The empath, the codependent & the narcissist: who's what?

hey there hi I'm Stacy Hoch psychotherapist and life coach and for years I have been working with one kind of person and it didn't dawn on me the thing that all of these people had in common until after I wrote a book about it and when I went through and edited the book I said holy I see the pattern now I see the kind of person that I work with and before it was just I was too close to see it even though all of my clients would come to me with very aligned although expressed differently issues and what that looks like is most of my clients are high-functioning women and hi powerful positions who look like they have it all together and their relationships are total mess but more specifically they look like they have it all together and their mental life is a train wreck and they're constantly kind of trying to find their place in the world based on production they find their worth through production and they find people who don't produce constantly lazy so they don't identify with that aspect of themselves that as more go with the flow type of thing although they deeply deeply want to I'm gonna tell you about this person and I'm gonna do my best to really pull out the threads that differentiate the three common things that go on in this dynamically over this person's life so if you're somebody who constantly seeks approval from other people even though you think that you don't if you are somebody who is judging other people and really has to be good that makes you feel valuable to produce to give purpose you are the person I want to talk to today so first the question is what is the correlation between an MBA and a codependent so I want to pull apart that thread and then I want to talk to you about codependency and narcissism and um I've written a lot about this and I want to say again that nobody is the villain here a codependent actively participates in this dynamic and I want to help you if you are this person to really distinguish what you are from the next person so you can utilize your gifts and actually own yourself to the core okay so if you think that you are an empathic person that's different than being an empath and I wanted to talk about this first so two empathy according to developmental psychology happens gradually in stages so an emotional empathy the second that we're born we are born with the capacity to be emotionally empathetic excuse me and what that looks like is that if you put three babies in a room and one of them starts crying all of them start crying they can't differentiate that one of them is separate than the other then they go through a stage where they recognize that baby is crying but that's not actually me crying so I don't have to cry and then they go through a stage where ideally they go up to a kid and say hey here's here's my toy I see that you're upset would you like to have my toy this I believe is the stage that codependents gets stuck in there is one a level of empathy beyond that which is okay I see that you're crying and you actually have different toys than I do so I'm gonna go get your toys to give you what you need or I'm going to tell you which would even more appropriate thing to go get your toy okay because that's going to be the thing that Sue's you the empath I believe if somebody who is actually stuck in emotional empathy phase okay and this is not bad at all it's actually a tool but eventually we get to a point in empathy where there we understand cognitive empathy and what cognitive empathy is is okay I can see that you are upset and I can put my mind mentally into why you would be upset but you don't feel like you are responsible or like you feel the feelings of the other person so there's emotional empathy which you physically feel the feelings of the other person and then there's cognitive empathy which you it's more about like I can feel that but I'm gonna make that about you where the empath tends to make it about himself and specifically the code of honey well inevitably if because they don't have to go hand in hand but at being an empath is definitely a precursor if you are not raised in the right environment to be a codependent so that said empathy motivates altruistic behavior which is great and motivates helping behavior it gets faulty to a point where we say I am going to give you help at the extent of sacrificing myself so there's a differentiation between a highly sensitive person energetically and an empath and I'm gonna I want to clear that up really quickly because um empathy may also be motivated by the desire to stop somebody else in distress because we can't on a nervous system level deal with that other person stress so we're like okay I'm gonna help you because I don't know how to deal with that okay that is more likely a highly sensitive person a highly sensitive person is actually acting from their own nervous system responses and then giving labels to that response whereas the empath literally picks up on other people's emotions and can't even tell that they're if they're theirs or the other person's worse the highly sensitive person will actually project out and and be like I feel this and this must be true because my nervous system is going crazy whereas the empath is like I'm being bombarded with all of this and it's almost like the difference between like being super overwhelmed and versus like paralyzed being overwhelmed like I have to leave the situation I have to fight or flight or I have to like act out versus like the empath is more likely to be like holy I have no idea what's going on here so the highly sensitive person is actually feeling other people's emotions but they're feeling it from their own perspective where the empath is coming they're literally feeling it and they they don't even know which perspective to take because they can see it all they have a hard time distinguishing whose is what so and the highly sensitive person might do that also and to be fair and empathy is we going to act like a highly sensitive person at times in their life but the EM patch is actually picking up on other people's stuff whereas the highly sensitive person is responding basically from their own stuff triggered by somebody else's stuff so