Learning from My Harshness as a Gentle Empath Mom

Gentleness is a two-way street

One of my harshest personal life experiences started when I gave birth to my first baby and became a stay-at-home mom.

As new mothers, we are naturally instinctive in responding to our babies’ needs before ours, even when experiencing new and drastic changes in life, such as:

• Changes in our bodies as our babies grow inside us and we try to recover post-partum.
• Experiencing childbirth (which is different for every mother, and with every child).
• Feeling our heart space expand much more widely, and also contract with anxiety, worry, and anger just as easily.
• Coping with how we feel about breastfeeding our babies day and night.
• Needing to take extra care in bathing, diapering, dressing our babies, constantly coaxing them back to sleep at night, and making sure they feel safe and loved.
• Experiencing changes in our lives through pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding that our husbands will never experience.
• Not feeling safe to sleep too deeply for fear of not being able to respond to our babies’ needs soon enough.

I couldn’t meet my own expectations of being a good-enough mom.

These new physical and emotional changes, along with the new tasks we need to do, felt way too challenging to cope with.

Before my first baby was born, I thought it would be easy for me to be a calm, compassionate, loving, and patient mother who always manages to calm down her baby.

But in reality, I often felt lost, stressed, and over-tired trying my best to stay awake as much as possible just to make sure that baby was safe and had his basic needs met.

Does this resonate with you too?

I realized much later that I am actually an Empath who needs a lot of quiet alone time to safely process and release energies I have been sensing from other people, events, and situations.

Some of us need a little bit more help to feel like “I got this!”

What is an Empath new mom?

Being an Empath simply means you are clairsentient.

You feel the energetic effect of emotions, thoughts, and words of others so deeply that you can physically feel hurt and/or uplifted by how others feel and think. You can even feel others’ physical pain as well. The term ‘others’ can mean people, events, places, and the Internet.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking and you’re right! This ability is not always useful!😅

As only a minority of the whole human population are Empaths, the way we react to the energetic reality can seem to be totally out of proportion to the common population. Having regular periods of alone time is absolutely necessary for us Empaths to digest/release/integrate the energies we have taken in so that we feel free and safe to deal with our own lives.

This feels a little bit like “putting on your oxygen mask” before you help your babies/toddlers put on theirs in a flight emergency!

There is a wonderfully strong connection between you and your baby.

Being a sensitive New Mom means you can easily feel the strong life force energy pulsating from your newborn.

Every time he/she is feeling contented and calm you enjoy this in an amplified manner as well.

What a pleasure to experience these pure uninhibited feelings emanating from your precious bundle of love!

This empathic gift that you have will also keep you alert of any warning signs way before others. You will be the first one to detect any signs of discomfort and illness from your baby, even before the physical signs start to show.

You know this simply by feeling that something is not quite right.

What it felt like caring for my baby

My heart would expand with so much love feeling energetically connected to my baby that I wanted to hold him all day long.

But whenever he fussed and cried, my heart would ache so much and I would try my very best to calm him. I couldn’t fully trust anyone else, not even my husband and mother, to take care of him, unless I was simply too exhausted to even hold him safely.

I felt like a pressure-cooker packed with so much energy overwhelm!

With this energy overwhelm getting in the way, I could no longer sense what my baby needs each time, and feeling this energetic disconnection is so painful for me.

Gentleness is a two-way street

It became much harder to be my natural gentle self again.

I felt more disconnected even with myself as I got crankier and expressed my resentment with more gusto! I hurt my loved ones with my own Harshness and that was really hard for me to accept.

I compromised my own rest, thinking it was only right to place my baby’s needs above mine.

Did you fall into this same trapped thinking too?

I realize much later that Gentleness is a two-way street— I can’t be harsh on myself in order to be gentle on my loved ones and vice-versa.

Gentleness only counts when it’s felt both in your loved ones and you.

How I recovered from my Harshness

When I had more time to myself as my boys grew up, I finally felt safe enough to take better care of myself again.

I took my time to nurture my own needs and wants — returning back to my love of energy healing, experimenting with healing through aromatherapy, and taking up a new passion by using my Human Design chart as a personal development tool.

All these tools helped me to be more aware of the Harshness I felt that is invisible to others.

I started to appreciate my sensitivity and practiced being gentler on myself and others more.

When I gave birth to my third son a few years later, it was much easier for me to feel safe and grounded while taking care of him. I was even able to write and publish my first book about Gentleness before my son turned two!

Are you being too harsh on yourself?

Being a first-time mom can be extremely stressful.

The stress gets more intense if you are energetically sensitive too!

Are you an Empath and a New Mom, too?

I hope that reading this will inspire you to be gentler on yourself.

Try to find some trusted help to take care of your babies/kids, so that you can use this time to return to your energetic self again. Take some time to self-reflect on how harsh you have been on yourself, and experiment with new ways to be gentler on yourself.

I honor the Gentleness and Sensitivity in you.