Empath Shutdown Recovery

Spiritual Tools for Empath Shutdown

I’ve experienced a Empath Shutdown twice in my life.

Today, I will be sharing with you what I gleaned on my journey through the experience and, more importantly, how I got myself unstuck, reset, restarted, and re-engaged on my spiritual path.

Empath Shutdown Remedies are a process for Re-awakening after an Empathic Shutdown.

Empaths are very good at receiving, perceiving, taking in, and understanding information, but we’re not so good at letting it go, shedding, purging it from our awareness.

I need to share two things before we get started.

The first is that what I will be sharing with you is complete. I am 100% over the impact of these events. They’re processed and done.

The second is that the triggers still occur as yellow flags, not red.

I share this with you as a trigger alert. Some of what I share may trigger a response in you.

If this happens, write it down in your journal, trust it’s over and focus on being present.

If you find yourself stuck, you can request instruction and coaching during the Q&A that follows this talk.

Fair enough?

It was during the second grade.

The second grade was one unbelievable year for me. Lots of stuff happened. We moved to a new home in the Hutchens Apartments in a new city, and I started a new school.

During the second grade, I learned two valuable lessons:

The first life-changing lesson was that there are different types of lies. My parents were both liars. I am pretty literal (always have been), hence my being the stoic medium and not the happy medium. 

In the second grade, a lie was a lie. I didn’t comprehend the nuances between little white lies, bald-faced lies, lies of omission, etc.

A lie was a lie, and lying helped you avoid trouble.

At age 7, I had yet to understand these nuances and hypocrisy of doing as I say, not as I do.

I told a whopper of a lie shortly before Christmas in the second grade, according to my father’s actions.

I received swift punishment from my father. It was brutal, and I was hurt then sent to bed without supper to reflect on my actions. But, at seven years old, I learned that getting caught lying was worse, and I had to learn how not to get caught.

These events setup up and informed the event that set up most of my Empathic Triggers.

Several months later, I received a watch for my birthday. It was a nice watch. Bright, shiny, and wound itself when I walked.

Shortly after my birthday, I spent some father-son time with my dad. We were in the kitchen. I could tell time but hadn’t made all the connections yet. So I asked my dad how many ticks there were on the face of my watch.

He responded with three words that set the tone for most of my life… YOU TELL ME.

Okay, I started counting them.

But this wasn’t the right way to get the answer.

My dad tried to teach me logic and reason to solve the problem by multiplying 12 times 5.

The hard I tried, the more agitated he became.

The longer I struggled, the more frustrated he became.

 I desperately tried counting the tick marks. I felt him growing angrier. The hair on the back of my neck was standing on end.

Somewhere during the 5 or 6 minutes, I remembered him spanking me. My fear shifted to paranoia, and I shut down. I quit.

A people pleaser was born with a debilitating case of performance anxiety. I learned that day was the way to stay safe is doing things your way.

You know what?

It worked. I survived the rest of my childhood, college, my first marriage. Everything was perfect until I was in my mid-thirties.

My second-grade survival strategy worked perfectly and is still part of me, who I am.

It shows up most often in our Old Soul Academy classes when we’re doing our practices and displaying our psychic competencies. But then, performance anxiety kicks in, and the exercises I can accurately perform in private evade me in front of others.

Whenever we display skills practice in class, I freeze up. This little slice of fear from my past blocks my intuitive knowing. I’m not entirely over it, but I can manage it. 

You must understand that we’ve experienced many things in life that influence us in the present many times in life.

We discussed the difference between our conscious, subconscious, and unconscious minds in our classes.

Our conscious mind is active here now. So you’re aware of whatever we need at this moment. 

Beneath our conscious thoughts are the things we know but don’t need at this moment. These thoughts are in our subconscious because they’re not helpful at this time. For example, playing the piano will not help you while attending an online spiritual church service.

There is a part of our mind that exists entirely beyond our awareness in the realm of what you don’t know. You don’t know, our unconscious mind.

You’re not even conscious that you are aware of it.

And that’s where most of this hard-wiring goes. So I was at. After a business failed, I decided to learn how to sell. So I went to work for a Fortune 100 company and was taught how to sell. I got pretty good at it, and I was offered an opportunity. So the day I walked into the doors of this fortune 100 company, I intended to be there for two years to learn how to sell, become very good at it, and have demonstrative proof that I could sell that the outside world would understand that.

But more importantly, my inside world would know it. And I had accomplished all that. And it was about the end of my two-year tenure. A new boss came in town. He liked me, and we had it as new products, and he gave me an opportunity. He said I want to be your rabbi. And I didn’t know what that meant in the corporate realm, but what it means is there someone who’s kind of like got your back?

He said I want to transfer you from sunny California to New Jersey and put you in the management leadership. And what that means is you work there for a year at the corporate headquarters, you get to know everybody, you play the game, and then we will give you a, an executive Wharton MBA. Now, at this point, I did not know what a Wharton MBA was.

