets. This intense moment of emotional paralysis set me in contemplation for the rest of the morning and afternoon. It took every ounce of my mental energy to force myself up from my pillow and to face the day ahead of me.  

I had been pretty sick the day before with a fever, dizziness and fatigue. But it wasn’t until I couldn’t move my body out of the bed did I realize the emotional piece to my “sickness”. 

After my dad died, a psychiatrist formally diagnosed me with Dysthymia, and my entire life finally make sense. She explained, after a long, thorough 2 hour discussion of my life, that events had led me to that moment in her office plagued with grief and questioning whether medication was my best next step, and as a sensitive and empathic child, it made deductive sense that I became an adult living with consistent and life long depression. Dysthymia is chronic, persistent, depression. 

When I had the conscious awareness yesterday that I couldn’t drag my body out of bed, I realized that for the last 25 years of my life I have been a functional depressive. It’s no different than a functional alcoholic, a professional gambler, an anorexic athlete, a purging fitness model competitor, or a working 80 hour/week lawyer. We function, but at a high and compulsive cost. My cost is my empathy.

There’s a term in therapy called transference, and countertransference. It refers to redirection of a clients feelings for a significant person or thing in their life to the therapist, and in countertransference.... the redirection of a therapist's feelings toward a client...my emotional entanglement with a client.

We talk a lot about it in our masters programs and about boundaries and self protection for the good of the self and for the client. We learn how to understand, deal with, and cope with both dynamics. These particular concepts are very difficult for me as my work with my clients can be entangled in the sense that my genuine care for them has no boundaries. Our work works, because I care so fucking hard. And the clients that generally come to me respect that about me and need that from me. But. There’s a cost.

When I used to sit in group supervision with fellow therapists and we’d talk about cases and share difficulties and feedback, I always had such a hard time articulating feedback. They could spin off into these specific techniques to try with clients and ways to address the needs of the clients clinically and concisely. In my head my answer to why and how I help clients in particular situations, was always, “well, I dunno, I just love them?”

Empaths are highly sensitive individuals, and highly sensitive to the feelings of those around them. It’s helped me to think of it as having a heightened sense of emotional intelligence. It’s the inherent ability to experience empathy through all senses. We take on the pain of others at our own expense. And hence, the cost, the sacrifice.

Despite every kind of coping or wishing it away, its not a trait we can change... it just is. And it is such a big part of us that it is inseparable from our identity as a human. The struggle lies not only in the turmoil this presents to our lives by internalizing the pain and sadness of those we love as well as strangers we meet in the grocery store line, but in the validation we never receive from the rest of the world. 80% of people don’t understand us. Most believe its just over sensitivity, or that we are weak, or that its just a “phase” we will get over. 

It’s not. This is our life. And our hearts break everyday and our energy is destroyed as we rebuild every night to start over every morning. “I spend nights stitching up the loose threads of my soul and in the morning I’m bullet proof”- Noah Kahan, “Young Blood”.

Some light reading to understand that this is a REAL thing…
loving an empath
the science behind empathy and empaths

Don’t get me wrong... this is the best gift that life could have ever given me. At times it feels like my superpower. Sometimes when I hug people I can feel literally feel myself take their pain away. People pop into my mind at random times and I have on overwhelming need to reach out, and I know something is going on for them, sometimes its good, sometimes its bad... but the minute they pick up the phone and I say hey I knew I needed to call you, the first thing they reply with is, “How did you know?”. As a therapist there is a transfer of energy that happens in my office. I don’t quite understand it, but the most common feedback I get from clients is, ‘as soon as I walk away from you I feel lighter, even if we talk about the shittiest crap in the world, I leave smiling or relieved, or empowered, and then I am so tired I need to rest.’ To me, that’s the energy I suck from them- the bad shit, I take it and I keep it so that they can walk out with a little piece of their hardened heart cracked open allowing light to come in.

The issues it presents for me is another thing, and to be quite honest I have no idea where to even start to explain this struggle. It’s the simple fact that the shit that everyone dumps and leaves with me, stays with me. I own it now, purposefully or not. My client’s shit, my family’s shit, my friend’s shit, the strangers’ at the grocery store’s shit, the world’s shit, and most difficult and challenging... the shit of the people I love. That’s all mine now. That’s just something that I have now. SHIT. All the shit.

Luckily for me I’ve found a way to channel this gift and to use it to do my very best to make people’s lives a little better. To be a small pebble in their road to healing. To combat the negativity I feel from feeling it, I contain it and turn it into sunshine. It fills me up, it gives me purpose, I am my gift. And that’s fricken awesome. You know the scene in the Green Mile when John Coffey sucks the kidney stone out of Tom Hanks and then spits it out as crazy swarms of bees? (Click here to watch the scene)

I GET that. 
But...John Coffey collapses at the end of every bee spewing.
Some days...I can’t get out of bed in the morning.

