Pile Up

Sometimes things pile up.  Several conversations happen in rapid order with many people can cause emotions to pile up like some kind of multi-car accident.  It leaves the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP, empath) in a state.  I had this experience with a lot going on at work.  By a lot, I mean excitement and other emotions from about thirty people in a fairly small space.  It was all good things, but the emotions flooded in me and kept on pouring in.  I could sense each of the feelings and all of them at the same time.  They were good feelings, and they were strong but not as strong as anger.  All the same, I was affected.  My behavior was erratic; it was hard to focus.  It was like being in a crowd but not as intense.  Afterwards, I decided that I should get rid of them.  The following is what I do to get back to normal or some semblance thereof.

First, I push the emotion out.  What I do is get into a meditative state and then use my will (intent) to push out the emotions out of my body and away from me.  It's a simple and effective technique.  It can be used in a moment when needed.  A problem with it is that if you like the emotion, you may find it hard to push it out.  What I do is try it several times.  Every time I feel a little more like normal. I guess it's a judgement call on how much you want to feel the emotion.  It's like turning down the volume on a music player.

Second I try to get into a meditative state to allow emotions flow through me but keeping my soul untouched.  This does take some practice, and does take some getting used to.  I've called this being detached.  I guess it's a compromise.  I figure sometimes it's hard to hold back the ocean of feelings, so you might as well run with it.  Yeah, I've mentioned these two techniques in other posts and for other situations.  They can be a harmonious way of dealing with this world.

A good night's rest is good after the ordeal; though, the emotions can linger for a few days.  Did I really wanted to get rid of all of the emotion?  No, not really.  I just wanted to get to a manageable state.  This way I could have control over my behavior.  After the rest I had a calmer disposition.

  Some empaths like to use shielding to not be affected by others' emotion.  My problem with it is that it's not always necessary to go to such drastic measures.  I like to experience the feelings of my environment, and shielding just diminishes that.  It's like throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Pushing out emotion, being detached from the emotion though it flows through you, and rest should help to get back to normal.  Yeah, getting back to normal. Some would question what normal is.  Of course if your an HSP, you may never know what normal is.  In this case, I am referring to what is normal for you.  It's a crazy world and from time to time it gets a little more crazy.

Old Emotion

When your hit with a very deep old emotion.  These are hidden issues in life.  They tend to make you feel funny or strange.  On the surface you feel fine, but deep, deep inside there's a storm raging.  It's quite an odd feeling experience.  Sometimes this happens to me.  Once, I had to take action, and I knew there was going to be a bad result for a particular person.  I had been working with this person for a long time.  The patterns  that arose in them were self destructive in nature.  In the end, there was nothing I could do about it.  It's like watching a train wreck in very slow motion.  The guilt emotions came up even though I see I had done everything I knew to do.  These guilt emotions were familiar to me.  When I was very young, my parents divorced.  The guilt feelings developed then; now they were back.  This is nothing less than emotional trauma.  After consulting with my highly sensitive friends (hsps, empaths), I figured out how to deal with the situation.  I'll talk about the symptoms, the investigation, and the recovery of this trauma.

The first thing I want to talk about is the symptoms.  For me the symptoms were emotional and a little weird.  Overall I felt fine, but the underline emotion was not fine at all.  I could sense that.   I couldn't shake my mood.  It was like my emotional being was preoccupied, and it couldn't handle any new emotional situations.  So I was not myself.  In that state you question what could be the matter.  I had to rationally think of what the matter was.  I could not use my intuition to help with that but I had to use my analytical brain.  A sense of panic was starting to come over me, and a sense of hopelessness as well.

To get a handle on my emotional situation, I had to go into a deep meditation state and started to ask questions to myself.  These were inquisitive and investigative questions.  I got my answer.  It was guilt I was experiencing.  Then I kept on asking questions on why the guilt was.  I got my answer again.  It was a guilt pattern as when my parents divorced.  To me that was a revelation.  Years before, I wondered if I experienced guilt due to the divorce.  I was very young and did not remember much from that time.  I only remembered some glimpses of scenes.  You really don't want to remember the bad stuff.  Sometimes you just blank out the bad stuff, but emotional evidence of them will probably remain.

The first step of recovery for me was in the meditative state.  I reasoned out my feeling of guilt.  I told myself that my parents divorce was not my responsibility and was not my fault.  Surprisingly that went quite well.  I suppose it's because over the years I gathered enough information about the divorce, and I reasoned how it indeed was not my fault.  So it seems though I knew that, I still had a pattern of guilt operating in me.  Now I was dealing with it.  Then I had to move on to the more recent situation.  I told myself that I was not responsible for the outcome and that I did do what I needed to do.  That I also did everything in my power to make things better.  That was the first step.  The next steps is day by day living with the outcome.  Though I feel fine, I do have a residual feeling that I went through something very traumatic.  So I have to take it easy.  I have to do some grounding exercises, and push out the old emotion to move on.  It's a struggle, I have to admit.  It will take time to fully recover.

