Send love to the part of you that believes it’s still your role to feel others feelings for them.

Emotional intelligence also means knowing that our emotions are our teachers. Therefore it’s necessary for everyone to process their own emotions in order to learn the lessons from them.

Ask this younger part of you what it needs from you? Maybe it needs you to acknowledge that some of your ability to merge with the environment, read others emotions and subtle changes in moods was a survival tool. And that’s a powerful strategy. But one that is ready to evolve.

Maybe this younger part of you needs to know that you are going to have the courage to make healthy choices like walking away from a situation when you notice red flags instead of habitually putting up with nonsense.

Recovering from over-caring is a blessing. It allows your genuine desire to care for other to become revealed. And the type of “caring” that came from surviving abuse can be recycled into wisdom and lessons learned.

I remember briefly dating someone I had known for ten years and as the relationship was dissolving I shared that there were some behaviors I experienced that I felt were harmful. This person immediately got triggered and lost their temper. (In public). Told me to stop talking.

My gut and in fact my entire body told me to stand up and walk immediately out but instead the over-caring/over-empathic/ mothering part of me told me to stay and make sure he wasn’t upset by what I said.

Thankfully, as soon as he started talking again the sword part of me said, now you stop talking. You asked to be silence so that means you don’t talk. You are not about to talk over me.

It feels important to share that story to illustrate how merging with other people’s feelings can completely collapse our own healthy identity structures/healthy self esteem. And we end up going into patterns of unhealthy Empath-caregiver to the detriment of our own well being.

I always notice red flags about people. Always. It’s just that part of me that used to think it’s my job to hold space for everyone that made me willingly ignore red flags. I never wanted to reject them. I definitely thought people just needed more love and compassion to blossom

In the situation I shared I was quickly able to clear that persons energy, find my center and move from a place of authenticity. It was actually a really pivotal moment when I saw my boundary work kick in automatically. Even though I momentarily went into an old pattern.

I could go into a whole thread about how a lot of this programming of over functioning + self sacrifice is especially active for black and brown women. But a lot of you already know this is ancestral work.