So what’s my point? A few things I guess, to write this as advocacy for the empaths of the world. I hear you. Fuck. I feel you hard. You can do this.
Also. It’s processing for me. Why am I collapsing lately and not able to recover, I’m writing so I can remind myself of who I am and what I need to do in order to keep bee spewing. Because one thing I know about empaths is that if they are not living in their purpose and in their passion, they are broken. So I’m talking out loud in order to find a greater understanding of my more frequent collapses, and to dive into more of the physicality of this energy and how recently, I’ve unlocked some door I don’t know how to close. 

This is the opened door...
I have a client who is struggling in retirement. He’s come to a place of uncertainty, unknown-ness, loss of identity, built up layered trauma with endless time to sit with the pain. He has come such an incredibly long way and we are kicking ass in therapy. His “symptoms” tend to show up as somatic. Physical ailments that are tangible, instead of an unexplainable intangible anxiety. He gets stomach aches, pain in his body, hurt limbs, etc. Our conversations are very profound and existential. I usually leave him feeling as if we worked on writing a thesis and are slowly chipping away at understanding the point of life. He is one of the only clients of mine that has brought his thoughts about my coping up in therapy. He asked me after one session, “Sammy. I have to ask you something. I always leave you feeling better. Now this doesn’t always last forever, but the feeling I get after our time is so relieving. I feel great and accomplished and hopeful. So I was wondering the other day what does that mean for you? How do you deal with all the crap I just dumped on you? Are you okay? “. Then of course we had a conversation about the transference of energy that happens with my clients and myself and why this is my burden to bear, AND what I get in return. Yes its hard, but its so rewarding to release someone’s pain. A gift and a curse. He was thankful, I was thankful, and we laughed and breathed sighs of release and relief, and gratitude.

At the next session he had developed some intense pain in his left abdomen area. After multiple doctors visits and uncertainty, they finally concluded that it was a painful hernia. 

Not shortly after this conclusion, I started noticing a pain when I ran and when I would do sit ups. Left side, lower abdomen. It continued for quite some time because I am terrible at acknowledging pain or dealing with hurt parts of my body, I just shrug them off, complain to someone who will listen, and then move on. 

It got worse. And worse. And worse. Sometimes its at a point so painful that I can’t lift my left leg up when I’m on the ground. After some time I explained it to my partner who has medical training and immediately he said, well it sounds like a hernia. 

WTF.

The client had to cancel a few sessions because he had vertigo so badly that he wasn’t able to drive or go anywhere. Two days later I woke up about to hop in the car for a camping trip, no shit I almost fell out of bed trying to get up.
Vertigo.
Couldn’t move for most of the morning. Never had a minute of vertigo in my life until this moment. I texted a friend later that afternoon to check in cause I was thinking of her, a soulmate who knows me more than most people ever will, and I told her I’d call her later to say hi... I started talking to her that night about this weird unexplainable and kind of crazy phenomenon I was experiencing with the client... and she almost stopped me in my tracks. She said, when were you thinking about me earlier today? I said, I dunno I think it was like 3:00 or so this afternoon when I texted you, why? She said, because I was having Vertigo all afternoon right around that time, I’ve never had it before and didn’t know what it was at first. 

WTF.

Am I absorbing AND  transferring energy?

A few more weird things have happened with clients- the paralleling of the struggles I’m currently having in my life are showing up for them, almost to the extent that I want to stop them while they are talking and say, wait are we talking about me or you? After throwing this idea around of emotional and physical transference with this friend and loved ones, I knew that I had to process it some more. I ended up sharing it with my somatic client. He was all in on this idea and we discussed it for awhile. A few weeks later I had a weird pain in my left wrist. I’ve had it before after I hurt my wrist, so I didn’t think much of it, except that it usually prevents me from working out the way I normally do for a week or so, then it tends to go away. This client reached out to me as I hadn’t seen him in awhile due to COVID, and said “hey, any weird pain going on lately?” I laughed. “Well kinda, I have a weird pain in my wrist but nothing to right home about or anything, just an annoyance”, and before I could finish my sentence he said, “yup, left wrist kinda of hurts through the index finger and thumb” and began describing my pain to a T. 

He said he just wanted to check and see, and told me to keep him posted in case my next body part starts to hurt so he can have a heads up. I asked him to do the same. 

WTF.

