How I Stopped Absorbing Other People’s Energy and Emotions

Editorial Staff / 24 seconds
June 19, 2025
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3 min read

Person meditating with colorful swirling background

“And then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ~Anaïs Nin

I used to think something was wrong with me.

I cried at the wrong moments. I felt anxious before a phone call, only to find out the other person was deeply upset. I could walk into a room and instantly sense who was grieving, who was fighting—even if no one said a word.

People called me empathic. Intuitive. But mostly, I felt weird. Overwhelmed. Other. Too much.

I tried everything to make it stop. …

“And then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” ~Anaïs Nin

I used to think something was wrong with me.

People called me empathic. Intuitive. But mostly, I felt weird. Overwhelmed. Other. Too much.

I tried everything to make it stop. Therapy helped a little, but only on the surface. I learned the language of trauma, boundaries, and projection—but still, I felt like I was carrying more than just my own stuff.

After about a year with one therapist, she finally said, “It’s not that you anxiously imagine things—you’re honestly always right. That’s a big difference. And I don’t know how to help you.”

The truth was: I wasn’t broken. I was energetically wide open. And no one had ever taught me how to close.

The Moment Everything Clicked

It was years into my wild, seemingly never-ending personal growth journey, and I was sitting on a date.

I wasn’t looking up, but I responded to what I thought was a question the man across from me had asked. When I looked up, his face had gone pale.

“I thought that,” he said. “But I didn’t say it out loud.”

I had done so much inner work. And yet there I was again—caught in a situation I didn’t fully understand. Feeling as though I had done something wrong.

When someone in the same room spoke about grief, it felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. Not metaphorically—my body literally responded. I had no idea where I ended and other people began.

In a moment of late-night desperation, I Googled something like “how to stop reading people’s thoughts.”

I ended up on the phone with a woman I’d found online. She greeted me with, “Whoa, you are wide open, aren’t you?” And then she said the words I didn’t know I’d been waiting for:

“You need to turn this down.”

Turns out, I wasn’t just sensitive. I had no energetic boundaries.

My body, my emotions, my intuition—none of it was contained. I had spent my life walking around like an open door, receiving every gust of feeling and energy that came my way.

It wasn’t empathy. It wasn’t anxie