Surround yourself with positive people! Check out this article from Mindful Muscle!
Emotional Vampires Drain Our Energy…
In virtually every relationship there’s an exchange of energy.
Except … relationships with emotional vampires (a.k.a. energy vampires).
The energy-flow isn’t exchanged, it gets sucked out of us. Or worse yet, the energy we get back is toxic.
It is important in our relationships to maintain feeling our best, but not all relationships allow us to do so. We must ask ourselves then, who gives us good energy? Who drains us?
In our lives, we are surrounded by a multitude of relationships at any given time. Hopefully most of the people we choose to engage with are positive and supportive of us and our lives.
Unfortunately, there are those that deplete our energy, leaving us feeling disheartened and weak. It is important to pinpoint these emotional vampires so that we may protect our sense of peace.
Emotional Vampires
To protect this sensitivity within us, it is essential that we recognize who these emotional vampires are and prevent the harm they cause our emotional field.
Emotional vampires are everywhere.
They can be neighbors, family, friends, or co-workers. We encounter them every day, and they often hit us hard, draining our emotions and leaving us resigned to chronic anxiety and depression.
How do we become more aware of these draining people in our lives?
The primary indicator is pretty easy to detect:
If you feel like you are in a contracted state of unease around someone, this kind of energy doesn’t nourish your be-ing.
We’re not saying that anyone you feel this way around is an emotional vampire, but this feeling a good starting place of awareness. It is important that we learn how to remove ourselves from the negativity they make us feel without alienating ourselves from them.
If we don’t learn how to do this, we often become passive in their presence, react to their negative remarks with inarticulate speech, or fail to speak out at all in fear of seeming indifferent.
Emotional vampires drain our mental energy.
The most malevolent of vampires can make us feel un-worthy, insecure, and unloved. Some of the subtler species of energy suckers will inflict damage that is more of a slow burn, and make us feel bad over time. They steal our self-worth with an “Oh, I see you’ve put on a few pounds.”
They make us question ourselves when they roll their eyes at something we said, or speak to us in an undermining tone. We must learn to cope with the vampires in our lives! The things they do that make us feel less than we are unacceptable, and it is pertinent to develop a plan in learning to deal with them.
While some believe deeply in the message of The Lord’s Prayer to “…forgive them that trespass against us…” there is also something to be said about preventing others from trespassing on our happiness in the first place.
What turns someone into an emotional vampire?
Often childhood trauma, mistreatment, abuse, loss, parental alcoholism, or illness can severely weaken a person’s energy field. Children usually mimic their parent’s behavior and a lot of times inherit their most unflattering traits.
Early modeling really does have an impact. Studies of Holocaust survivors reveal that many became abusive parents themselves. Vampires draw on the energy of others to compensate for their own loss.
Most of them are not even aware they are doing it, but leave us with a sad or angry feeling.
We become tired in their presence as they draw on our energy for their own vitality. It is rare that a vampire sets out to purposely devitalize you. They are usually oblivious to the emotional drain they cause.
It is important to know the secret of how vampires operate in order to navigate away from them and maintain your positive energy field.
An emotional vampire goes in for the kill by stirring up your emotions.
When your buttons are pushed, you are thrown off your center, which makes your energy easier to drain. There are certain emotional states that increase vulnerability for attack. Feeling tired or desperate attracts vampires and makes us more susceptible to their negativity.
Other feelings that vampires feed on are:
Low self-esteem
Appearing weak or submissive
States of depression
People pleasing
Once you begin to understand what attracts emotional vampires, you can see what you can learn from them:
What are they in your life to teach you?
What part of your current energy-state attracted them into your life?
How can this experience help you grow?
Every moment in life and every person we come in to contact with is an opportunity to become a better person. But it doesn’t mean that we have to subject ourselves to energy vampires for the sake of a good learning lesson either.
While we cannot isolate ourselves from these vampires completely, we can learn to cope with them by better understanding their purpose in our lives.
We can start to see vampires as opportunities to rid ourselves of our low vibrational states and use them as tools to move into our highest vibrational selves.
