Relationships are actually very easy, with people who have empathy.

One of the surest signs of trauma is continuously relating to difficult people.

I’ve spent my entire life trapped in a maze of narcissists and their enablers. For a long time I couldn’t see it. Relationships were confusing. I was avoidant. I overlooked bad behavior. I couldn’t see the mistreatment, or the people that everyone else stayed away from. Then I started to see it, and I fought back. I spoke up. I confronted the disrespect. It was everywhere.

Then, I found the root. Ever the constant gardener, I pulled it up. The root. The rot. And I exited this level of the game. To anyone who finds themselves in this place, I salute you.

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Once you see it, You can’t unsee it.

It’s only very recently after studying energy medicine under very careful guidance and instruction, that I was able to break free from this dynamic, and create enough distance and healthy boundaries to observe the dynamic created between empaths and narcissists.

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Unfortunately, while you’re still inside of it, you’re playing the Hunger Games. It’s an incredibly transactional and manipulative reality with puppets and puppet masters pulling invisible strings, where some dominate and others choose to be dominated.

But with enough time and practice you can successfully outgrow this level of interaction.

As a healer, and a recovered empath, I can’t help but notice how much these connections affect the physical health and mental sanity of my clients. You can’t talk about women’s health and sensitivities without addressing the impact of narcissism.

Narcissism is a Personality Disorder in psychology and 3D reality, and it’s also an energy diagnosis with it’s origins at a level that most cannot see. It is a well-organized and malevolent complex that hides itself behind a heavy glamour, and works through dominance and control to keep us in illusion, delusion, and unaware of our power. There are two main types; one is more overt and self-righteous (Donald Trump is an obvious example), but the other, far more common, is more covert and incredibly charming. Empaths and narcissists are drawn to each other like moths to a flame. If you are susceptible you’ll notice a strong pull when a narcissist is around; almost spell-like.

As my therapist likes to say, “When you feel an immediate and strong pull towards another person, RUN.”

This is something that can only be experienced from the inside-out. It’s not a casual encounter, umbrella diagnosis, or emotionally unavailable partner. It’s a person who is under the influence of a sophisticated spirit-attachment, and is actively working to diminish you in ways that cannot be seen with the physical eyes, although those who have been in close relationship to a narcissist have seen the mask slip. That’s why so many of us who make it through become Seers, and likely had powerful gifts to begin with that were intentionally being suppressed.

I was married to a narcissist. We were together for 10 years. Following the divorce and breaking of my family, I was in a vulnerable position as a single mother, and consistently picked up by female narcissists until I learned my lesson. They absolutely target and seek out those who are vulnerable, too open, too trusting, lonely, desperate, and quick to empathize.

Here is what I know about Narcissism, and how it taught me about energy and healing.

1. Narcissism is the training ground for spiritual discernment. Many spirit attachments that work through narcissists target those with a lot of light and actively work to blind the third eye chakra and the throat chakra. Learning to see reality, and speak up exposes the narcissist.

2. Narcissists look for people who are very open, and have empathy. Empathy without discernment and protection makes you easy prey.

3. Empaths, those with special gifts, must make it through the gauntlet of the narcissists and their enablers in order for their gifts to reach maturity.

4. Being open and loving freely, being accommodating and forgiving easily, enables narcissism in relationships. Adult relationships are not unconditional.

5. Until we say No More, we are complicit in consenting to these dynamics.

6. We are the generation outgrowing the narcissist-empath dynamic.

7. None of your previous coping mechanisms work here. I have not seen anything so persistently unyielding that it pushes you past the boundary of psychosis where your own patterns finally let go, the veil rips open, and blessed discernment arrives.

8. Narcissists are vampiric. They appear glamorous or spell-like, just like vampires. And they feed off you, just like vampires.

9. As long as you’re participating in these dynamics you will be blinded, or kept in denial. They don’t want to let go of their food source, and feel extremely threatened if you try to leave.

10. To extract yourself from these dynamics can be incredibly confusing and isolating.

11. For a long time I practiced forgiveness with these people and gave them another chance. This doesn’t work. Any continued access to you allows them to extract, and will divert you from your life purpose.

12. Feeling lost and confused about who you are and what you’re meant to be doing? This is a spiritual crisis and often your soul has been hijacked by another.

13. It’s so hard to leave these dynamics because they take a piece of your soul, of YOU. So we continue to be drawn back because they literally have a piece of us.

Why the Narcissist-Empath Dynamic?

