Self-Care When You Feel The World Spiraling Out Of Control
Things are really intense right now. A recent study found that eighty percent of Americans believe their country is “spiraling out of control,” and two thirds of them show “signs of clinical anxiety or depression.” Empaths are dangerously challenged to process it all, because we are so acutely aware of the suffering around us, which encompasses the suffering that causes anxiety, as well as the anxiety itself.
There are two parts to caring for yourself that I want to talk to you about. The first part is developing the ability to get perspective on the heightened emotions you’re tuned into right now. The second is to learn how to preserve yourself for the long-haul.
They both involve memories from your own life. If you’re quite young, then you have seen more than your share of global hardship already. I have patients whose families were devastated in the 2008 financial crisis, and who were on the verge of recovery when COVID or police brutality tore the very fabric of society. The suffering is real.
Perspective
When I was a little girl, I spent a lot of time with my sister’s grandparents, and her grandmother was of Jewish heritage. I clearly remember one evening at one of their card parties, when the adults were playing cards. I noticed that one my grandmother’s friends had a series of numbers tattooed on her arm, and I blurted out, “Mommy, is she cheating? See the numbers on her arm?” A chilling stillness passed through the room before my grandmother’s friend picked me up and held me in her lap. She told me about the concentration camp where the tattoo came from, and she ended her story by telling me, with intense passion, as you can imagine, “Never be afraid to live every single day, and to ask every single question.”
I was shocked by her story and followed her advice by learning everything I could about the Holocaust. I was astonished at what human beings could do to each other. All empaths have these experiences when they are younger. Something like that is thrust at them, and they can’t help but want to understand what it is. That’s their response: to understand, to know.
It gives us purpose, because even as children we know that we can actually do something about it. Empaths want to do everything they possibly can. As a child, you might remember believing, as I did, that if I was thinking about you, I could protect you. As a child, I wanted to prevent you from being hurt in the first place. Over time, empaths learn that they rarely get the chance to do that. Most of the time, they help heal others after they’ve been hurt, and in that situation, it actually is possible for us to help someone by thinking about them. We can give healing energy to others simply by force of will.
Broken Dreams
Young empaths just naturally set out to heal the world with this ability, and most all of us have grand ambitions of healing everyone and preventing all future pain. This is a child’s understanding, a child’s wildly innocent hope. But, even as adults, we never fully abandon it. We really do have magical abilities, after all, so we tend to think that having a global impact is just a matter of getting enough magic to flow through us.
We also intuitively realize that the way to heal the world is to start with the people around us, and that leads to our first disillusionments. We find out that we can’t heal people who do not want to be healed. Years ago, when I was just starting my practice, I was assigned to a suicidal patient. This person was so far down the hopelessness hole they couldn’t see the sky, and they eventually did commit suicide. I was crushed. It was one of my darkest moments, even though everyone who had worked with the patient assured me that we had done all we could.
We find out that, sometimes, we can’t heal people fast enough to save them. We can’t heal groups of people just by thinking about them, either. This gives us a clearer understanding of what we’re up against. There are a million media outlets dedicated to serial killers, torture, rape, war and mayhem. There are only two, that I can think of, about the wonderful things happening in our world.
Why do so many of us have an innate desire to submerge in this negativity? Why are people so ready to believe that “other people” have to be met with violence and power? Why are they so eager to believe that, while they are kind and loving, the “other people” are inherently evil and dangerous?
Empaths don’t get it, and we don’t like it. We can fall down the hopelessness hole. I had one very scary moment when everything went completely dark, and I felt like I had no control. I was plunging down the hole, shocked. There wasn’t even any precursor to it that I could perceive at the time, no photo or headline that “hit me” — it just came out of nowhere.
That’s a real danger that you are facing right now, too, because of our historical moment. When you start to fall, use your intellect to recollect that we’ve been through history like this before. From a black person’s perspective, we’ve been cycling through this for four hundred years, with almost no spiritual progress. Putting it in that larger context can help you breathe.
Self-Healing
But it won’t help you flow emotionally or cosmically. For that, you need to remember your life as an empath. There’s something else that you’ve been doing since you were a child, and it’s really important to think about it now, so if you fall down the hole, you’ll have a ladder to get out.
Since you were little, you have always remembered those rare moments when your good deeds actually seemed to dawn on somebody. You were always empathetic, always good, always working your magic in your thoughts, but most of the time, no one knew. Every now and then, however, a glorious moment would come when someone would let you know that you helped them.
These moments thrilled you, and each of them still does. Every one is like lighting a match in Plato’s cave. There is truth. There is beauty. The universe is miraculous. Once the match is lit, even when it goes out, you’re going to know that there was light. You’re going to know that light itself is real.
You collected these memories for a reason. It’s an empath’s instinct to collect them. Because when you are being sucked into the hopelessness hole, you can use those memories to save yourself. When I was little, I imagined keeping them in a box, and it wasn’t until decades later that I found out a lot of empaths do this, and it’s actually been formalized into a therapy.
When I fell in, I literally opened my box, and intentionally remembered the times when others noticed I had helped them and said something to me about it. This was so powerful that, out of nowhere, I had a spiritual experience. I heard someone saying, “You have to stay here.” It was information from the universe itself, and it has become one of the most important memories I keep in my box.
The Times They Are A Changing
There’s one more aspect of our historical situation that I want to help you process, because it’s connected. When there is so much pain screaming at us from every direction, we tend to worry that the apocalypse has begun. The prophecy was about four horsemen, and when we look around, they’re rampaging now.
But that’s prophetic thinking, religious thinking, false thinking. You’re an empath. If this really was the end of the world, you wouldn’t be wondering if it was. You would know. Since we know it isn’t, you can reject the notion, because the notion comes from your societal training, and not from your intuition.
You and I also know that all things in the universe ebb and flow. Right now, we are awash in pain. But when the tide turns, it will be one of the most amazing transitions humanity has ever produced. We may not witness it in our lifetimes. Transformations like the one we’re in take a long time. Previous, local ones, like the Age of Enlightenment, took over 200 years. We’re looking at something global in scale, and so it will certainly be even more epic.
I think it’s instructive to consider what Ruth Nanda Anshen wrote over sixty years ago in her introduction to Eric Fromm’s masterpiece, The Art of Loving (Harper & Row, 1956):
“There is in mankind today a counterforce to the sterility and danger of an…anonymous mass culture, a new, if sometimes imperceptible, spiritual sense of convergence toward world unity on the basis of the sacredness of each human person and respect for the plurality of cultures.”
We’re still on that path. Your responsibility to the world, as an empath, is to help humanity reach this convergence. Your responsibility to yourself, as an empath, is to keep yourself strong, so you can.
Photo by Ben Mater on Unsplash
