Not Everyone Who Sees the Dark Is Dark: Why the people who can sense darkness keep getting blamed for it

There’s a lie that follows dark empaths everywhere we go. It says that if you can see, feel and work with darkness, you must be made of it.

We hear it in a lot of ways. “You’re too intense.” “Why are you always looking for the bad in people?” “Takes one to know one.” “You’re a manipulator.” Somewhere along the way, being able to sense darkness got twisted into being the darkness. And all of it is stirred up by those who don’t want the darkness to be pulled into the light.

Let’s pull these lies apart

Search “dark empath” online and you’ll find a lot of fear. Articles warn you about people who can read emotions and use that skill to hurt others. Some of this goes back to a 2021 psychology study that used the term for people who scored high on both empathy and traits like manipulation and coldness. The internet ran with it. Before long, “dark empath” meant “dangerous person who understands you too well.”

That’s not the dark empath I know. And it’s not the one I write about.

The dark empath I know is the person who walks into a room and feels the tension everyone is ignoring. The one who knows the charming new friend is off, months before anyone else sees it. The one who can sit with grief, rage, and ugly truths without running. Those willing to examine the darkness in the spiritual realms. We don’t use what we see to hurt people. We use it to protect ourselves and the people we love.

Seeing the dark is a skill. What you do with it is your character. Those are two different things.

Here’s what I’ve noticed over and over. The loudest voices calling dark empaths “manipulative” are often the people with the most to hide. Most people cower in the face of predatory people. Dark empaths do not.

Think about it. To those who have spent years hiding who they really are, and harming others, the person who can see through them is a threat. Manipulators are used to being able to charm, fawn, and play the victim. It works on most people. Then they meet someone it doesn’t work on. Someone who watches them quietly. Someone who notices that their stories don’t line up.

So, the manipulators do what they’ve always done. They flip it. They tell everyone that we are the dangerous one. That we are cold. That we are reading into things. That we are the manipulators.

It’s an old DARVO trick. Point at the person holding the flashlight and illuminating the hidden realms and say they’re the one who made the room dark.

Now, there are people out there who read others well and use it to do harm. They’re the psychopaths of the world, and that’s real. But that’s not a dark empath. The difference is the heart behind the seeing. A predator studies people to find a way in to exploit them. A dark empath sees a person’s traits and then decides whether it’s safe to let them in.

The shadow realm is real work. I know, because I have walked those hallways for years.

Here’s the part people really don’t like to talk about.

Many dark empaths don’t just sense darkness in people. We sense it in places. In energy. In the spiritual world. Some of us can feel when something heavy has attached itself to a person or an environment. Some of us can sit with entities and dark spirits that would send most people running. And some of us have learned how to work with that realm without being swallowed by it.

That scares people, because to them, darkness is frightening. Dark empaths do not fear the darkness. We are adept at walking through its maze.

Every culture in history has had people who did this work. The ones who sat with the dying. The ones who cleared malicious energy in houses. The ones who walked into the places nobody else would go. They weren’t always thanked for it. Some were called witches. Some were burned. The people who could face the dark were too often treated as if they’d brought it there.

The Benandanti of Italy: In the 1500s and 1600s, villagers in Friuli believed they left their bodies at night to fight witches and protect the harvest. They saw themselves as the good guys. The Inquisition put them on trial anyway, and over the years their questioners pushed them to see themselves as witches. (Benandanti)

Agnes Sampson of Scotland was a healer and midwife, the kind of woman people called when someone was sick or dying. In 1591, King James VI questioned her himself. She was strangled and burned as a witch. (Agnes Sampson)

The sin-eaters of Wales and the English borderlands. When someone died, families paid a sin-eater to eat bread and drink over the body, taking the dead person’s sins onto themselves. Families needed them, and then avoided them in the street. One of the last known sin-eaters, Richard Munslow, died in Shropshire in 1906. (Sin-eater)

Marie Laveau of New Orleans was a famous Voodoo priestess of the 1800s who nursed people through yellow fever and sat with prisoners waiting to be executed. To many she was a healer. To others, she was someone to fear. (Marie Laveau, 64 Parishes)