empathy in Psychological standards can be created by this is the ironic part and this is what I'm really why I'm really passionate about this because it can it supposedly comes from either temperament when you are five months old and you are just as likely to be the exact temperament as you are at five months at 50 which they say the same thing about empathy the level of empathy that you have when you're four months old is very congruent with the level of empathy that you have when you're much older so temperament genetics if you have an you know a soft empathetic parent you're likely to be an empathetic person notice that empathetic is different than an empath and I'm gonna talk to you about that in a second and then here's the weird aspect of this empathy is built with maternal warmth and supportive parenting the empath I believe is built by poor parenting and so here's the thing so in empathy it says psychologically that it's determined by genetics it's determined by temperament is determined by great parenting or piss-poor parenting so I think the piss-poor parenting and not like these people know better this is not there no villains here okay the piss-poor parenting is the cause of the empath and I'm gonna tell you why because the empath and I actually I have a little tool here I'm gonna I'm gonna hope that this analogy works out for you guys so we're all born like this okay and this is just say that's this is the empath in that time where we hear somebody else cry we can't differentiate if it's us or them we start crying so we're picking up on other people's stuff and the empath is pretty clear okay so the empath herself and I shouldn't you know I shouldn't say her or himself um and a normal and that person will inevitably look a little bit more like oil like they're kind of a little bit more dense in energy because they haven't had to hone in on staying super clear for the sake of survival so an empath is actually somebody who goes okay I feel an emotion and they ultimately were a child responsible for em passing the parent so the normal situation that at hand would be the baby cries and the parent responds for an empath I believe it's almost the exact opposite the empathic baby or the empathic child is actually responding to the emotional state of the parent and they have learned that that's literally what they have to do to survive so somebody who doesn't have to utilize their empathy constantly somebody who doesn't have to em empathize with their parent it's much more likely to just kind of like become oil they're much more likely to shut down I go okay I I don't have to rely on that skill to survive because people are going to actually meet my needs or as the empath struggles to meet her own needs and then ultimately has to hone that skill so there's parts of the brain that are associated with reducing personal stress that is activated by seeing other people and the empath I definitely believe has decreased activity in the parts of your brain where you differentiate between the self and the other so ironically and this is where my work comes in um the so empathy is built in congruence with guilt people who display more empathy along with a deeper sense of guilt are much more likely to follow the rules and this is also why guilt is such a powerfully destructive and also a weirdly useful tool in our society so if empathy and guilt go together ultimately what I believe is the codependent empaths the guilt and they feel worthless and I'm gonna talk to you a little bit more about this and um so if we REM passing the guilt and we're living off of guilt and we're going I don't have any work because I literally can't save the parent that I'm M passing and nothing I do is right there's always intermittent reinforcement we're like oh one day she's warm in the next day she's not warm and I don't really understand so we're going it must be me it must be me I am the fucked-up one here and I am worthless there is no purpose to my life because I can't even save my parent who I obviously am responsible for saving because you know I'm passing with them and I clearly can tell that they're like either absent which I want to get to in a second they're absent emotionally so I have to like pull them in and if I can't then I am not worth anything because that was basically my sole purpose the other interesting thing and this is how we know that empathy cognitive and emotional empathy are gradual in different stages for people and they kind of have to match up in order for somebody to be empathetic somebody with um somebody on the spectrum they have deep emotional empathy so they can feel at all that they can't conceptualize what the hell they're feeling which is not that different than a very highly sensitive person or an empath except ideally we as not being on the spectrum have enough cognitive tools to override this so the other end of the spectrum so the app and we have the autistic spectrum which is I usually feel emotional empathy but I can't put words to it so yours is mine and it's making me totally freaked out versus cognitive empathy which the sociopath or the narcissist is very capable of and this is why it's very destructive because they are capable of seeing cognitive empathy and going oh that's really getting a rise out of this person that's really doing something to this person and they can see that it's distressing but they can't feel the distress so it doesn't matter what they do so their empathy actually they have empathy but it's cognitive it's in the mind and then really care because I can't feel what's going on for you and God to a codependent we're like I'm gonna save you I want to make you come out and like and love me and I couldn't save my mommy or my daddy so I'm gonna come and save you because you're void of yourself just like they weren't and I know you're intermittently reinforcing me just like they did and if I can just win this game I can prove that I'm worth loving right so there's more there's something also called egocentric empathy which is when basically if the child we see that there is a need and we go to that other child and we say here's my toy so we am the emphasize the empathy is accurate the gift is wrong okay because we try to give away our gifts