Sins of the Empath : Honesty
The sins of the empath. These are the traits which are inherent to those who are of an empathic nature. You possess these traits; this is why you were picked by us. You may wonder why they are regarded as a sin? This is because in our view we consider them to be sins as we do not possess these traits. These traits are regarded, in your world, as laudable traits to have. These traits however make you vulnerable to us. They cause us to be attracted to you in the first instance and the existence of these characteristics means that they are ripe to to be exploited by us. These traits are good traits to have but because of us they become polluted, desecrated and exploited.
You cannot lose these traits. They are as much a part of you as your skin tone and eye colour. They define who you are. You may, unusually, try to rid yourself of them but you cannot. It would be like trying to rip out your own heart and still live. These traits are infused within you. For the most part you will be pleased you possess these characteristics, thankful that they assist you and define you, separate you from being one of us. You ought to be aware however of what these sins are so you know what it is that causes us to home in on you and furthermore how it is that we exploit these sins for our own benefit. With that knowledge you will be able to look to protect the relevant characteristic and ensure it remains intact and is not attacked, shredded or fed upon by us.
The first of these sins is the empathic sin of honesty. James E Faust said of honesty,
“Honesty is more than not lying. It is truth telling, truth speaking, truth living and truth loving.”
This aptly demonstrates how honesty is at the core of how an empath behaves. You utilise this honesty in everything that you do. It governs how you interact with people, how you speak to people and most of all how you conduct your intimate relationships. I am not suggesting that this empathic trait makes you a saint; you will not be above pocketing the excess change if the cashier hands you back too much money or refraining from telling a friend that the outfit they think is wonderful does not really do them too many favours. Your honesty is tempered with discretion and being circumspect when you identify that a lighter touch is required. You understand when being too honest with another is not appropriate. Nevertheless, honesty is of huge importance to you. You regard it as a fundamental factor of your character to act with honesty, both in terms of those you deal with and especially in respect of yourself. This core of honesty and its repeated application to your every day outlook in life makes it ripe for exploitation by us.
The exploitation commences at the seduction. When you engage with people, you have a tendency to allow your emotions and traits to be seen by all. You do not hide the way you feel. You do not operate from behind a mask (not like others you may know of) nor from behind a curtain. You do not cloud your dealings and operate in a shadowy manner but rather you exhibit who you are from the outset. This is of no consequence when you are dealing with your fellow empaths or even the normals but it becomes especially dangerous when you come into our sights. Not only do we have a heightened ability to sense the traits which matter to us, you aid this because your honesty means that you have all your characteristics on display. Just like a proud shopkeeper displaying his wares in a pristine shop window, you exhibit (but you do not flaunt) your inherent traits for the world to see. This means that your empathic and class traits which are so important to us when we target our victims are out in the open because of your honesty. You have an honest default setting. It is akin to having no privacy settings on your social media so that whoever takes an interest in you can see everything about you, everything that you have ever posted, where you live, where you have been, your photographs and so forth. This default setting is important to us as it makes our task of identifying you so much easier. When you are demonstrating those empathic traits through your honesty, they are highlighted, prominent and readily identifiable. Accordingly, if you keep wondering why you always seem to attract our kind, it is because your honesty is causing you to stand out to us.
Your honesty means that you engage with people without an agenda, without suspicion and providing them with the benefit of the doubt. This honesty of approach means that you fail to see those red flags which are fluttering during the seduction and that you fail to hear the blaring klaxons and see the flashing red lights which signal that something is amiss. You operate in an honest way and this causes your thinking to be framed so that you expect and assume that the person you are dealing with is honest towards you. This honesty takes you into the territory of gullibility. Add to this that we are of course not being truthful with you in the way we engage during the seduction and you have little chance of avoiding what we are doing; seducing you and doing so effectively.