The narc’s biggest weapon is manipulation through love and belonging. They show up with something you want (big promises, gifts, seduction, a circle of friends) when you are lonely or desperate, and hook you. When you can no longer be manipulated by belonging, you can be liberated. Many will throw away their liberation rather than leave these relationships.

The narcissist will continuously work to distort your reality, so as to never face their own inadequacy or deep pain. The empath’s biggest weakness is lack of boundaries and discernment. Because of their untrained eye, they will continually lean in to try to understand the dynamic because it’s truly baffling, but it also prevents them from facing their own shadows and deep pain.

The lesson of the Narcissist-Empath dynamic is all about where you give away your power, and to whom.

How tell if you’re dealing with a narcissist?

1. Question their behavior.

   I’ve had a lot of honest conversations with a lot of people.

   The only ones who seem to mind are narcissists.

   They can’t be seen as wrong, and will oddly all resort to an eerily similar script when questioned. Deny, act incredibly offended, and tell you that you’re the problem.

2. They lie.

   At first they appear to be little white lies, little slips of the mask, harmless inconsistencies, and then the larger scale of manipulation becomes apparent and you realize they are always trying to control the relationship, and protect their self-image instead of having any desire to meet you and see you.

3. Set boundaries. They don’t like this. They don’t like being told no, or pushing back. The sooner you do this, the sooner you know what you’re dealing with. If they sense you aren’t open, if they can’t manipulate you, if they can’t feed, they lose interest.

4. They want respect, but they don’t give it. They’re extremely touchy around your behavior, your tone and having their own needs met, but walls go up when the tables are turned.

5. Narcissists appear so beautiful and youthful, and you’ll find them in the center of a circle of enablers. Their lives seem to follow an upward trajectory of success because they are siphoning from those who surround them. Meanwhile, those who surround them suffer all sorts of ailments and minor set-backs, but never connect it to a power exchange happening out of sight.

6. If you want to spot the narcissist, look for the ones who are never alone and are surrounded by well-meaning empathic folks, who lack discernment. If you want to find those with true power, look for the ones who are pushed out of the herd and willing to stand alone because they challenge the reality of the group.

The Emperor’s New Clothes is a wonderful allegory of a narcissist, the many enablers, and the one who sees, and is brave enough to speak out.

Recovering your boundaries, voice, and vision as an empath is the most powerful gift you can give yourself.

If you are still trapped in this level of the game, I offer 1:1 guidance and energy clearings to get to the root of these dynamics and help empaths recover their power and fight back.

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One of the most surprising parts of my healing journey was when I released wounded masculine energy from my energy channels.

Another time I found my ex-husband’s energy snaked around my mother’s energy which had lodged itself deep in my feminine channels.

By slowly and carefully removing others from the deepest layers of my being, I began to operate in a way that was authentically me, and it shifted my understanding of enmeshment and how we affect each other.

Here are a few things about energy you may not realize:

1. When a trauma happens, the victimizer transfers wounded energy into the victim. The victim then carries this energy, like a dark cloud in their system, until they have the means to heal and release it, or they transfer it to someone else perpetuating the perpetrator-victim loop.

2. Living in close proximity to someone who has unaddressed shame, addiction, self-loathing or guilt can cause you to absorb this from them as it unconsciously leaks into the field.

3. Much of what you think and feel does not even belong to you. Our minds & energy bodies are incredibly porous, especially if you’re sensitive or empathic without proper hygeine. If you don’t practice energy hygeine or reinforce your boundaries, your thoughts and feelings can be picked up & amplified by various unseen forces. You won’t be able to detect their actions, but you’ll feel the effects.

4. Men transfer energy into women’s bodies through love-making. Most women are expressions of their lover’s energy. If you don’t work to clear or transmute this, you can easily become a receptacle for someone else’s anger, depression, fatigue, and so on.

The reason so many people are waking up to energy healing is because the deeper you go into the body, the more sensitive you become to the subtle layers of what’s YOU and not YOU. And energy healing works in these areas where nothing else has.

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If you’d like learn more on how to navigate and clear your own energy please reach out to me for 1:1 guidance.

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Abandon the self, the other women told me.

They didn’t know the medicine was keeping them sick. I didn’t know.

For years, ages, lifetimes I practiced abandoning the Self; giving and forgiving, keeping the peace, don’t make it about you they said.

But everyone has a line in the sand. A place where the cognitive dissonance becomes so great that it shatters the denial.

My forgiveness, my softness, my generosity was being gifted to those who hadn’t earned it. And refused to care for it.

In all of my spirituality I had never truly resolved my anger. I had bypassed it, and in doing so I had lost connection to my discernment.

