If you are an empathic, intuitive, creative, emotionally sensitive person, one of your greatest challenges will likely be to learn how to process the uncomfortable and disturbing emotional energies around you, and within you.

Besides processing your own quota of personal pain, you might consider that emotional healing is also an interpersonal and transpersonal process that includes feeling and distinguishing the emotional energies of other people, places and time.

Some people who see me for therapy cannot find a tangible story of abuse in their life history to explain why they suffer so much. If you cannot access traumatic memories from your past, and you are feeling intense emotional pain, you might contemplate how you are being affected by:

1. Other People's Pain: You are feeling emotional energies that are not your own. Your emotional body is like an instrument that can tune into the energies of other people around you.
2. Ancestral Pain: You are feeling emotional pain for your mother, father, and your family lineage. The science of epigenetics states that we all inherit portions of unhealed pain from our ancestry
3. Societal Pain: You are being emotionally affected by untrue societal programming. Many societal norms are not healthy, kind or inclusive. It is important to note that when acquired societal beliefs do not feel good in your body - they are untrue for you.
4. Collective Pain: You are feeling the current state of the world. Spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle says that we each inherit our share of the collective human condition to process. You might be feeling and healing the pain of all women, of your ethnicity, your country, the earth and so on.
5. Past Life Pain: You are feeling emotional pain from other lifetimes (if you believe in past lives.) Some spiritual teachers say that this is "the lifetime to heal all lifetimes." Because the "veils" between lives are now thinner than ever before, some spiritual sages say, we could be feeling the emotional imprints of all our lifetimes on earth.

Experiencing Emotions as Energy

If you are suffering from emotional pain, your "hurt story" could be far too small to explain what you experiencing. If you are highly sensitive to your own disquieting emotions, and to the disturbing emotions of others, solidifying a logical narrative about the cause of your emotional pain might not be the best healing route for you. 

Because emotions need to be energy in motion, creating a story about why you are in pain can limit your fullest healing potential. As an energetically sensitive being, you might need to process your emotions in ways that do not involve locking into logical sequential thinking.

Emotions are energy in motion and they need to continuously flow. Pain arises from trapped and repressed emotions. Emotions that are not flowing hurt. For highly sensitive people, getting your emotional field flowing again is the key to emotional healing.

8 Ways to Process Emotional Pain as Energy

1. Accept your emotions fully. Do not resist your pain. Any resistance to emotional pain limits flow and causes more pain.
2. Focus on the emotions in your body. Unravel your emotions from the inside of your body instead of looking for what is wrong on the outside. Feel your emotions as energy - without a story.
3. Oscillate in and out of your emotions. Go within and feel your emotional pain for a few moments. Then, come out of your painful emotions, and using your senses, find something to appreciate. Oscillating between emotional pain and sensory appreciation will help you to not overtax your nervous system.
4. Walk or dance your emotions. If it feels too difficult to sit still, oscillate between feeling your emotional pain in your body, and then move back out into sensory appreciation while walking or dancing to music.
5. Paint or draw the energy of your emotions: Sensing into your body, invite the energies of your body to express and release through spontaneous painting or drawing.
6. Do not label your emotions: Experience your emotions as they move, shift, dance, walk, breathe and paint without attaching words or stories.
7. Write poetry: If you want to use words, write poetry. Poetry expresses emotions in a looser, leaping, less logical way.
8. Cultivate joy: Practices of love and joy can help to heal the most painful emotions. Empathic, highly sensitive people heal emotions best by staying and playing within the higher octaves of energy. Invent projects that are fun, interesting and uplifting to keep you playing with your energy at a higher octave of joy.