The Empath's Survival Guide, Life Strategies for Sensitive People; Judith Orloff
New York Times bestselling author and UCLA psychiatrist, Judith Orloff, M.D. created this practical, empowering book for everyone who wants to develop their sensitivities and empathy to become more caring people in an often insensitive world. Whether you’re a highly sensitive person, or an empath who absorbs other people’s stress, or simply someone who wants to live a more open-hearted life without burning out or experiencing compassion fatigue—this book is for you. It’s also for the loved ones of sensitive people who want to become more supportive of them. Sensitivity is a great gift that needs to be honored and developed.
The Empath’s Survival Guide begins with self-assessment exercises to help you understand your sensitivity, then offers potent strategies for protecting yourself from overwhelm and replenishing your vital energy. For any sensitive person who’s been told to “grow a thick skin,” here is your lifelong guide for staying fully open while building resilience, exploring your gifts, raising empathic children, and feeling welcomed and valued by a world that desperately needs what you have to offer. It’s also about embracing the empath in all of us.
As a physician and empath herself, Dr Orloff is passionate about this topic as she sees how sensitive people too often get misdiagnosed in the mainstream health care system with depression, agoraphobia, panic disorder, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. In this book, she offers empaths and all sensitive people a range of “survival guide” strategies to positively manage their sensitivities and avoid sensory and intuitive overload. She covers topics including health, work, love, sex, parenting, narcissists and other energy vampires, and developing intuition. Then, with these strategies in place, they can enjoy their gifts of depth, creativity, intuition, love of nature, capacity to deeply love, and fulfill their desire to help others and better the world.
What is the difference between having empathy and being an empath? “Having empathy means our heart goes out to another person in joy or pain,” says Dr. Judith Orloff. “But, for empaths, it goes much farther. We actually feel others’ emotions, energy, and physical symptoms in our own bodies, without the usual defenses that most people have.”
With The Empath’s Survival Guide, Dr. Orloff offers an invaluable resource to help sensitive people develop healthy coping mechanisms in our high-stimulus world—while fully embracing their gifts and power.