I have been talking about empathy and its connection to trauma on my podcast recently. It is a connection that took me a long time to make, and once I did, I was able to see my own relationships a lot more clearly. I had been seeing through the eyes of an empath who was using hypervigilance to keep myself safe, a maladaptive strategy from surviving trauma. I would use my super-empathy skills to scan the room for pain, and then I would hone in on that pain and try and fix, soo

The body is speaking, but I cannot hear the message aside from an ache in the pelvis and a tightness in the wings of the shoulders and a restlessness that keeps my leg bouncing even now as I write. My jaw aches. A pressure sits in my throat. This animal body is speaking, and this human mind struggles to distract itself from listening. An inconvenient message, to be sure. Better to just push on with things and wait for the animal to comply. If I ignore this building crescendo