How Do You Know You're an Empath? (Transcript)

Episode transcript, ShelbyRADIO · 39 minutes

Short answer: Shelby Carino knew she was an empath when she realized her constant talking, starting with hours of unloading on her mom after school, was really her way of releasing emotions she had picked up from everyone around her. An empath picks up other people's feelings, thinks they're her own, gets overloaded and then needs to move that energy out. The sign many empaths recognize is someone dumping their problems on you for an hour or two, and you being the one who leaves drained, heavy or angry. The goal isn't to stay an empath, but to learn to transmute that energy, hand it back, and step into your own energetic gifts.

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Key takeaways

• An empath picks up other people's feelings and emotions, thinks they're her own, and gets overloaded.
• Many empaths become big talkers, because talking is how they try to move the emotional energy they absorbed.
• Forgetting parts of your childhood, or even things from a couple of years ago, is common on the spiritual path.
• Being put on silence by her mentor for six months showed Shelby she was giving everything away and not keeping anything for herself.
• Holding space for someone doesn't mean absorbing their chaos. You learn to transmute the energy and give it back so both people can move forward.
• If you aren't yet able to do that, it's okay to tell people you can't take on their load right now. You're looking for partners, not to be someone's punching bag.

Full transcript

Lightly edited for reading.

Looking back on my awakening (00:00)

Hello, good morning. Today I'm going to share how I knew I was an empath. It's so interesting to go back along the timeline of my life and pull out the beginning of my awakening, because it's helped me fill in some memory gaps as I've been ascending.

I'm in a season of tying up loose ends, completing timelines and finishing loops. A lot has been moving through me as I've navigated my energies over the years, especially since I met Joe, my husband, in that twin flame vibration. That relationship took me beyond the change work I'd been doing and into places emotionally that I really had to clear. In turn, that began clearing my psychic eye, my spiritual energies and my soul pain.

As I've been cleaning out my spiritual closet, I've been using the pieces of information that come forward in these episodes, so the energy of you can say, "Oh my gosh, yes, this is how I always felt," or "Come to think of it, this happened to me too."

Why we forget things on the spiritual path (03:44)

When you go on your spiritual journey, it's very common to forget things. It's very common to have blanked-out moments from childhood. It's also very common to forget things that happened two years ago.

On a spiritually ascending path, you open and close doors energetically along the way so you can focus on a certain quadrant of energy. You go down into it to heal, purge, cleanse, harmonize or extract, whatever you're doing there. At a certain point, you come full circle back into all of your quadrants. That's when you might feel like you're glitching, because both sides of the brain's energies are coming back together to make you whole again.

From the mind into the body (05:08)

You're no longer living off the right brain with no balance from the left, or all in the left brain with no balance from the right. You're coming into harmony, and that's part of the spiritual ascension process, because it really does start in the mind.

That's why so many people were focused on the law of attraction and working the mind to shift what was in the mind. Now we have to be about the energies. Energy does live in the mind, which is why we have to clear our belief systems and thought processes. But we also have to drop it into the body even more, because we have to align with the frequency and vibration of what we want to attract.

Growing up a talker (06:32)

So how did I know I was an empath? Before I get there, I want to share a piece of my childhood that I eventually put together. It helped me understand not just what an empath is, but how long I had carried that label, and how I eventually got out of it and into something different.

Growing up, I was a talker. I know that might be shocking. I even have a podcast. I sit alone in my office talking into a microphone with a white sock on it. I talked a lot to my friends, but mainly I talked to my mom, because she worked from home.

Unloading on my mom after school (07:56)

When I got home from school and my mom was there, I would sometimes spend hours just talking and talking. I didn't realize that unloading on her was me needing her help to move through all the emotions I'd picked up in class. I was at school eight hours a day, and my energy was completely overloaded.

That's an empath. You pick up other people's feelings and emotions and think they're yours. Then you get overloaded, and you become a really big talker, either to family members, like my mom, or to friends. You're trying to move through the emotional energy you picked up from other people all day. I didn't know at the time that I was a talker because I was trying to move energy.

Holding space and emotional setbacks (09:20)

Fast forward. I went through a lot of purging, healing and cleansing. I built my psychic strength and learned to move energy with intention and call back the energy that's mine, which helps me keep my own space clear.

I still work with clients every day, and I hold an energetic space for them. Because of the change work I've done in myself and how I've fine-tuned those energies, holding that space naturally helps them get to a place where they can release their emotions. In the fifth dimension, it's all about releasing emotions. You have to go through the emotional setbacks and the emotional purge.

When I say emotional setbacks, I don't mean you're going backwards. I mean you may have to set yourself back to a specific time and place on your timeline to pull out an emotion you hadn't fully released yet. You hadn't harmonized it, given it oxygen or given it attention to let it know, "I know you're there, and I'm going to help you move." Sometimes we have to go back, pick something up emotionally, test it against where we are now, and then move beyond it so we can get the change we want.

As empaths, we're feelers. We pick up all these energies, and for many of us the only way to get it out is to talk, because that's how we run the energy.