The shamans of Siberia: Under Soviet rule, shamans were arrested, their drums taken or burned, and their work banned. Some never came home. (Siberian minorities in the Soviet era and How shamans were persecuted)

Joan of Arc: She said she heard voices from the spirit world. In 1431, at nineteen, she was burned for heresy. Twenty-five years later, a retrial cleared her name, and centuries later the same Church made her a saint. (History.com)

Yet, we’re still here, and we’re still doing the work. We have mastered self-protection and balancing our energy. We are not afraid of our own shadows or the shadows of anything else. As a self-identified dark empath, I am aware of my faults, my stumbling, and I don’t walk in shame of them. Instead, I work to refine those parts of myself, take them as lessons, and continue doing my work.

We matter as much as any other empath archetype. Everyone loves the soft empath, the gentler ones, and the healer who brings light and comfort. These types of people matter, and the world needs them.

But the world also needs the ones who can stand in the face of darkness and not flinch. Light empaths soothe the wound. Dark empaths identify what caused it. Light empaths hold you while you cry. Dark empaths help you see who made you cry, and why you keep letting them back in. Light empaths bandage. Dark empaths build the protection so that bandaged wound can heal.

One isn’t better than the other. They work together. A healer who can’t look at darkness will miss it when it’s sitting right in front of them. A dark empath without compassion is just a cold observer. We each carry part of the work.

Everyone can learn from us, and each other. You don’t have to be a dark empath to learn from one. Here’s what we can teach.

Your discomfort is information. When someone feels off, you don’t have to explain why. You’re allowed to trust it. And not everyone who feels off is a bad person. Sometimes people simply are not right for you, and that feeling is a signal saying, there’s no worthy connection here. And sometimes that off feeling is a signal from a traumatic past. There have been times I felt off and created distance with someone, only to find out later they were actually incredible people with the same boundaries and badassery that I move with.

Being nice isn’t the same as being safe. Some of the most dangerous people you’ll meet are very, very nice. I am not overly nice, and because of that, I’ve been labeled mean, a bitch, and other derogatory words. I’m okay with that. Because the very ones who blow those darts are the ones that need to be avoided. So, stop being so overly nice. Be amicable. Be real. And know that whatever someone else does with that is not your responsibility.

Looking at darkness doesn’t make you dark. You can identify what’s wrong in a person, a group, or an environment, and still be a good person. Someone has to say it. You can see it and not try to control the outcome. Recognizing darkness is a skill, and what you do with it is the mastery.

Your own shadow is worth meeting. Most people spend their whole lives running from the parts of themselves they don’t like. Dark empaths learn to sit with those parts. That’s where real healing starts. Why be afraid of our faults? No human being is perfect. When we are willing to look at the shadows, the unhealed traumas, as painful as it is, that is where the garden is tilled, and what results from there is the growth of new plants.

Fearing the shadow realm is conditioning. Many people have been trained to fear the spirit realm they consider dark, demonic, filled with shadow people, or whatever narrative they’ve been handed and told to believe. When we begin to break down this conditioning, there is a great freedom of mind that arrives. We find that most of it is made up of mirages, and that behind darkness, is brokenness and unhealed parts calling out to be loved and freed.

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If you’re a dark empath, I want you to think about something. How many times have you made yourself smaller because someone told you that your seeing was the problem? How many times have you second-guessed what you knew to be true, just to keep the peace?

Be honest with yourself about that. Then ask whose comfort you were really protecting. Ask if fear was driving you. Here’s the truth. The dark is always there. You didn’t bring it into the room. You just refused to pretend you couldn’t see it. The real question to be considered is why anyone wants you to stop seeing that depth.

So, keep your flashlight on. Let them squint. The ones who hate the light of exposure brought by dark empaths are usually the ones hiding in that darkness, and you don’t have to be controlled by their facades.

Anatomy of the Dark Empath © 2023 by Vennie Kocsis is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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