If I wanted to groom the segment of the culture that holds all the power (women) to stay small, obedient, easy to control, compliant, willing to overlook bad behavior, and not fight back, I would anesthetize them with Love & Light spirituality. And in their somnambulant state, I would watch them turn and groom each other.

But with feminine power returning to the planet, we have to welcome the dark feminine or we fail.

To everything there is a yin & yang. This creates wholeness. We are spiritual beings, but we are also animals in a body. We want to be good, but we are also naughty, mean, unkind. It is this tension of opposites that creates the human experience. On the quest for Love and Light, you can’t bypass being a human.

When I was younger, I bypassed my grief. It wasn’t anything I’d ever known how to deal with so I kept running from it until I was in my early 30’s. When the grief finally caught up with me and I broke through that compartment, I cried for about a year straight. The same thing happened with my rage. When I finally chose to stand my ground, and face the unraveling of welcoming her back with all of her terrible fire, I raged for a good year and half. Turns out there’s plenty to be mad about.

What happened next, I didn’t expect. I could finally see. I could see the snakes in the grass. I could see my own boundaries, and how many people I let trample all over them. I could see the masses of women and men who hadn’t crossed this threshold. I could see the women who were brave enough to let themselves become unhinged and face the outerlands of the wild, feral, abandoned women. The thing “they tell us” we least want to become.

I could see I was closer to being free.

And further from the herd.

I wondered how many others had walked this terrain; the oppressed, the marginalized, all those who had let rage initiate them. I could see we lived in a very inverted reality, and where the power truly lies.

And I could see what those who practiced the earth based religions knew all along; the indigenous, the witches, the shamans, the underworld travelers and shadow workers, and those who made it past the glamour wall of things that appeared shiny.

Love, light and striving to be good are only half the story, and when we cast the messy dark feminine out of the picture we split ourselves in two, and our power went with her.

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So many of us have lived our lives with the understanding that when our bodies express symptoms, they are the problem.

Shoulder pain = there’s something wrong with my shoulder. Back pain = inject a medication into the back. I’ve observed this purely physical, black and white interpretation western medical model for my whole life.

In the TCM, Traditional Chinese Medicine model, our perspective widens and we see a holistic organism influenced by rivers of meridians that runs through the body like highways. If someone has a headache it can be from an influence downstream such as the liver, or the gallbladder. And it to take it a step further into the emotional dimension, a kidney infection can be caused by fear or fright from something happening at home.

And then there’s the final dimension of energy or spirit. The more sensitive you become the more this will reveal itself to you. In TCM we call this energy Qi, and contrary to popular opinion “energy” is not “woo.” Chinese Medicine has an entire branch of healthcare devoted to the study of qi and energy healing called Qi Gong that is thousands of years old.

You’ll notice in western culture an almost continuous increase specialists, afflictions, and medications, but what’s happening underneath that is that we’ve forgotten how to tend to this basic layer. We’ve forgotten how to charge ourselves.

Learning how to connect with and clear your own energy can restore your vitality, improve relations, and be a self-led path to Realization, free of ideology.

To bring it back to our earlier example of the different medicines, we have

Western model : My shoulder hurts - fix my shoulder

TCM Model : My shoulder hurts - let’s open the different channels of the body to allow the whole system to balance.

Energy Medicine : My shoulder hurts - let’s examine the next, more subtle layer of influence and information, available to healers and other various intuitives, where we can access the truth.

What is this layer?

“Those who have studied physiology should go further and investigate the science of the soul. A subtle spiritual structure is hidden just behind the bodily mechanism.” —Autobiography of a Yogi

“The energy body is a vast invisible network where spirit, matter, and personal power intersect through seven distinct energy centers, or chakras. Through this system our emotional biography becomes our biology.” — Caroline Myss

The Core Concepts of the Energy Body according to Caroline Myss

• Your Energy Field: Your physical body projects an energy field extending as far as your outstretched arms, serving as both an information center and a perceptual system. The seven chakras act as data banks that record your life history, choices, and even choices and contract from other lives.

• Where Memories are Stored: Any emotional and psychological experiences, such as past relationships, traumas, and core beliefs, are converted from thought into matter and stored in specific areas of the physical body.

• The Seven Stages of Power: The Seven main chakras map out human maturation and spiritual development through distinct levels, moving from tribal/group safety all the way up to divine and universal consciousness.