Called out in class (12:08)

I was speaking so fast and so much that I was basically spewing energy. When I met my mentor back when I was studying NLP, I finally realized I was talking like that because I was trying to release all that emotion, psychic energy and discomfort. It was an anxious energy I couldn't get out.

Early in my NLP classes, my mentor was at the front of a full room talking about something, and it pinged me in a good way. It resonated, and I immediately wanted to speak up. I raised my hand and started sharing, "I have this journal, I write this down, maybe this could help the class." I was running my know-it-all.

She stopped, looked at me and said, "So are you just saying this so you can hear yourself talk, or do you really want to share this with everybody?" I was a deer in the headlights. That energy went straight through me. My face got flushed and hot. I was totally embarrassed. She called me out in front of everybody, and clearly there was a truth there. Then she added, "Or maybe both." I didn't say another word the rest of the class.

After class, she came up and said, "I want to thank you for allowing me to do that." I said, "Oh, you're welcome," and she didn't explain why. Later I figured out what it meant for me. Part of me clearly wanted to hear myself talk. My ego was running that. But the teacher in me really did want to help people and share the information. Receiving her calling me out energetically sent me on a journey to figure that out.

Six months of silence (15:52)

Some months later, she put me on silence in class for six months. I went to class a couple of times a week, and I wasn't allowed to talk. I thought, "How is that even possible?" But I did it.

I realized I was doing so much talking that I was giving everything away and not keeping anything for myself. I was missing out on so many aspects of myself. That was my empath: I'm feeling all of this, I have to talk, I have to get it out. I wasn't quiet long enough to discover what I was missing that could help me move through my process better. I think that's why, as we get older and want to get quiet, we go to meditation retreats. We're looking for someone to put us in silence.

That silence took me back to an 11-day meditation retreat I had done. When I got quiet, I connected with the realization that I came from a generational line of psychics and empaths. My mom's side was more psychic and my dad's side was more empathic, and I was here to help clean that up in my family line.

Learning when to speak (18:12)

When I brought Joe in, my twin outside of me in the masculine, I went even deeper into clearing those psychic energies. I started putting the puzzle pieces together: my empath overflowed into being a big talker, that overflowed into the ego side of wanting to hear myself speak, and that led to getting called out, which showed me I needed to learn, ethically, when to open my mouth and what really needed to be said.

That catapulted me into a new spiritual process. I was in another quadrant of my awakening. We don't just open a door once and it's done. We move through different quadrants, different doors.

What my mentor taught me in sessions (19:36)

In some of my private sessions with my mentor, I talked the whole time and she just listened. In others, she shut me down and did all the talking. I realized she was teaching me. There were exchanges happening. And I'm so sorry to my mentor for those sessions where I talked the whole time. That's just how much energy I had to get out, and I needed someone to help me process it. She was holding space for that.

Then in another session she'd say, in effect, "I'm not going to hold that anymore. I'm going to give it all back and teach you how to do it." That's when she talked more. She never told me what she was doing. I figured it out and drew my own conclusions.

When she let me talk, I felt lighter and more clear-headed. I didn't feel like I was drowning energetically. I'd never been able to talk to somebody who could recycle the energy and give it back to me, and it helped me move forward. When I had to be quiet and she did the talking, sometimes I didn't feel as vibrant, and sometimes I did. I was learning the ins and outs of being an empath, what it means to hold space for people, and how not to get drained by people who just want to dump their stuff on you.

Learning to transmute and give energy back (22:52)

She was really teaching me how to transmute energy. When I realized my energy body was learning to do that, I knew it was a big gift. I was learning to navigate the energies and get out of the cobwebs, just through those interactions with her.

So part of my ascension process was learning to hold space for other people. When I was in that learning mode with clients, I let them run their issues through me. I let them be chaotic and really vent about their problems while I held the space. I learned a lot about what they were saying, and I learned I had to figure out what to do with it.

When people get things off their chest onto someone very empathic who's picking it up, the empath has to learn how to give it back. You have to do something with it so it doesn't sit in your body. You have to transmute it, navigate it and send it back, so there's an exchange. A good mentor teaches you how to give people's energy back to them without hijacking it and without getting stuck in the recycling. We're not here to hoard. We're here to share.

My empath led to deeper connection (25:12)

Knowing I was empathic, that I could take on energy and feel things, moved me into my next evolution of intuition. That gift turned into mediumship, which led me to hands-on healing, which led me to my spiritual mentor so I could learn NLP, the subconscious mind and change work. My empath opened a deeper level of connection to the world. Let that sink in.

That's how I came to understand mediumship and connecting with people who have crossed over, and how to help that communication channel. Because of all that, I had to learn where to meet people. Once I was in my psychic strength, I was no longer plugging into people to run their energies for them. So I tried my empath on for size: let me hold the space to run the energies instead of taking them on.

I realized I needed to meet people where they are energetically, which meant opening a lot of doors in my own energy. Whether it was a paid client, someone at the grocery store or gas station, or a family member, it didn't matter. I had to meet them where they were.

Everyone has been through something (27:32)

Somewhere, we've all been where somebody else has been, even if our experiences were different. Through the expansion of my empath I learned that nobody gets through life without some kind of trauma. We've all been in the middle of some chaotic crisis. I know I have.