I was an engineer, and MBAs weren’t that important, but I researched the Wharton MBA, and my ego loved it. It’s like, wow, I could be the big man on campus. But then I went into this depression. My results started to slide. I was not happy. And I found myself one Saturday morning, unable to get up or wake up and get out of bed.

And I was so trying to please everybody else that I had not paid attention to my health, my wellbeing. So I had to completely shut down my inner sensitivities, my inner awareness, my inner ability to pay attention to the difference between my instincts and my. So, fortunately, at this point, I’ve been meditating for about 10 or 15 years, 10, 12, 15 years.

I started to do the process that I’m about to share with you today to help me unwind and unpack all this. And it is this process that makes all the difference to get you unstuck, to re-awaken after a shutdown, you know, on a computer, on a PC, you hit control alt delete. And if control alt delete doesn’t, you turn it off, and you turn it back on.

And if that doesn’t work, you unplug it for five minutes, and then you plug it back in, then you turn it on, and that can reset things. So this is the spiritual equivalent to it specifically for impasse who find themselves stuck, who find themselves shut down, who find themselves disconnected from what’s going on around them in life.

The first thing is you have to get to the source of the anxiety and depression, the source of anxiety or depression. In my case, I was offered an opportunity, and that opportunity was to go back here. And go into this executive leadership program. The problem is that’s not where I wanted that. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t honoring who I am, why I’m here, and where I’m going.

The reason I’m here is to be here with you right now, doing what I’m doing. Nothing makes me happier. Nothing lights me up more. So, in this case, the source was an opportunity that my ego loved, loved, loved, loved it. Sometimes the source is someone very attractive to you.

Sometimes it could be money, a new car, prestige, something. So it’s skidding to the source that triggered the pattern of events that led to the shutdown. So identifying the basis of the anxiety or depression allowed you to trigger the sequence of events that led to the shutdown.

Now, the part that is the most important. And this whole process I’m about to share with you is being able to disarm the emotional triggers that empaths have to disarm emotional triggers. So now, through the process, I’m going to share with you in just a moment the process of disarming them is straightforward.

It’s not easy, but it’s effortless. Those who’ve been here for a while know the process, although a different application. But what happens is something in the world triggers a UN an unconscious experience, which our body goes into 100% survival mode. And if you’re, if you’re my version of empathic, it’d been empathic because I’m a chameleon.

I blend into the space around me. The problem is, I don’t know my true colors, and I wasn’t honoring my true colors. So I was blending into everything around me, which included in this corporate culture, a promotion. The management leadership program that triggers, though, is a fundamental flaw that I had programmed back in the second grade, me trying to please others and do things to make them happy, their way, not honoring what works for me my truth.

And what’s inside. And this was a series of patterns that were reliable triggers. Anytime someone asked me to do anything, whether it was a wife or a girlfriend or a boss or a coworker or a dear friend, I disappeared into what they wanted, the way they wanted it to, not what I wanted and what served me subtle, but real.

So I went through this process. I’m about to share with you, and I call this process to get out of hell free card. I thought that was kind of cute, especially, you know, the three-year-old loved it, you know? So it’s a process of guided meditations in a journal.

And the way I dealt with this, this breakdown now I had, I was aware of the punishment that happened when I told a lie. And I was mindful of the kitchen event that happened with my dad. I did not know their interactivity. I didn’t know how the first punishment informed the shutdown I experienced in front of my dad and my inability to perform the way he wanted me to.

I did not make that connection until after this process. Right Meditation, Right Thought, and Right Action is the formula.

Right Meditation, we practice daily. Sit down, be still, step into the eye of the storm. Once you’re in the eye of the storm, you look to areas in your life, detached from the feelings.

Learning to be in the moment, right now, is both art and science. 

The science is getting things out of your head onto the paper and then seeing the source of it.

The art is recognizing the feeling.

So I had a new opportunity, my body and awareness started to shut down, and my results tanked.

My re-awakening was a three-day process lasting Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. But, first, I would meditate, breathe, and think about the opportunity in my future in New Jersey.

I visualized receiving a Wharton MBA and earning a decent six-figure salary. It was appealing, sexy, and desirable. But it was killing me at the same time.

After about two days of doing this, I went through this whole process, so sometime on Sunday, I remembered the promise. I made myself that I would be in this job for two years, learn how to sell to not only know it to myself but also know it as far as having demonstrative awards. Nothing is more of a reward, award, and affirmation that I had succeeded than a boss who invited me into a management leadership program to help lead this company.

So in this moment, I saw that I had accomplished what I wanted. So my mission, my intention, my focus for being there was. And as I saw that I was able to melt down all of this stuff, I saw freedom. So why did the end of the sun tunnel? I saw my true colors, my true intentions, why I was there, and I held a dig, big, deep cleansing sigh of relief. Still, then I had some messes to clean up, but it was in the thinking about cleaning up the messes of telling the boss man that I was quitting instead of taking his generous offer, that I saw this pattern between punishment and then having someone then try to instruct me.

