How to tell which thoughts and emotions are really yours(for empaths)

As an empath I have struggled my whole life trying to be friends with everyone and not lose people and I would’ve done anything in order to keep them close. Well, not anything, but close to anything.

I have also had a hard time knowing which thoughts and emotions are really mine and which are those of other people. But for some years I have developed some strategies that I want to share with you:

1. Know that usually the thoughts which are yours are less obvious and are the ones which are softer and longer in duration. I know this sounds a bit weird but as you go within, especially if you are meditating, you can find there a lot of noise and probably also internalized voices from people in your life(especially from narcissists if you suffered from narcissistic abuse). You might also find it hard to recognize your true thoughts at some point and believe that everything is your thoughts and your faults and your shadows. This is not always the case and first discernment tool I find it to be softness, mainly because we have shut down our true voice and that means also making it less “visible” to ourselves even.
2. Usually the thoughts which are that of another person are followed by the tone of voice of the person that you might have internalized. Hearing voices wouldn’t have to be such a tabu subject, especially because it’s something natural and something our brains do in order to anticipate other people’s behaviors and survive psychologically.
3. If you have thoughts which are entangled with other people and find mixed phrases of what you would do, say and have know that you can also detangle them. For instance, when you try to articulate that stream of thought until the end of the phrase what are you getting? Are you getting a longer, genuine phrase or do you find it to be a chunk of what someone else would say? If you cannot complete that stream of thought in the same sequence and find it “broken” somehow, then you must have translated it from somewhere.
4. Know that subliminals are something we all are struggling with, however some people seem to be more immune to them simply because they have more strong mental barriers. Trying to build mental barriers is a bit hard but it can help to articulate your own thoughts even if they are familiar or if you are lazy in articulating them, re-affirming your own internal dialogue and discourse is always helpful if someone else is trying to interfere with your mind. Usually if you find pieces of thoughts and attitudes which are foreign to you they must be a projection into your mind from another source. Yes! This can happen!
5. Although it might sound a clichee, but always a means to discern is your heart. For instance, do you feel that thought coming from your heart? From within truly? Or do you feel it rather coming from outside? Try to sense the direction of that thought itself? Does it echo into you or does it seem generated from deep within?
6. Seeing the entanglement between minds can be a fun thing and learning “The quiet mind technique” and how to detach from this Tower of Babel of the minds through any meditation practice can help you overcome the mental chatter and noise. Usually we generate 70000 thoughts per day but how many of those thoughts are really ours? Let alone the ideas about life and knowledge that we received? It is rather an external source which is projecting or letting the knowledge pass through you as it happens from generation to generation.
7. Now, the hardest part, what if you react in a way that you don’t want, or think some nasty thoughts which you regret afterwards? Or, when you do the aftermaths of an interaction you end up with a lot of visions, memories even, which do not belong to you? What if you are forced into mirroring someone who isn’t as “love and light” as you want them to be? For sure they could reflect some aspects of you that you are unaware of but what if they are inflicting you those behaviours? Well, I always find that if you see beyond the trauma bond and the common fear that you have with the other person, you can manage to see into the real fear of yours which is unique and bringing about that situation to the surface and you can regain your initial purpose and intent and the original blueprint of your voice after you have processed the fear. We might get lost in other people and become just mirrors but usually distance and self-reflection at your own pace can bring your inner voice back. Even if there are a lot of shadow interactions going on which we haven’t processed you can resist this overwriting trend that is going on in society by contemplation and self-reflection. I also find that if you do not recognize your inner voice anymore or are trapped in useless conversations in your mind with other people, fast forwarding the conversation can help. But that can also bring about distortions. What could help, in reality, would be a better common ground and rewriting the inner dialogue in the way you want, if you gain that internal freedom.
8. Words are powerful but so is movement and attitude. If your mind can’t stop but showing you personas and voices which are those of other people and if you can sense that something is not right with you or don’t feel like yourself, you can always call a shrink but I also want to tell you that this is normal: we are all fragmented or overwritten by other people when we don’t pay attention. Another technique is grounding yourself. Sensing your body can make you regain your inner voice. Also, listen to your body, it has a voice too, that voice can bring back also the voice of your Soul.
9. Learn to recognize emotions and sense the vibration of a branching of thoughts. Instead of trying to decipher anything in your mind which isn’t yours, you can sometimes simply reduce the whole internal situation to a single vibe: what is the vibe that you are sensing right now? Well, depending on the vibe, all of the emotions and thoughts are associated with it, so it doesn’t matter necessarily if it’s yours or theirs, all that matters is how to transcend that vibe(if it’s displeasing).
10. Telepathy can happen to all of us and it’s starting to be science already.

If you know that you are an empath and probably are going to bond without wanting to with someone, learn to distance yourself psychologically from the people you don’t want to be entangled with and know that if people are persistent in being there present in your mind they probably don’t like their environment in that particular moment and by virtue of their dissociation from their own body they are projecting themselves into you. We tend to leave parts of us into other people’s realities and they tend to leave parts of theirs into our realities, the whole thing is to know how to bring yourself back and that begins also with cultivating a sense of presence and inner stillness. After all, in each moment you can create your own thoughts and start from scratch if you can be quiet a bit and you can sure learn to detach from unwanted dialogues and unintended implications even if they are coming from you or not. If you sense that you can read thoughts you probably are and at the end it doesn’t even matter if it’s coming just from your own wounding or it’s something projected if you cannot find the inner space to deal with them.

11. Learn how to mentally block something by training yourself to do so with small things.

Regaining the sense of self and having a privacy in your inner environment can be hard as an empath but it doesn’t have to be a burden. Make it a quest to rediscover your self and your inner reality. The more your mind is healed the more it will have place for beautiful thoughts and if you hold beautiful thoughts then it doesn’t matter to whom they belong.

12. Praying can help you recover internal coherence. Praying and chanting.

Learn to do these techniques.

So finding a way to curate your mind(maybe read something if you like reading), listening to beautiful music, learning the quiet mind technique, learning to detach and permanently clearing yourself of things which you sense are not yours, even if it’s a sort of trick in the overall scheme of co-dependent minds and karma, is still the most ethical thing to do and if you are thinking that maybe all the evil thoughts and emotions out there are yours and yours to process think again because that is not the case.

At most, the most useful thing to do for the world is to keep your inner peace and exalt yourself into wisdom and truly producing some wise thoughts of your own. Also a mantra like “What’s mine is mine, what’s theirs is theirs” can also help.

I am not saying this will be the Fix for all mental struggles but it can be a way to get to some sort of solace, until you can mature and gain that stability and integrity to actually think, be and affirm what you really are on the inside. We are all on this journey of tuning our whole being to who we truly are.