Why Healing is Reclaiming Personal Power

At the most basic stages of consciousness, healing means addressing this or that symptom. As one grows in maturity and sensitivity, you can begin to connect the dots or listen to the intuitive nudges that so many physical disorders mirror unresolved emotional blocks or places along the way where you’ve lost your power.

We are very good at understanding the basics of physical self care (healthy diet, sleep, exercise), but we won’t recover our true healthy selves until we reclaim our personal energy, examine where we’ve given our power away, and better understand the storage & influence of past memories and the bonds we create with others.

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1. We were the highly sensitive kiddos. We are the ones whose bodies respond differently to the same foods and medications that other bodies can tolerate without incident. We react to mold, vaccines, caffeine, birth control, alcohol, when most other people don’t.

2. We absorb the emotional and physical toxins in our environment. Our bodies are finely tuned instruments, and extremely porous. If something is off in the environment our bodies will express this as physical symptoms. Locations exposed to low-grade pollution and cities or neighborhoods where the population is energetically dense are especially harmful, as is living with individuals with toxic habits or addictions. We will absorb shame and self-loathing just as easily as we’ll absorb love. Oftentimes 90% of what we’re feeling is not ours.

3. We are highly attuned partners, friends, and parents. These qualities often come with a high level of empathy and hyper-vigilance, making us really good at seeing and anticipating the needs of others. The downside is that it’s rare to find this reciprocated in others.

4. We will be shown over and over again that we are here to live a life that is true to our own internal guidance system. Most of us have lived our whole lives suspecting that we’re weird; too sensitive, too much, not enough, and just can’t seem to live by the same design as the rest of the world. 40-hour work weeks? The energetic demands of motherhood? Eating 3 meals/day? Extreme hobbies or exercise? The need for creative outlets. Everything needs to be run through the truth filter of our bodies to assess personal efficacy, and the solutions can be… uncommon.

5. We struggle with belonging and self-doubt. Ultimately belonging and validation are things that we source within. When we turn our own love and attunement towards our insecurities, and make gentle but consistent strides to design a life of alignment, we can anchor our unique resonance and claim our right to be here.

6. Our energy levels are much lower than most, and require special care. Because our systems are constantly processing things that aren’t ours, we can become easily fatigued in the company of others, in large groups of people, or even with average daily responsibilities. This is where education on Proper Energy Hygiene is essential and will yield life-changing results.

7. We make high-maintenance partners. We do. It’s important to acknowledge this. Our sensitivities can cause extra drama in the household, and require extra time and care to understand. Not everyone is up to the challenge or wants to be seen with our X-ray vision and that’s ok.

8. We’re not here to fit in. If anything we relate more closely to the sensitivities of the younger generations. Any work we do towards our own healing, and ability to usher in the next generation of more energetically sensitive humans will make it that much easier for them to own their sensitivities and create space to do things differently.

In my own experience, I initially struggled very hard with motherhood and fitting in. The pressure feels exceptional around family culture. My journey with two boys and a co-parent has led me time and again to trust my own intuition as the wayfinder. I’ve worked with masterful healers, relationship coaches, and listened to thousands of women in my healing practice, and the more I lean into my internal guidance, the more I can feel my own path rising up to meet me.

I like working 3 days a week. I need to move my body every day. Water therapy and steam rooms seem to release the deeper absorptions of other people’s energy that I can’t otherwise shake. I practice qi gong and energy hygiene daily, like others brush their teeth. I couldn’t live with my husband. He was attached to an old paradigm and full of his own deeply seated unprocessed emotions. It made me start to go mad. I like being a co-parent. I really appreciate having breaks from my kids. I try to make time one day/week to be entirely by myself, nonverbal, unplugged ~ if not for the whole day, for half the day. If I don’t have this I can start to wander too far from myself, and I become a liability to those who are in my care.

I’d love to hear the adjustments you’ve made in creating a life that is uniquely suited to you, and the little habits that defy explanation but just work.

I’ve often used the term “canary in the coal mine” when listening to my highly sensitive clients trying to filter all of the information coming through their bodies. But lately I prefer the term Sentinel Species. While we can be harbingers of what isn’t working, we are equally suited to be Seers of what will work better, especially when we cultivate and lean into our gifts. And share them with the people who receive them gladly.

For more information on Energy Hygiene or 1:1 Guidance for Highly Sensitive Women & Human Design Projectors please reach out.