Because of that, I can draw from those experiences vibrationally to match people where they are emotionally, and still do it ethically while holding sacred space, so they can get to their empowerment and their clarity. When that energy is reflected back like a mirror to whoever I'm working with, it comes back as a more healing vibration. They get to experience, "This is what love feels like. This is what joy feels like. This is what clarity feels like." Now they have that in their frequency, and they can move forward.

That's why I tell people, "I'm going to meet you where you're at." Usually an emotion gets triggered, and I have to find that emotion inside myself that I've worked on and cleared, so I can hold that space and they get the most out of the exchange.

When people dump on you (29:52)

In the beginning, I let people throw up all over me energetically and spew their chaos at me, because I didn't know how to stop them. Learning how and when to cut someone off was a process. It was only making things harder for me, because I didn't know how to process it yet.

Over time I learned that when someone wants to unload everything and hasn't done the work to understand what they're unloading, they just want someone to process it for them. So I learned to navigate what they were putting out, add a few words or some insight, and hand that energy back to them so they could move. That way they weren't doing what I used to do as an empath, talking for no good reason with nobody giving anything back to help me move.

I learned that the mirror of myself can energetically be a mirror for someone else, so the exchange brings empowerment and movement for both people. That's instead of being the empath sitting there while your friend dumps everything into you, and then you feel like you weigh 10,000 pounds and can't get off the couch.

If you haven't yet developed the strength to reflect that energy back to someone healed and with good intention, and you're getting drained, then you have to tell those people you can't talk right now. You're unwilling to take on the load of what they're dumping. That means you have more change work to do, to build a foundation of immunity so you can be constructive with people like that.

Partners, not punching bags (32:40)

We have to understand that we're looking for partnerships. We're no longer looking for punching bags for our anger. Usually, when we feel something we don't like, we go find the empath who will take in those feelings, because we want them to do something with it. That's what I call the punching bag.

If you're becoming an influencer or a practitioner of your spiritual gifts as a healer, you have to look at your personal world and ask, "Where am I still getting punched by personal emotions? Where am I still bringing in people who dump their energy into me and use me as a punching bag?" That's the journey that leads you to partners in your life who aren't doing that unnecessarily, who are in a real exchange.

These truths have to come to the surface. You have to find the underlying issues creating this and how they're taking you away from outcomes or making the road rockier than it needs to be. We're no longer here to take things out on other people. We take it to ourselves, so we can review on our own timeline how well we navigate our own frequency.

So we have to move away from seeking what we think might happen and come into partnership with ourselves, creating space in our energy body to heal emotional pain and trauma that stems from soul pain. That builds a foundation of healing and immunity. We have to go beyond just wanting to know and step into the work, which takes us to what we're really seeking: spiritual growth, spiritual ascension and intimacy with someone else, because we've found it in ourselves first.

Moving beyond the empath (36:24)

We keep doing the work so we can move beyond being the empath and into the strength of our abilities, toward what we really want, which is a balanced and harmonious psychic space.

So you might recognize, "This is how I know I'm an empath: people come and tell me all their problems and chaos. They talk at me for an hour or two while I sit there listening, getting more tired and beat down, and when they leave, I'm the one who feels angry, like I want to punch a wall or throw a chair." That's because you've received all of that energy.

Then you get to the point where you say, "I'm done being an empathic punching bag. I need to learn to navigate and transmute what was just dropped into me. Where in me was I in rapport with everything they just put on me? Let me use that for my spiritual growth, to bring up my own soul pain and move it through my body and my process." That's when you truly get empowered.

That's how I knew I was an empath. I did receive all of that in. And then I moved from empath to a true awakening of my energetic gifts, and we all have them. I've worked those gifts to become a better influencer, facilitator and mirror. It all comes back to us, not others. Other people are just reflections of what we're still allowing. You can't mentally kick something out anymore. You have to be energetically in alignment, and if something isn't meant to be in your life, it will kick itself out, because it's no longer in alignment with you.

That was a big episode, so let all of that sink in.

Frequently asked questions

How do you know if you're an empath?

A common sign is picking up other people's emotions and thinking they're your own. If someone unloads their problems on you for an hour or two and you're the one who leaves exhausted, heavy or angry, you've likely absorbed their energy.

Why do some empaths talk so much?

Shelby explains that talking can be an empath's way of releasing emotional energy picked up from others during the day. As a child, she unloaded on her mom for hours after school because she was overloaded from everyone's emotions in class.

How do you hold space for someone without getting drained?

Instead of absorbing what they share, you learn to transmute it, add a little insight and hand the energy back so they can move forward. Until you can do that, it's okay to tell people you can't take on their load right now. If you're constantly exhausted, please also talk with your doctor.

Should you stay an empath?

Shelby's view is that being an empath is a stage, not a destination. The goal is to do your own healing so you can move beyond absorbing others' emotions and into your own energetic gifts.

Where to go next

• Start here: my free 16-minute audio, When You Don't Feel Like Yourself
• The course: Protect Your Energy, simple tools to keep your energy clear, grounded and your own
• Listen next: Retiring the Empath
• Work with me one-on-one: private sessions