The Plight of the Empath or Highly Sensitive Person

Help For HSPs

Guest article by Kathy Moore

I see many clients in my practice as a hypnotherapist and consultant that are overwhelmed by or stuck in some intensely negative, recurring emotion-- especially guilt. Some exhibit such intense and unexplained sorrow they say things like, "I've been crying all week for no reason!"

I would characterize most, if not all, of these clients as: highly spiritually evolved, accepting responsibility for their own lives, serious about working through their issues and open-minded.

So why can't they seem to get past these problems? When I began to intently study this phenomena, I started seeing similarities and making connections.

Most of these clients would spend as much time (in the pre-talk portion of their sessions) relating other people's problems and how they were affected by them as they did "their own stuff." They frequently made comments regarding seemingly unexplained anger, grief or guilt in themselves, that they simultaneously recognized, yet could easily explain in friends and relatives.

What I began to realize was that these clients were not only extremely empathic, but had no idea what to do about it. In fact, I now believe at least 60 percent of my current clients are highly empathic and, of these, a large portion of the emotional problems they suffer from are not their own.

As synchronicity would have it, shortly after I made this connection, my copy of Issue #29 of Intuition Magazine arrived. There, on page 8, begins an article by Maggie Oman Shannon, titled 'The Sensitivity Trait.' Maggie Oman Shannon's article chronicles the work of research psychologist and psychotherapist Elaine Aron.

continued