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For many years I’ve played a supporting role to others. I grew up an oldest daughter in the midwest. I have two younger siblings and to this day I always feel very comfortable in small groups, and I run primarily on what is lovingly called ‘Big Sister Energy.’ This has traditionally manifested as ‘knowing what I’m doing,’ and ‘making sure everyone around me has what they need.’ From my earliest days I was a girl scout, volleyball team captain, and a VP sorority sister! My dad was a football player and H.S. football coach in the midwest, and my mom was a nurse so I was generously granted their more dominant qualities of Team Player & Caregiver and was thus molded into a sister-healer-cheerleader with a little boss sprinkled in. And for most of my life this persona served me exceptionally well. I really loved this version of me. She put on a good show, and built a really decent life for herself and so many others.

Oh Amy, the version of me who believed in marriage, helping others while setting myself aside, having children and a magical home in the country. I even built a really beautiful Holistic Health clinic in San Francisco that did quite well, and served a ton of women.

And here we all were, placed on the planet at the very time the terrain that held the existence of mankind started to wobble and tremble irrevocably across the globe; accelerating evolution or extinction it’s hard to say. As soon as I had my first son in 2012, the veil began to drop, and the the world as I knew it began to glitch. Old paradigms, old structures, perceived metrics of success and happiness started to feel false, like illusions. I watched my dharma shift more towards empowering women, and simultaneously my marriage to a mysoginist & narcissist became increasingly uncomfortable. As my inner world grew, my outer world would start to collapse and I found that I couldn’t keep playing the game. Or that the game wasn’t what I thought it was. Just like the personality I’d come to rely upon, so all the maps and guardrails started to disappear. It’s like a great and cosmic wind swept into the picture and whispered over and over relentlessly, This is Not for You. I was alas, an unconvincing trad gal, who’d walked into a trad family, and despite my best efforts to make it work my spirit was at odds with my human, and I had to meet my first surrender. This was Not for Me.

And as many many other women can attest to, I watched the family I’d created crumble before my eyes. I watched the clinic I’d built to guide others become something I couldn’t bear the weight of any longer, and most disturbing of all, I watched the shadows of the sister-healer-boss-mother start to reveal themselves, as shadows so often do at mid-life. So I did what any practiced overachiever would do when presented with the stirring of their own subconscious. I doubled down on my patterns.

I helped more women. I gave and gave. I shared my wisdom freely. I loved others too openly and without boundaries. I stepped into single motherhood and continued to give and support others while hovering at survival mode myself. As luck would have it, the over-sacrificing of Amy had an expiration date. I could only outrun my insecurities for so long. Eventually we all get knocked off our own pedestals. Spirit sent me the most effective wrecking ball of this incarnation, my now ex-husband. This man blew up my life and my support system not once, but twice. Like an unaware, incompetent toddler following along, tugging at my coat-tails, he had a knack for appearing right when I needed the perfect Destroyer. And when I collapsed for the second time, I could finally psychologically handle peering deeply into the depths of the Amy that existed underneath the persona.

Out came Amy Garden at mid-life. She’s actually a little angry. A lot of her beliefs on service and helping others emptied her out. They left her gasping for air. As much as she loves her healing arts, she’d rather show others how to heal themselves. She knows now that not everyone wants to be healed. She wants to make art. She finds that other people seem like they’re still in character. She likes spending time alone. In spite of her heroic efforts to see the good in people, she now has discernment and a lot of people are rather exhausting and dim. She’s thinking a dog might be just right. She finds herself becoming so many things she never thought she was, and so…

I’ve come to Substack to write my way through. I feel so passionately about the journey of becoming and exploring what truly brings me pleasure at mid-life.

I’d love to meet other women who’ve made it to where the maps disintegrate, and the main character that got them to midlife stepped back into the shadows. As a woman who’s always believed in and supported women, I’d love to envision that our collective mid-life awakening and daring might just be the force that brings us truly alive.

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I’ve been unraveled time and again, and watched my creations come and go. I’ve watched parts of my personality vanish that I thought would be with me forever, and it’s been really scary and isolating at times to have so much taken away.

I’ve watched men and women betray me a multitude of times as if mirroring back to me the places I’d deceived myself, always shattering a piece of me that needed to break.

I’ve watched myself become a highly sensitive single mama whose life took a dramatic detour from the trad families, and oddly I like it better here. I know there are many of us, carving paths that we didn’t expect to find ourselves on, and I’d love to write to us most of all. This is for the witches, the sovereign women, the Creators, the recovering codependents, with our growing voices, that we create a new map that allows us to finally receive the support and trust we’ve offered so many others.

I feel in my bones that those of us who’ve been through enough collapse and reinvention were intentionally put here to architect something designed for our pleasure, not our performance. And when I inquire deeply enough, I can see all the elements of an exquisite garden.

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