There have been a few more instances recently that have affected my personal relationships. The people I love are hurt, in emotional pain or physical pain. They get something or feel something deeply. Then I do. But the thing is I don’t realize it until after the fact. So is it the chicken or the egg? Am I’m absorbing, or self sabotaging, or unconsciously trying to understand, or is it a bit of both? All I do know about it is that once I’ve experienced the experiences, their pain is gone. 

My next challenge is to understand this. I do know and understand that there have been a lot of differences in me lately. The last year of my life has been challenging and at times tumultuous. And throughout this struggle I have learned a weakness and strength about my current situation and process. Dysthymia plagues me and always will. But something that’s changed for me, as that energy door has opened so has my ability to see my depression for what it is. I’ve learned that for all these years I have avoided my symptoms until they’ve attacked me... functional depressive. I have kept my feelings inside. I saw burnout only once I had completely passed any point of avoiding it, I forced myself out of bed and told myself I am just really tired, then I’d self punish through excessive workout or late hours or less food, I didn’t want to be around anyone but instead I was around everyone, and I’d ask everyone how they were and if I could help, I’d say I was fine, I was irritable and snappy, and I filled myself to the brim with activity so that I didn’t have to think about why I didn’t understand why I wasn’t okay. There isn’t an answer to depression, it just is. But I could never tell myself that.

Now, I wear my emotions on my sleeve and not intentionally. Some days my mood is paralyzing and I can’t move out of bed or get myself to apologize to the people I love due to the immense wall of shame in my way. Emotions come out of me like a rainstorm when the sun is shining, or when five things happen at once and I can’t deal, or when a lot of bad shit is going on and everyone’s emotions are floating in the air around me. It’s like someone opened Pandora’s box, and I’m feeling all the feelings inside a padded room with no escape, and I’m hearing all the sounds with noise cancelling head phones on, my body is carrying the weight of those old scuba diving metal uniforms while running up a mountain, and I’m debilitated with being unable to describe the intensity of what it means to be empathic. It’s like there are no words, yet everyone needs a verbal explanantion from me. It feels voiceless.  It’s like being deaf but being forced to sing. 

Yet. We all know, the deaf CAN learn to sing. Beautifully even. I feel energy, but everyone communicates in words. I’m living in a world that asks me to be black and white, but I can only talk in color. So, how do I sing without hearing? How do I function in a black and white world? 

Although this present moment is very hard and very new for me, and it feels at times like I’m drowning, I know that in order to stay afloat I must learn to tread water, and I know that if I hadn’t taken off my life vest and stopped avoiding my empathetic depression, I would have NEVER EVEN KNOWN I WAS DROWNING. You can’t really tread water without being thrown into the deep end without a vest.

I need to learn to ask for a line. A hand. A bright red paddle to reach out to me in the water so that I can see it when my arms and legs can’t tread any longer. Because I dont think I’ll ever avoid the drowning, or that I want to. When I drown I know what drowning feels like, and for me, that means I can then be the paddle for someone else. I just need to learn to ask for a paddle when I drown, let the people I love know that 80% of the time you won’t understand me, you won’t be able to prevent me from drowning, I dont even want you to, but you can be a bright red paddle and kindly reach out a line... not to take me out of the water or to steer me off course, just to let me bob and take a break for a minute. Because bright red paddle’s don’t talk or judge or fix, they just let you know they are there and remind you that it’s okay to live in color.  

The lessons for anyone who made it through my rambling... they will be different for everyone, it depends on where you see yourself in this story. For my fellow empaths, find your paddles- learn to do things to help yourself and to have people to ask for support. I have lots of paddles, running, hiking, adventure, writing, creativity, but lately those don’t always help. I needed a paddle with feedback, a human person to push me into introspection and to challenge my stubbornness and to know my drowning signs. It takes work to be vulnerable, with yourself and with someone else. But we need paddles. Find yours. Put work into it. I did, and I’m trying. And he’s pretty dang awesome... He listens to this crazy shit that goes on in my brain, pretty much everyday.
For the other paddlers out there, thank you. We need you. Even when we pretend we don’t.
And for those don’t know much about any of this, thanks for reading. Now maybe you have a better understanding of the energy that we all give out in the world and how it can affect others. We all have shit. Check yours. We are all connected on an intangible level, put your good shit first.

Ask for a paddle, or understand paddles, or be a paddle. There’s not many of us out there that are true empaths, that drown on the regular... so if you know one, remind them that while living in color amidst a dark world is a confusing and overwhelming, it brings far more beauty than the darkness. And if you are one, remember, you are the light. You are colorful.

Listen to: Tidal by Noah Kahan