to somebody who's not asking for our gifts they don't want our toy they don't want our mom or our hug they want it from something else that they're not getting it from and we as codepen let's go please please please here's this like I'm gonna help you can you take this from me and that's not actually what they want so the empathy is accurate but it's egocentric because we try to give them what we would want in the same situation this is where I think though independents are stuck so empathy itself is another word for Clare suntan and what that means is we can literally clearly feel everybody else's feelings which is very very unnerving to the untrained empath I would know so the difference between normal empathy which would be more like oil and I'm not saying that this is like there's no comparisons or hierarchy in this situation although there always is in a codependent and a narcissistic relationship or codependent period the difference between empathy and an empath is that empathy you won't have to be trained in an empath is somebody who is literally requires training to basically determine which stuff is theirs and which stuff is somebody else's and you can you can tell if you're a highly sensitive person basically versus an empath also if it sticks if if you leave a situation so saying you're a highly sensitive person your nervous system has all worked out you're gonna be like the the zebra who ran from whatever was chasing it because a half an hour later you're gonna feel fine as long as you exit the situation you're gonna feel fine the empath carries that situation with her it doesn't matter what psychological tools she uses to overcome it doesn't matter how much she can intellectually let go of something or how much she knows better she's still bringing home somebody else's junk and the the biggest distress in the scenario is that she will if she is untrained think it is hers and make a mess of her own life because she is going well I feel this way it must have been because of what happened Thursday and then she'll go fight with her boyfriend about what happened Thursday when they were already resolved in that situation about what happened Thursday but really it wasn't her stuff to begin with so empaths can be very self-destructive and self-sabotaging because we feel other people's stuff and we don't know that it's actually not ours examples of this I have worked with people my primary example of this and it's like kind of embarrassing to admit I worked with a man who had very and he was very intense very very intense and he had a lot of dense vibes about his healing process and there was a lot of resistance there and that's fine it is what it is but that night I come home my boyfriend didn't he always calls me when he's on break from he's a musician so he'll go out and do a show and then call me want a break he didn't call me and then I couldn't get a hold of him and I was up until 1:30 in the morning bugging out I mean like I was pacing I was doing things that were just not me just like I am not the person who's gonna pace around like I'm gonna go to bed because I don't give a what you're doing if I'm pacing I should have known better it took me four hours for some voice in my head to go this is not yours this is not yours this is not yours and literally and I want to give you the tools to help you distinguish this too because this second that I heard in my head this is not yours I said it three times I felt this energetic lift and I was like holy that's all I had to do earlier and then I can essentially like cut away in my auric field the parts of the parts that like if I really settle into my body like where is this housed what is just look like and ultimately I can mentally visualize like I'm just slicing this away and I'm returning it I'm returning it to where it came from because as an empath it doesn't serve us actually to to work out other people's stuff for them and serves us to feel it so we can help them get to the other side of it but it doesn't serve us actually save them so what we have to understand really in empaths and empathy in general is that feelings are energy and feelings can be thrown feelings can be you know the woman who's like and you feel her fly across the room even though she's standing at the doorway you know that you can feel that energy being thrown at you energy is real and if we look at it from a psychological as a psychotherapist I'm standing I'm gonna tell you today there will not be a way out through a psychological modality doesn't matter how long you were in therapy there will not be a way out of your empathy until you address it on an energetic level and it's not like you have to get out of your empathy but there won't be ways out of your own web until you address what you need to address out the energetic level so um we need to get that that's real like we're not making this up this is not I'm not crazy you're not crazy for feeling what you're feeling it's legitimate stuff it's actually happening okay so um it's also I suppose a fair to say from the research that I've done that the empath is wired in energy and psychology whereas the high highly sensitive person is wired biologically and psychologically so they're actually they're coming from my biology is affected by this whereas an empath so it's like an N word out my biology is affected and I have to like do something to make that stuff where as an empath is energetically wired so somebody else can literally input to the empath and that affects their biology it's not an inward out process it's an outward in process that make sense okay um so the the seed for codependency no matter how you look at it is in empathy and that they doesn't have to mean that you're an empath but the seed for codependency is absolutely in empathy so codependency which is also considered which is all of the people that I work with who don't even know they're codependent I I didn't even know I was go to pennant I had a master's degree in psychology and I was a spiritual junky for years on this path of self-discovery and realizing him that not only am i an empath I am a codependent and that it was like learning that I had cancer my whole life and all of a sudden I was cured it was like okay now I know