All The Feels (Empathic Children)

I have four and a half empathic children.

 My husband and I are empathic, which means that sometimes we have a lot of emotions bouncing around my house and sometimes we can very easily get into a never-ending feedback loop of feeding off of each other.  This was not something I bargained for when I started a family. This was not something anyone talked about or I found in any of the parenting books I read. Sure I learned all about attachment parenting from Dr. Sears but no one really talked about what to do with all the big emotions kids have, and what to do when sometimes those emotions were not even their own.

Looking back I am sure that my eldest was picking up stuff that wasn’t her own.  Hubby and I used to joke about how we would take her for walks in the mall and she would turn on ovaries wherever we went.  Which might be a cute superpower rather than an empathic one.

But once our second daughter came along there were certainly times when they would feed off of each other emotionally and those were often pretty tough parenting moments for my hubby and me.  I think we chalked it up to toddler behavior and how that often does not make any sense to an adult mind.

By the time number 3 and 4 came along (they are only 20 months apart) the amount of empathic reactions shot up.  Girls would be crying because other girls were crying and I would be running triage just trying to figure out what was going on and keep my emotions in check and it was really hard.  And frustrating. Yes, you want your kids to feel for other people, it keeps them from being quite so nasty to each other, but on the other hand, this often felt out of control.

It wasn’t until I joined an out of the box business coaching program and met some of her other clients and heard people talk about being empaths that it started making more sense.  I started understanding what was going on, and learning the other kinds of empaths there were (not just how I react) so that I could start seeing how everyone in my family is empathic in different ways.  

I started saying things like, “I know your sister is super sad right now because of such and such but those are her feelings, you don’t need to try and feel them for her.”

 “Or wow, she is having a big reaction to this thing, and that can be really hard to deal with or sit with right?”

I started just trying to hold a safe space for my daughters to process their emotions  Not telling them to stop crying or to calm down unless it was an unsafe situation to be being that emotive.  I started learning about the Emotional Freedom Technique and how I can tap not only for my reactions to their reactions but I could actually tap for them and help process some of their emotions.  I try to encourage them to tap with me, which only goes so far these days but it is a great tool to have in my back pocket.

I am curious to see how it is going to go with this fifth daughter of mine, knowing that I have different tools and concepts in my toolbox this time around.  And being able to know that her emotions are not a reflection of me, and sometimes she is just picking up on the general state of things rather than her own personal distress.  It will be interesting because you never know the personality you are getting And who they are as a newborn is not always who they will be as a toddler and then a young child. I really feel like it takes to about 5 before I really get a solid sense of who they are going to be.