Channeling Your Energetic Gifts
If you’re energetically sensitive or empathic, trauma can add a layer of confusion to your experiences. When you pick up energetic information, you often don't have context for that information, so your unresolved trauma becomes the filter through which you interpret your perceptions. Have you ever emphatically sensed a certain feeling in the room? For example: You sit down next to someone and start a conversation, or in a chair someone was just sitting in, and you sense an unexplained intensity in the space. You feel an adrenal rush and your heart starts to race. If you have unhealed trauma, you might assume that you’re sensing someone else's anxiety. From there, you might translate this to mean that there’s something bad or dangerous the person needs to protect against.
It's easy to misread excitement as anxiety, because our unhealed trauma influences how we interpret energetic experiences.
You come to this conclusion reflexively, without having the neutrality to take in the full situation. It’s based on your own history, rather than what is actually happening in the present time and space. Without any context, feelings of excitement can masquerade as anxiety because they both reflect a similar biological experience in the body. Another example is when you’re stuck in fight or flight and automatically interpret certain stimuli as a threat in the environment. As a result of past trauma, you infer that unfamiliar presence negatively because you have an inherent fear that something harmful exists in your space. Experiences like this can leave you feeling helpless because they're actually mirroring the helplessness we feel after a traumatic experience. These patterns can be painful, scary, and confusing, and they can happen with both tangible experiences and psychic ones. And, when it’s not a physical experience that can be validated, it’s hard to wrap your head around what you’re experiencing. This can create a great deal of distress, like fear of the energies and entities you’re tapping into, ungroundedness, being overwhelmed by the feelings and experiences of others (and your own), and ultimately disconnecting from yourself and practical aspects of life. When you’re traumatized, it’s harder to know whether this is something stemming from your imagination versus an actual psychic experience. If you have severe trauma AND psychic gifts, you may be experiencing both simultaneously, which can leave you feeling confused about what’s real. The key to navigating through this confusion is to heal your traumas through gentle energetic healing work.
You want to use your gifts to inform your life and make it better, not to escape your body or life experiences.
Presence is key. Escaping the present moment only perpetuates the consequences of trauma. Whatever you hold in your day-to-day experience will also translate into your energetic experience, and vice versa. There is no separation. For energetic gifts like clairvoyance, clairaudience, or empathy to be balanced, we have to address and heal our traumas. Otherwise, our wounds and fears become woven into our psychic / energetic experiences. This is often a difficult and uncomfortable place to be. Where our trauma-coping strategies and our psychic gifts meet, is a place that often creates feelings of confusion, fear, and lack of grounding. There is a difference between leaving your body (disassociation) because you’ve gone into fight or flight versus going into an altered state to perceive or read energetic fields. When we are triggered or hurt and striving to survive, we can’t discern the difference. Both types of experience can take us into a sense of peace or fear, relief and/or a need to fight against something. This is the danger zone where we fear we might be “going crazy.” The way through this is to heal your traumas. Learn how to regulate your nervous system, become aware of what your trauma coping strategies are, and differentiate that from your psychic experience. Ultimately, the key to addressing these concerns is presence. That’s what it all comes down to — cultivating the presence to stay in the moment.
Presence is key in healing trauma and in being able to accurately perceive subtle energies.
Resetting the nervous system. All energy work enters the body through your aura (etheric layer) and then into the nervous system where it affects the physical body. Healing occurs when we are in a rest and relaxation state, as with reiki work. That’s when the parasympathetic aspect of our nervous system is engaged, and change manifests in our neurology, neural pathways, chemical experience, and ultimately the state of our physical, mental, and emotional bodies. In essence, by resetting the nervous system, we can most effectively heal the body and find freedom from all the ways trauma limits our lives.