I have a platform to work with so codependency is also classified as self-love deficiency disorder by some people which is ironic because I want to explain to you though in energetic terms the way that I see this going on so it's actually the addictive the addiction to chasing your own worth your own purpose because we feel so purposeless as codependence that we essentially have to seek to save somebody else to make sure that our life has value so codependency is the addiction to basically being numb to the sense of loneliness that we feel so we will do anything to eradicate that sense of loneliness that was created by what we could call an attachment wound in childhood normally in Psychological terms from a narcissistic parent but again I want to just like labels are cool for the sake of like using them constructively not destructively this isn't to to vilify anyone again so the Ampata is the hero healer the codependent is the fixer okay and I can be a a a codependent requires a CO okay so I have to be in a co dependent relationship I have to be with a another person to be a codependent but I don't have to be with another person to be an empath I want to talk about the irony of being an empath raised by a codependent I want to talk about the irony of being an empath um uh matched with a codependent and what that looks like so um a codependent entire character is based on basically an image so we're going I'm worthless I'm going to project outward that I can save you I can help you and that's going to be my worth and our self-worth and self-esteem is validated by what we do and validated by other people's opinions and I suppose thoughts about us the problem with being the empath is that often also those opinions and thoughts deeply create us they're not just affecting us there if we don't hang out with the right people as empaths we are literally being created by somebody else and this is why I think this work is so important for EM House because here's why I want to just explain this to you um let me see I do have here's the comment thank you so both a codependent and an empath will struggle to create boundaries and to know what their own needs are so if we look at it in terms of this so say I'm an empath I don't have enough cups here I am an empath okay so let's just put water in here here's the codependent and the codependent normally gets in relation I'm just gonna use this I hope it works normally gets in relation with a narcissist because they um what we ultimately do is we go I have to save you and the narcissist what I'm gonna drink my coffee and use it so you can tell also because a lot of codependence go mio narcissist the codependent desires to be in relationships with people they deeply and when I say n I mean literally in like they want to get in a relationship with people they want that to be their safe space and that's it they feel secure in a relationship the narcissist kind of uses relationships like we use a cup they don't they use it they don't really think about it it's something that they manage it's not something that they desire to be in and I'm going to hopefully demonstrate why so if we have a narcissist who's basically the empty cup who wants to use things because that's the only way they know one thing we also have to realize is that the narcissist started out as a codependent who didn't have a co okay so this are now as a codependent trying to get their needs met by a parent or somebody in their immediate life as a child who didn't co-create with them so there's actually a benefit to being a codependent who actually has somebody to co-create with but we have to recognize that we're in the dance so the codependency is this void and goes oh my god I know exactly what you did you escaped yourself so the codependent goes I'm gonna help you to feel alive by giving you all of my sustenance basically and God the narcissist loves this because they don't have any of their own my job in my work is to get people to put their stuff back their sustenance back in their cup and work from that place so if you look at this cup as like that the outside is just an image the outside of this is just an image the sustenance inside is what's important the codependent essentially becomes void of themselves and then the narcissist hates them because they're trying to infiltrate something that isn't actually them in the first place so they will always see them as incongruent inauthentic and weak somehow that said the codependent does what they do because they understand that the narcissist is void of themselves because it represents a parent that they had that they never were able to save themselves so they seek to pour all of their stuff into the narcissist and ultimately the narcissist and this is why shadow work and inner child work are so important for the codependent because the narcissist is literally living in their own shadows and the codependent inevitably will do all of her sustenance to her shadow self she will become void of herself for the sake of somebody else so shadow work is important and I can tell you more about that later but also inner child work because there are attachment issues going on here that have halted the development of both of these people the norsu so the narcissist I already said this okay the narcissist is started out as a codependent and the codependent and the narcissists are the flip side of the same coin one seeks to be good one seeks to give to prove their worth and the other seeks to take to prove their worth if you give this to me then that means I'm worthy and the codependent goes if I give this to you that means I'm worthy so for I hope that I'm I'm threading these things for you so you can understand the relationship between an empath a codependent and a narcissist for the codependent whether you're codependent empath or whether you're just a codependent period the most essential things to get you back into this Cup are discovering actually what your likes are actually what your preferences are and that might require some isolation because an empath typically goes through phases of three phases of development in their empathy which would be I live for everyone or I live for others to begin with and then I live for myself and that