Positive Energy Protection
Do you take on energy from other people, feel emotionally drained, or find yourself carrying heavy feelings that are difficult to let go of?
This is Video #2 in my Positive Energy Protection series.
Throughout this series, I’m essentially creating a mini-workshop to help you understand how we can be affected by other people’s energy, what we can do to avoid taking so much of it on, and how we can release it when we do.
The goal is to gradually build greater emotional and energetic awareness so you become more confident in recognizing what is your energy and what may be coming from someone else.
When we can understand that difference, it becomes much easier to move through social situations, work environments, relationships, and everyday life without feeling so overwhelmed or drained.
Building Greater Confidence With Your Energy
A big part of this work is learning how to strengthen your own energy and become more aware of what is happening within you.
This can help you:
•Feel more confident in social situations
•Become less affected by other people’s moods and emotions
•Stop carrying work energy home with you
•Reduce rumination after difficult interactions
•Become clearer about what belongs to you and what doesn’t
•Feel more empowered wherever you go
As we move through this series, we’ll look at practical things you can do before, during, and after interactions with other people and situations.
But before we get into those practical tools, it helps to first understand what we mean when we talk about “energy” and how this exchange may be happening.
What Do We Mean by “Energy”?
I’ve done a number of workshops on this topic, and at one workshop someone finally asked me, “What is this energy you’re talking about?”
I realized I had simply assumed people understood what I meant.
When I talk about taking on “negative energy,” I’m talking about energy that we experience as unpleasant or that doesn’t feel good to us. You may be feeling perfectly fine, spend time around someone, and suddenly feel drained, heavy, anxious, or simply not like yourself.
The opposite can happen as well. You can spend time around someone and come away feeling energized, positive, and uplifted.
So what is actually happening?
One way to begin understanding energy is to think about waves and frequencies. We can see a simple example in water. If you drop a stone into a calm pond, waves of energy ripple outward from where the stone entered the water.
Radio waves provide another useful example. Different radio stations are broadcasting different frequencies all around us. We don’t see those waves, but when we tune a radio to the correct frequency, we receive that particular station.
Turning up the volume increases the strength or amplitude of the wave. Turning it down decreases it.
What Happens When Energy Waves Meet?
Now imagine dropping two stones into a pond at different places.
Each creates its own series of waves. Eventually those waves meet and interact with one another. When they do, each affects the overall pattern of energy.
This gives us a useful way of thinking about what can happen between people.
We are continually expressing and receiving information through our thoughts, emotions, body language, tone of voice, behaviour, and the emotional states we bring into an interaction.
When we are around another person, these patterns interact.
Sometimes that interaction feels wonderful. We feel energized, connected, understood, or uplifted.
Other times we may notice our energy changing in a way that doesn’t feel good. We might become tense, sad, anxious, irritated, or drained.
Understanding this interaction gives us a foundation for looking more closely at why certain people’s emotions can affect us so strongly and why highly sensitive people may notice these changes particularly quickly.
Sympathetic Vibrations: Why We Can Feel What Others Are Feeling
Have you ever been around someone who is sad and found yourself beginning to feel their sadness?
You may sympathize with them because you understand what that feeling is like. You have the capacity for that emotion within you, and something about what they are experiencing resonates with that same emotional capacity within you.
A useful way to understand this is through sympathetic vibrations.
Think of a tuning fork. When you tap it, it vibrates at a particular frequency. You can hear the sound, and if you move the tuning fork close to your body, you can actually feel the vibration.
Now place another tuning fork with the same frequency nearby. When the first tuning fork is struck, the second can begin vibrating as well because it resonates with that frequency.
If the second tuning fork has a different, incompatible frequency, it won’t resonate with the first one and it won’t vibrate.
This gives us a helpful analogy for understanding emotional sensitivity between people.
When someone is experiencing sadness, for example, that emotional state can resonate with our own capacity to experience sadness. It’s almost as though their sadness begins to vibrate the corresponding emotional “tuning fork” within us.
We feel what they are feeling. We become more in tune with them.
