I can feel her very strongly as soon as I walk through the door. We are the only two people here in the lobby. I am waiting to see my therapist. This woman at the table is filling out paperwork, it appears, for her first time here.

She has shoulder length, dark brown hair, and is nicely dressed in a skirt, boots and a matching jacket. I sense that she feels her appearance will make her seem less “crazy”; if she dresses nicely. She doesn’t know that she isn’t crazy. She is a victim and her sadness runs deep.

I am feeling her energy so strongly that it is affecting my physical body. I know this heavy chest I’m suddenly feeling is not mine nor is the tight throat. This did not start until I walked into the waiting room and saw her.

I am writing this now on my phone notepad as I watch her, mainly as a deterrent, so I don’t empathically become impulsive and blurt out talking to her.

When she’s filling out the forms she is agitated. I watch her shift and rub her forehead then finally throw her pen roughly into her purse. In that time period she is also angry.

I can see in my mind someone who feels like her father. He is dark haired. It is short, almost black, hair. He has a narrow, fairly pointed nose and sinister, cold dark eyes. He feels tall and skinny. Now I am sad and tearful inside my body, and my skin has chills with my arm hairs standing up. His energy is thick and mean.

She is reading through all the paperwork of disclaimers, and I am reading her.

My mouth is watering through some nausea. I count my breaths to calm down, reminding myself to stay steady.

My therapist comes through the front door and briefly cuts the connection as she walks between us.

“I’ll be right with you.” She says to me as she heads to the back, leaving me alone with the girl again.

Now I see his hand. He is holding a belt that is folded in half, and his hand is more into the middle of it and not towards the belt buckle. He was a disciplinarian who favored exact blows of holding the belt in a more controlled way, as opposed to swinging it and letting it land anywhere on her body.

I want to ask her. I want to verify what I’m seeing. I am deeply fighting this urge. I don’t see small child sexual abuse. I see consistent physical abuse. I do see sexual satiation in her older life, a leaning toward zoning out through sexual escapades of feeling good in the moment.

As she reads her papers, I am feeling her mind, which is currently split between the memories she is about to have to talk about and what she is trying to focus in on reading and absorbing.

I can’t ever say what I see directly to the person I see it about. It’s invasive and could be triggering to them. It’s such a hard position for me to be in when I feel so many multiple things. I want to comfort them. I also so, so badly always want to know if what I’m seeing is correct.

Yet, I cannot say to strangers, “I see your father holding a belt.”

This could cause more trauma for them, and I’m just not comfortable doing that, so I release it.

These moments are sometimes difficult for me as an Empath. I feel compelled to connect to a person in these moments. It’s part of why too much public activity is not an active choice for me.

I can spend a lot of time seeing into someone’s life, something I consider a gift that I cannot necessarily use for anything openly. I can give quiet empathy or only talk about it, if the other person initiates it.

As I watch her, I see she is struggling with something inside of her, something she isn’t sure she wants to talk about. Something with her father. She is having conflicted feelings of having to talk about her father. I am trying to figure out what that is, I get a slight sense she feels sorry for him at times for some reason, maybe his own childhood or times when he was good to her.

She does not look up or over at me once. She is emotionally frozen in time, memories and pain in her own space.

I wish I could tell her that I know this feeling; this throat lump I am physically feeling from her right now. She is just beginning this healing journey. I want to reach out badly, if just to say, I see and understand.

I wonder sometimes if I relayed to someone what I saw, if it would give them validation or comfort. Especially people like her, who come into my field waves very, very strongly.

Yet, I always stay silent. Right now I am pushing away the urge to speak with her by sitting here writing this out on my phone instead.

Post therapy continuance:

My therapist opened the door at this time to call me back to her office. I didnt see the other woman again.

When empathic energy displays images of other people’s lives, it takes constraint to resist the urge to give them a hug.

At times I feel like a medium for other people’s trauma.