would be the period of like kind of isolation where what we're going what do I actually like what actually does feel good for me which is gonna drive everybody else crazy all of a sudden we're gonna be selfish and assholes for for like literally just settling into our own energy body and filling out what our preferences are and then once we know that we can again live for everybody else but it's not for others I'm included in the equation of living for everybody else then so to discover what your likes and dislikes are absolutely essential which might require some isolation which is gonna shove you into that place of loneliness that you didn't want to be in the first place it's okay because you're the only person who can save you in this space so also I'm gonna say so say I am a coat or I am an empath and I am raised by a codependent what do you think that does to the empath so if I'm an empath and my codependent person has dumped all of her sustenance into somebody else ultimately I'm going I can help you I can help you and we go to the person we ultimately realize like this person can't meet my needs so ultimately if both of our names are gonna be Matt I have to meet their needs and that is a vicious vicious cycle because that is when the empath goes am i a narcissist or am i a codependent I don't understand what I am because I can see it all and I can see where she is I can see where he is I can feel that like no this this they're all zombies basically I don't understand what I am in this whole mix so it's very like likely a possibility if you question us in yourself that you are actually I'm an empath which supposedly only 1% of the people are and the more I understand this the more I'm like dude we need to rock this like crazy um who was raised actually maybe not even by narcissists but by a codependent and in them not being able to meet our needs because they were void of themselves which is no different than the narcissist we basically infiltrated their space which inevitably probably looks a little bit more like this because it's like oil and water and then we go well I thought we were supposed to blend I thought we were supposed to like get along in this situation and the co demands like no you I'm out there why are you trying to pull me back into my little space right why are you trying to put me back in that little container embodiment is absolutely key for the narcissist the codependent and the empath putting all of that sustenance back into the vessel in which it came is absolutely key and we have to get into the vessel to decide what the vessel wants what we want and how the vessel wants to create okay so um it's really important to also distinguish what's yours and what was told to you that you believe like your worth is not ever going to be met by producing because you're always gonna have to produce and produce and produce and that's gonna be exhausting and tiring so your worth actually is established by the way that you live your life based on the ability to create boundaries that you say yes to more than you say no how many of us and this is all of my clients do things out of guilt which is like oh that's how empathy is created let's guilt our children but guilt is the thing to be eradicated from the empath because the empath thinks that she is absolutely worthless without serving somebody else not true the codependent thinks that but the empath who's born into the pattern of codependency will inevitably think that she is worthless and she has to produce and blah blah blah she has to give in order to receive she has to constantly be meeting other people's needs and that's an image disorder if literally I do not exist without your validation and that's no different than the narcissist I do not exist in that your validation so we play this game together and that's a dangerous game so again I'm Stacy Hoch I suppose I am here to help codependent empaths get in their vessel and create from their own sustenance instead of other people's if you would like to learn more about this definitely sign up for my newsletter I am intending on doing a mastermind and a beta course online for specific to codependent empaths to pull apart what's yours what's not your your worst blueprint as a child so definitely sign up for my newsletter and keep an eye on that if any of this made sense to you and I hope that is of service do today may be the first step that you can do today as the side like what you know I think a lot of em especially based on guilt or codependents period we get to a state where we start to experience pleasure or start to experience ease and then we feel guilty about it we're like oh my god I'm not allowed to do this so push past that threshold of deserving push past that threshold just today of like I'm gonna do this shamelessly not even feel guilt about it I'm gonna whether it's like pleasuring yourself whether it is giving you know getting a massage whether it's giving to somebody because you genuinely want to not because you feel guilty about it but doing something that you genuinely find pleasure for detaching from the guilt associated with it maybe just start there today okay so I hope this was of service to you I know it's very long I've never made a video this long but thank you so much for being here and I love you and you're so worth it it's you're so worthy you're so in there the job is to get in here so we can create out there okay bye

Channel: Empoweress

Views: 242,542

Rating: 4.8380899 out of 5

Keywords: empath, codependent, anxiety, self esteem, assertiveness, narcassism, self love, empathy, psychotherapy, life coach, spirituality, guilt, attachment, connection

Id: nsEI4pOggUo

Length: 34min 10sec (2050 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/DomesticIvy]

My word.

Without going in to too much detail you have just described my entire life.

I have been battling this question for so long. Thank you for sharing your wisdom. I’ve just started the journey of filling my self back up. I’m so excited.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Good luck with your quest to help yourself and others!

[u/howNOTtofap]

This is an amazing video, thanks so much for sharing! Just learned so much about myself, Stacey is fantastic.