Empathic Residue

Emapths have the ability to read people and know what they are feeling and why they are feeling it simply by seeing them. They don’t need to have a conversation with the person and they don’t need to touch them. They don’t even need to be extremely close to them. An empath for instance, will be able to tell the mood of crowds at a mall simply because they have walked through the doors. However, people don’t even need to be in the room with empaths for the empath to know what they were feeling. This is because just like our physical fingerprints on anything we touch, we leave behind an empathic fingerprint of our emotions and what we were feeling. This is empathic residue.

One great example of this is with babies. Although a baby certainly can’t tell you what they are feeling, they have other ways of communicating. For instance, they cry when they are hungry, letting you know that they need something. So if they were to cry while lying on a blanket and hours later, when the baby was in bed and the blanket was picked up off the couch or the floor, an empath would be able to tell that the baby was upset when in contact with the blanket. However, it’s thought that babies don’t usually leave behind this fingerprint until they are several months old.

The reasoning for this seems to be that babies don’t have the brain development that is necessary to realize that there are things going on around them that they may have an emotional connection to. It’s been proven that babies don’t love their mother as soon as they are born because they simply don’t know to make an attachment to anything or anyone. However, as the brain begins to develop and babies realize that there are situations that could cause them emotional pain instead of physical pain, they too will begin to leave behind empathic residue.

One amazing and particularly scary part of this ability is to be able to see what has happened there. For instance, an empath who is very in tune to their own energy may be able to pick up empathic residue while travelling in a car. As they pass the same stretch of land where once a horrible car accident took place, they may be able to not only pick up the feelings but actually see what happened. Or they may pass a longtime ago favorite childhood place and as they pass it again in adulthood, they may be able to actually see what happened there as well. They may recall a favorite time or just visualize a generalization of that place, such as being in the schoolyard at recess as they pass their elementary school.

Picking up on empathic residue can be both very exciting and very scary for empaths. Just like any other skill of picking up on people’s emotions, it’s a skill that must be developed, harnessed, and blocked so the empath does not spend their life seeing things they don’t wish to.