Do You Feel People Use You?

Who Do You Attract into Your Life?

As a highly sensitive person you have a very sensitive amygdala in the brain that picks up on situations and emotions much earlier than less sensitive people.  You feel compassion and are often drawn to healing, angels and complementary therapies.  You love learning something new and gaining qualifications.  More than anything, you love helping others; it feels as if it is your purpose in life.  People will feel drawn to your energy. 

However, some there may be some people in your life that you would rather not be around.  You may feel that you have to offer your skill for free; I feel we have all been through that stage at the start of our awakening. Like anyone else you have to feed, clothe and house yourself and for that you need an income.  It is possible to make a living doing something you are talented at and enjoy doing it.  If you do give away your special gifts it will attract the sort of person who pays you little or no respect but they will make full use of your abilities to enhance their own life.  In the meantime, you have unwittingly sabotaged your own self-esteem by not respecting your own abilities and what you have to offer.

The other sort of person who may come into your life is a sociopath.  Hopefully not, but they are incredibly difficult to spot as they are consummate actors and go to great lengths to become a chameleon-like presence in your life, mimicking any characteristic that will attract you and keep you in their life.  We all learn by example, for instance we have to learn social skills, overcoming natural desires (like actors at the Oscars who enthusiastically applaud the nominee who has won when deep inside they feel disappointed or even resentful) and behaving with courtesy towards others.  We have a conscience, it’s a governor over our responses and reactions.  However, in the case of the sociopath the amygdala does not function fully and the only things they seem to feel are fear and anger.  At a core level they understand that they do not feel emotions like everyone else but they cannot do anything about it, other than put on an act of behaving as society would expect.  They have no conscience to guide them as to what is wrong or right, what it is to feel.  In their own minds they can justify any action of theirs, no matter how odd it may seem to the rest of the population.

Why You?

The first sort of person described uses you because you have not set healthy boundaries in place and because you feel you cannot say ‘no’ when asked to help.  It may be worth asking yourself if you have low self-esteem.

In the second instance, a sociopath is drawn to you because you have a heightened ability to sense a situation and look at the deeper meaning.  You use your intuition to feel your way through life and you are, although you may not realise it, a natural leader.  People love being around your energy, so you act like a magnet to those unable to feel.  They want to learn your ‘secret’, how do you do what you do, why do people like you?  They hope that your extra sensory perception will provide them with what they lack.  They cannot feel properly, so they think they need to live life through you in order to learn how to feel.

When the word sociopath is used, it conjures up images of violent, deranged people.  Yes, they can be as they have no conscience to guide them through life.  The only way they experience any sort of emotion is through fear and anger so there will be a point when they try out both on someone.  However, they can appear perfectly normal as they have learnt to mimic certain reactions to a given situation.  They don’t all necessarily come at you with an axe, threatening to cut off your head.

Why Can’t You See Them Coming?

You are intuitive, why is it that you can’t spot the users and abusers from the start? Simple.  You have a trusting nature; you don’t expect people to behave in this way.  A sociopath is extremely cunning and they go to great lengths to appear just like everyone else at the start.  I have certainly had one such person in my life, possibly two.  The second is, in my opinion, borderline.  She covers her tracks by claiming to be eccentric so that if her behaviour is questionable she laughs it off and adjusts accordingly. Both were control freaks and manipulative; they used sympathy in the first instance to get their way, followed by anger and agression if that didn’t work.

In each case it was a few years before their real nature revealed itself and even then there was self-doubt on my part.  Was I misjudging them, as they said?  As it turned out, no.  By that time my self-esteem had been dented, if not eroded, as was their intention.  They choose to live life through another in an effort to try to experience emotions and discover what a conscience is.  In doing so they will try isolating you from friends and possibly family. They have put a lot of effort into and invested a lot of time cultivating you and they don’t want to let you go.  After all, highly sensitive people form about 1 in 5 of the total population so it might take some time to find another such person and even more time to start all over again.  Once you do manage to break free, as you believe you have, they will find new avenues to ‘attack’ you, often using other people as emotional blackmail to bring you back under their control.

Prevention is Better Than Cure

If these sorts of people are difficult to spot, even for a sensitive, how can you prevent them affecting your life?  Try the following methods:

• Healthy Self Esteem
• Setting personal boundaries (not barriers which keep you away from everything, absolute anathema to a sensitive person)
• Learning to say no and mean it
• Being kind to yourself before you are kind to others

I don’t wish to scare, but to advise what it can be like.  Fortunately, sociopaths are not commonplace.  It just seems to me I attracted two too many!  I don’t want you to go through that.

Take care and blessings to you.

Stephanie x