Cause I only saw my dad after the punishment, as a threat and everything in my survival newness at what 6, 7, 8 years old wanted not to make him mad because if he was angry, I already knew. And because the level of the lie I told was not in my mind, the punishment was much greater than the level of the life, because at that point, remember, I had no distinction between big lies, white lies, black lies.

So I saw that if I upset the boss told him I would quit, there would be these unintended consequences down the line. So that’s what I had to sort out. So that was what got me to shut down is the dissonance between my dream, my goals, my ambitions for being here with you now, and that strategy of skill development I learned back then at that point.

So that’s to get out of hell free card. Right Meditation, sit down, quiet your mind, enter the eye of the storm. Then you start Right Thought, going through, and looking at the source of your anxiety, the source of your depression, really what caused this episode, right? It could be some bad news. It could be a generalized upset with Diane could be a long-term recurring thing.

It could be a medical condition. At Spirit360 Fellowship, we avail ourselves of both Western and Eastern medicine, both spiritual healing and Western healing, because some of the drugs they have are very helpful to help us manage the chemicals in our brain. So we can train ourselves to get them done holistically.

Then after you do that, you want to go through and see the triggers, find the triggers that set you down a path of unhealthiness that pat set off the patterns that get you stuck that have you feel shut down that have you feel not who you are. And that is the pot pop. That is the process of going through it.

Now. Here’s what is interesting causing the real. Causing you to reboot the control alt delete the unplugging, the turning things off is at first the meditation. And then after you get to the stillness and you touch stillness, and you’re in that eye of the storm mind at the threshold between body and mind, then you can step into this world of thinking.

And the whole purpose of right thinking is to create an actionable decision and actionable decision and a actionable decision in the moment. Because the moment you take action informed by your spirit, that leads you in a direction you want to go. That’s the first step, the step the Chinese talked about the first step of a thousand mile journey begins with that first step.

Everything you want starts with that first consciously decided. After you’ve processed all the information, got in touch with your intuition separated it from your instincts. Sometimes you’ll have spiritual influence from your spirit guides or teachers. That is not my experience many times on these profound interpersonal things you’re dealing with.

Your spirit guides and teachers aren’t, there will not interfere with you. That’s your burden. Sometimes it’s selection. You came here to learn. There could be a lot of reasons that they won’t intervene and share with you the answer because you know, the thing about these answers is everyone else around you sees it.

You know, you’ve got this blind spot back there that everyone else sees behind you, but we just can’t see the blind spot until we expand our awareness behind us. And then we can see it once you see it, you have the BFO, the blinding flash of the obvious, and you see the path out. So they get out of hell free card.

Is that an actionable decision, regardless of how small take that decision. And then you repeat the process, you get it out of your head on the journal, and the Re-awakening occurs. By you taking control of your life. Again, control of your experience again, control of your faculties,

uh, allowing you to get back in touch with who you are, why you’re here and where you’re going. So here’s the set yourself free. Yesterday’s why doesn’t matter. So it doesn’t matter that my dad punished me when I was in second grade. It doesn’t matter that I couldn’t figure out 12 times five when I was a third grade to re-awaken your spirit, to really allow yourself to, to find this remedy, to being shut down to being stuck to being unhappy is to really get back in touch with today.

What’s your white today? My why at that point, which was the path that set me free was to accomplish this ability and developing this skills as a self. And then return to my life to lead me to here. Today’s who, who am I at today? Not the little boy in second grade, who couldn’t do 12 times five to figure out the number of ticks on his watch.

Not the little boy had told the Whopper of a lie who got him punished, but today’s who, today’s why. And more importantly, today’s where, and as you consciously get present now in this moment, focused on who you are, why you’re here, where you’re going in, that presence of stillness in the eye of the storm, consciously generating and creating and experience of now all of these unconscious things that are buried in there, they’ll start to come to the surface.

But when they come to the surface, you will not be at the effect of them because you’ve disarmed the trigger. After all, you’ve arrived at the source of the anxiety and the depression. Now, is it easy?

It’s constant mindfulness of what’s going on with your body, the patterns, the triggers, the sense of where you are.

But the beautiful part about this is the today’s you armed with this information armed with this awareness armed with these tools can start developing the skills of touching stillness on command, consciously journaling, doing your right-thinking processing through what matters, what doesn’t getting grounded back into a goal and ambition.

It has you be here now on a journey to where you want to go. Because most empaths and sensitive people are chameleon-like, hiding in plain sight. So we disappear into everyone else’s life and dreams, and it’s terrifying to put our vision, our true colors. Because many times, somewhere in our past that’s been threatening, it hasn’t worked out well.

The three R’s to get out of hell free to re-awaken after a shutdown. Right Meditation, Right Thought, Right Action. You will re-awaken in time and on time.

That’s the frustration for most of us. We want the hack, the quick answer. And if you’re going to develop spiritual fitness, your ability to be grounded here now at the moment and who you are, why you’re here, and where you’re going.

That’s a skill that takes a little while, a little bit of practice, especially when the rest of the world doesn’t seem to care about what you want.

My highest blessings.