For someone who is highly sensitive or empathic, this experience can be particularly strong. You may pick up very quickly on another person’s emotional state and begin feeling affected by it yourself.
The important part is learning to become increasingly aware of what you were feeling before the interaction and what began to change once you were around the other person.
That awareness helps us begin separating what belongs to us from what we may be picking up from someone else.
Highly Sensitive People and Emotional Energy
If you find that you pick up other people’s emotions very easily or become drained around certain people and environments, you may simply be a highly sensitive person.
Highly sensitive people tend to be more aware of what is happening around them. You may notice subtle changes in another person’s mood, emotions, body language, or the overall feeling of an environment that other people don’t seem to notice as quickly.
This sensitivity can be valuable. In nature, greater sensitivity to the environment can serve a protective purpose. An animal that notices subtle signs of danger before the rest of the herd can alert the others and help keep the group safe.
But being highly sensitive can also become overwhelming.
You may be more sensitive to:
•Other people’s emotions and moods
•Lights, sounds, movement, and busy environments
•Conflict or tension around you
•Subtle changes in your surroundings
•Stressful or emotionally charged situations
This can become even stronger when your nervous system is already overstimulated and you’re spending a lot of time feeling stressed, worried, or on alert.
When you’re already in that heightened state, it can become much easier to feel overwhelmed by what is happening around you and more difficult to distinguish between your own emotional state and what you’re sensing from someone else.
The purpose of this work isn’t to make you less sensitive. It’s to become more aware of your sensitivity and learn how to work with it so you can remain grounded and connected to yourself without becoming so easily drained by everything around you.
Understanding Your Energy Is the First Step
Understanding how energy and emotional sensitivity may work gives us a foundation for doing something practical about it.
If you can begin noticing when your energy changes around certain people or situations, you can become more conscious of what is happening instead of simply getting swept up in it.
In the rest of this Positive Energy Protection series, we’ll move into practical tools for what you can do before, during, and after interactions
This includes grounding yourself, setting intentions, noticing when you’re beginning to take something on, and clearing or releasing what you don’t want to carry forward.
The goal is to help you move from one interaction to the next without carrying unnecessary emotional weight with you, while becoming more confident and grounded in your own energy.
Explore the Full Positive Energy Protection Series
If you often feel drained by other people’s emotions, moods, or stressful interactions, explore the full Positive Energy Protection series. We’ll look more deeply at why this happens and practical ways to manage your energy before, during, and after interactions so you can remain more grounded, confident, and connected to yourself.
Positive Energy Protection — Protect Yourself from Negative Energy and Maintain Balance:
http://hypnotherapyvictoria.com/positive-energy-protection/
FREE Self-Help Mindfulness Series
Learning to stay present and connected to your body can be especially helpful when you’re sensitive to other people’s emotions and energy. Mindfulness helps you notice changes within yourself sooner, so you can become clearer about what is yours and what may be coming from the people or environment around you.
My FREE Self-Help Mindfulness Series can help you:
•Become more present and grounded
•Notice emotional and physical changes earlier
•Reduce automatic reactions to stressful interactions
•Stay more connected to yourself around other people
•Develop greater awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and surroundings
FREE Self-Help Mindfulness Series:
https://www.hypnotherapyvictoria.com/free-self-help-mindfulness-series/
Counselling Hypnotherapy
If you find yourself frequently affected or drained by other people, deeper emotional patterns, self-confidence, boundaries, or subconscious beliefs may also be contributing.
Through counselling and hypnotherapy, we can explore these underlying patterns and work toward helping you feel more grounded, confident, and secure within yourself.
Counselling Victoria:
https://www.hypnotherapyvictoria.com/counselling-victoria/
Hypnotherapy Victoria:
https://www.hypnotherapyvictoria.com/hypnotherapy-victoria/
I also offer a free 1-hour video consultation where we can talk about what you’re experiencing, how it is affecting your life, possible underlying patterns, and what you’d like to change. You can also learn about my therapy process and see whether working together feels like the right fit for you.
Arne Pedersen
