Do you prefer to be away from people. Do you find people or places drain your energy, or when you are around people for too long you start feeling sad? Do you get depressed around crowds of people? Do you suddenly feel scared, or have feelings of dislike from certain individuals without any real reason? Do you know a person you are talking to has a hidden life they keep secret from others?

If so you may belong to a unique group of people who are known as Empaths. Empathy is picking up on and feeling emotion or other characteristics of someone or something. They could be standing right next to you or be far away, distance is not a concern. I think people who think they have been in contact with what are called ‘psychic vampires’ are likely Empaths who do not know they are.

Empaths usually do not enjoy groups of people, and are occasionally thought of as loners or distant. Empaths are sort of chameleons in they pick up and feel the emotions of others as easily as they feel their own thoughts and emotions. Generally these are the stronger emotions, such as loneliness, sorrow, wanting, and the like.

Someone who displays the characteristics of an Empath can be happy and having fun and suddenly start to feel lonely or depressed without any reason for the change in emotion other than someone they have an emotional bond with or a strong personality they have recently been in contact with is feeling these strong emotions.

Mainstream community thinking in general dismisses someone being an Empath just as psychic ability is dismissed or attributed as a lucky guess or two. For someone who knows they are an Empath, they have close up and prsonal understanding of what is going on around them.

Being an Empath is difficult as emotions and feeling need to be constantly checked against a personal standard because of the degrees of emotions. It is possible an Empath may feel sad over something that happened in their day, but their sadness in amplified by the feeling of another that inadvertently became part of their feeling of sadness without their realizing it even happened.

Of course on thought to be aware of is empathy can be mistaken for physical or emotional disorders that one may not even be aware of. Being an Empath makes life difficult. Unlike someone who is not, emotions or feelings should not be taken for granted as being your own, but examined as whether they came from an external source.

With enough practice in examining your own feelings and emotions, it will become second nature and you won’t even notice you are doing it. It is easier to manage the emotional roller coaster many Empaths find themselves on when they can quickly dismiss a thought or emotion as belonging to someone or something else, and not their own.

I think a number of people who think they suffer from depression, take medication that does not help, and have no physical reason to hold strong emotion are Empaths and do not know it. It may be people who think of themselves as clairvoyant, or sensitives are empaths, or perhaps empaths belong under one of those labels.