Trauma of any kind has symptoms, needs an investigation, and demands a recovery.  Emotional trauma is not different.  You may experience some emotional shock.  Make sure that you keep yourself comfortable, warm, and hydrated.  Talk to others to help sort out the pieces.  Seeking help from a psychological counselor is a good idea.  These old emotions are wounds that have festered over years.  Recovery won't be immediate, but immediate headway is possible.  I'm not a psychologist or psychiatrist.  I'm just a highly sensitive person sharing my experiences, recommendations, and opinions.

Music Obsessions

One of the things I get obsessed with is music.  I think it's fairly common to get obsessed about things now and again for highly sensitive people (HSP, empath).  Now with me, I developed this obsession with music.  I know it's common to like music, and many people buy much music in a year's time.  That's not exactly what I'm talking about.  Try listening to a song over and over for weeks.  Soon, you'll get tired of it.  My obsession drives me to listen to it and to play it in my head.  I'm going to share how I started with this obsession, how I understand it works, and share some artists I've obsessed about over the years.

It's 1970.  There is no internet, there is no cell phones, there are no computers, no social media, not even compact discs.  What's sitting in my living room on a table is a box with a bunch of nobs on it and a round thing on the top that turns.  It's a stereo system made up of a turntable, radio, and amplifier.  These pieces were stacked on top of each other.  I am two years old, almost three.  The room is huge to me.  There are soft chairs and a sofa.  The windows are very tall but thin.  The carpet was shag.  There's a sound coming from the stereo, and it's a song.  It said "if you want it, here it is come and get it.  But you better hurry because it's going fast."  I find the album cover of the long play vinyl record and its a picture of a outside patio with a giant hand on some stone podium and the index finger having a nail in it.  All I could think of was ice cream, because ice cream melted.  From then on when I heard the song I thought of ice cream and when I had ice cream I could hear the song in my head.  Yes, I'm Pavlov's dog.  That was the beginning of this obsession.  I got a kick out of it.  By a kick, I mean a natural high.  I went into a state of euphoria.  From then on I was hooked.

I blame my empathic abilities for this.  By concentrating on a work (painting, song, technology) I can tap into the excitement associated with the work.  Sometimes it's the whole artist and sometime it's just a song.  The feeling goes so deep.  Heart and soul get rattled together till they resonate in concert.  It's becoming one with the music and words.  It's feeling every agony and every excitement in pure harmony, until I'm ready to burst.  Then streams of tears come and I'm fully taken.  Sure, it's my drug.  There has been many  times throughout my life where I've drove my friends and loved ones crazy with this obsession.  At one point in my childhood, I was asked not to sing out loud since I could not carry a tune, and didn't have rhythm.  In fact, I found out in recent years that audio information is not my preferred source of information.  My preferred source is tactile or doing and my secondary is visual.  So this obsession seems like a contradiction for me.

Here's a sampling of song and pieces I've obsessed about over the years with youtube links to the songs:

Bad finger

Burt Bacharach

Carpenters
Elvis
Bobbie Gentry 

Dion Warwick
Peter Paul & Mary

Moody Blues

Eric Burdon

Fifth Dimension

Bee Gees
Simon & Garfunkel

Barbara Streisand
Shirley Bassey

Olivia Newton John
Gordon Lightfoot
Neil Diamond 
Paco De Lucia

Linda Rohnstat

Elton John

Tchaikovsky
Prokofiev

ABBA

Cat Stevens

Beatles

Dvorak

Queen
Aerosmith
America
Eagles 

ELO
Boney M

Donna Summer

Police
Dire Straits

ABC

Diana Ross

OEM

Mecano

Michael Jackson

Supertramp

John Lennon
Mike Oldfield

Train

Five For Fighting
No Doubt
P!nk

Lady Gaga

Christina Perri

Diana Krall

Kimbra

You should have gotten a good overview of this obsession of mine with how it got started, how it works, and what artists I've obsessed about over the years.  I don't consider myself as having obsessive-compulsive disorder.  I have never been diagnosed with that nor has my behavior promoted and comments about that from others.  I think HSP's can develop these obsessions if they pickup on an emotion that they love.  Isn't that a normal human thing to do?  We are attracted to situations, people, or things that make us feel good and we're repulsed by those who/that make us feel bad.  What do you obsess about?