Keys to empath friendships
Empaths want friends. More than anything else, we want someone to understand us, someone like us, someone who can see us.
Yet, for all the empath gift that we have it should make us the perfect friend, we rarely find them.
A few years back I read Who’s your best friend – the adult version and I realized that adult friendships are completely different than childhood friendships.
I have now realized that empath friendships are always going to be different than normal adult friendships too. “I have friends that hold the keys to different doors of my personality.” As an empath, we are going to have many doors and many keys.
As children, we had very few doors that held our keys. We had school, home, and perhaps some favorite activities. As teens, we continued to have the school, home, activities, and then other interests. It was easy because we had few doors with few keys and usually had other children / teens who were looking for similar friends. It was still a struggle and for some, we never found anyone to share keys with.
As we finished school and moved out into the great big world, we had more keys. We had more secrets, we had jobs and dreams and desires. We had experiences and suffering and anxiety.
As empaths, we had so much more. We had held keys that were not our own, through our gift, we experienced things that were not our own experiences, yet it was and still is real.
How do we match keys? How do we find key holders when we don’t even know sometimes, what is ours and what is not.
We then remember how easy (or hard) it was to have friends when we were younger and we wonder why we cannot find that intimacy today.
It’s simple. We have too many keys for any one person to match with us completely.
Now that I realize this, what are our choices? It’s simple. We find multiple people that match our various keys.
Do we like to read? Join a book club.
Do we like to hike? Join a hiking club.
Are we foodies? Join a foodie club.
Do these not exist in your area? Start them!
Do we want people to understand our job? Start a club of some sort with co-workers.
Through clubs, we find support for our various keys.
Never neglect our deep hidden keys either. There are support groups for just about anything.
As for your empath support group? There is online, there is the option of creating a local Empath Support Group.
We can never have the simplicity of childhood because now we have too many keys, too many layers but what we can do is find people who have similar keys and share a little bit of ourselves with them.