Studying the Hindu faith, Buddhism, Christianity, Psychology studies and various cultures is a profound education in life experience. When you grow up an empath and do not know, you can experience a series of unknown challenges in life. Your will to survive must exceed your will to succumb to life’s experiences. Children at an early age are influenced by the things they see, feel, and experience. Growing up an African American woman, I saw many things. There was so much abuse in the household, that I grew up thinking this was normal for everyone.
Always having been intuitive and perceptive, I was drawn to the mental health field. I would watch from an early age many dysfunctional patterns of behavior. I discovered, family cycles must be stopped, if a person wants to live a normal life. The environment plays a part in your mindset. Sometimes we must change our environment and circle of influence, to change the way we see things.
If unaware, an empath that is both emotionally and physically sensitive, you must analyze yourself and know what you normally think about and how you normally feel. “One of the important normal functions of the higher mental processes is the solution of emotional problems”. (Dollard and Miller, 1950). The problem with this is, many people did not start understanding empathic abilities, until the last ten years. So, life experiences will eventually give you an in depth understanding in life, if you have a desire to stop being influenced by others.
We are spiritual or energy beings, capable or perceiving things in any given place. The ability to perceive is to feel things with our senses. Your senses are the ability to touch, taste, smell, see or hear. The intuition is also considered to be a perception. It has been said by many theorists that the intuition is not a sense, but that has been argued over time. It is in fact one of our perceptions.
Environmental stimulus can stimulate similar experiences, if not self-aware. There are many surrounding factors that are stimulus triggers. Smells, sounds, words, voices and texture are some of the things that can potentially stimulate earlier experiences. Not everyone understands or wants to understand, but for those who research for answers, technology and the internet has placed us at an advantage to understand.
Previously wanting to understand PTSD, I embarked upon a journey to research and observe human behavior in differing places. It is amazing how the things we once did not give thought, suddenly start to make sense. Extrasensory perceptions are the main cause for many conflicts in understanding of self and empathic sensitivities. You do not have to be an empath to be capable of perceiving at higher levels. Educating oneself can increase our understanding.
The theory by Schachter and Singer states that, a person is stimulated by two factors, physiological arousal and cognitive label. “The two-factor theory of emotion, states that emotion is based on two factors: physiological arousal and cognitive label. ... According to the theory, when an emotion is felt, a physiological arousal occurs, and the person uses the immediate environment to search for emotional cues to label the physiological arousal”.
We are each given senses. It is amazing how working in the healthcare field and mental health for twenty years, I have not discovered this scientific knowledge sooner. Always having had the ability to smell sickness in others, read macular facial expressions and take note of everything in the environment, it did not provoke me to search for answers, until much later in life.
Bem’s Theory is, “Self-perception theory is counterintuitive. Common knowledge would have us assume that a person’s personality and attitudes drive their actions; however, self-perception theory shows that this is not always the case. In simple terms, it illustrates that “we are what we do." According to self-perception theory, we interpret our own actions the way we interpret others’ actions, and our actions are often socially influenced and not produced out of our own free will, as we might expect”.
We must want to improve upon ourselves and change our lives for the better, to arrive at a place of wisdom and overcome stigmas that would like for us to believe that this is a negative characteristic or trait in the DNA. DNA can be changed with knowledge, scientific studies and understanding of the individual themselves. On a cellular level the mindset and behavior are not destined for defeat. If it is possible on a cellular level to have certain characteristics, it would also be possible to feed those characteristics knowledge and change their operation.
Learn to analyze yourself, your emotions and know your normal pattern of thinking. Once you know who you are, it would be impossible to allow someone to tell you that your patterns of thinking are anything but logical. If a soldier is in the jungle and cannot see his target, his other senses would become stronger to perceive his target. That is the beginning of understanding empathic abilities, the strength of the mind and intuition.
References
Konecni, V. J. (1975). The mediation of aggressive behavior: Arousal level versus anger and cognitive labeling. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(4), 706-712.http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.32.4.706
Kelly, T.M. (2015). Clinical Parapsychology: Extrasensory Exceptional Experiences (1st Ed.). University of Alternative Studies, Retrieved from: https://www.academia.edu/12798615/Clinical_Parapsychology_Extrasensory_Exceptional_Experiences_1st_Edition_Graduate-Level_Textbook_
MUSE. (2019). CTU. Theories on Emotion: Schachter & Singer and Daryl Bem. Retrieved from: https://spark.adobe.com/video/Z96GIvK3H9aTc
Dollard, J., & Miller, N. E. (1950). Personality and psychotherapy; an analysis in terms of learning, thinking, and culture. McGraw-Hill. Retrieved from: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1951-04608-000