The inherent honesty which you possess also means that you tell us how you feel and you will do so early in our interactions with you. Since we are engaged in love-bombing you at the outset it is nearly impossible to resist telling us how wonderful it feels and that you have fallen in love with us. Your early declarations in this regard are wanted and expected. Hearing this allows us, along with seeing the relevant indicators, to know that our seduction is proving successful and that you are being embedded. Gaining such knowledge is important for us in terms of ensuring that we have the level of fuel that we want but also in terms of allowing us to bind you closer to us, for instance by asking to borrow money or by moving in together. Your honesty results in your telling us what you are thinking and feeling, which in turn gives us the green lights we require.
Your honesty makes you transparent. You cannot hide anything from us and most importantly of all, you are unable to hide your feelings from us. Thus you will always struggle to hide you joy, your delight, your ecstasy, your pain, your tears, your annoyance and your agony from us. This emotional honesty is fundamental to why we engage with you. This means that the fuel you provide to us is purer that any which might come from another source. Yes, the “normals” will provide us with fuel through being happy to see us, through praising us or annoyed at being messed around by us. Even our own kind will provide fuel to another member of the brethren through exhibiting jealousy, annoyance or anger, but in both these cases there is an absence of emotional honesty which is prevalent with you as an empath. Your emotional honesty creates a fuel which is pure, free from toxins, devoid of pollutants. It is not masked, it has not been shrouded or clouded in some way, as is the case with normals and most certainly with our kind.
By being emotionally honest you ensure that your fuel is the best of all types and naturally this is why we are drawn to you, sink our teeth into you and start to drain you of all that sparkling and pure fuel.
Your honesty makes you a target to begin with, it makes you an easier target to latch onto and the reward of this pure fuel means we want to keep hold of you and keep returning to you to feed on it.
The matter does not of course end there. Your empathic sin of honesty generates further problems for you once the devaluation commences. We are dishonest. We are habitual liars, practitioners of deceit and operate through a skewed lens of fraudulent intent. When we engage in these dishonest practices it mortally offends your innate honesty with the consequence that you respond by providing yet more fuel. This offence to your honesty combined with your honesty drives you to want to make us see the lies that we so readily allow to fall from our deceitful mouths, to have us address our mendacity and recognise what we do. This only serves to bind you to us further.
The honesty you have with your self also means that you have a capacity to be introspective and the consequence of this is that you regularly self-flagellate by blaming yourself when you can find no other answer to our behaviour. The narcissistic perspective and our toxic logic, which are invariably a mystery to our victims means that you fail to understand why we do and say as we do. Your honesty causes you to look inwards and you blame yourself. This fulfils our desire to remain unaccountable and increases the weight of the burden of our engagement with you, upon you. Your honesty causes you to accept blame either where it does not lie with you or in a greater proportion that for which you are culpable.
Your honesty of dealings also prevents you often of speaking of the devaluing abuses outside of your relationship with us. At first, that may seem a contradiction, but you would feel dishonest if you spoke about them to others without informing us first of your intention to do so. You, by this stage, have learned that it is a safer course of action to suffer in silence rather than speak out to us and in turn you will not speak of what is happening to others, not until the pressure has become too great or more likely once you have been discarded by us.
The enduring love you experience for us, or more accurately, your addiction as a consequence of our infecting you, means that when those hoovers come post escape or discard, you are unable to shroud or hide how you truly feel and once more you light up like the brightest beacon. You signal to us that your love (addiction) remains and thus there is yet more fuel to gather and that you are so susceptible to our machinations to pull you back into our grasp once again, be that to extract fuel or to commence the Formal Relationship once again.
We know you are honest. It shines from you and we identify it from the way you conduct yourself and what you say when we target you at the outset. Not only is the identification of this trait confirmation that you possess one of the many traits that we look for, it also confirms that certain actions will succeed and certain responses will take place.
It is often stated that honesty is the best policy. It is certainly a policy that we endorse. It is one of the empath’s sins and with it comes the attention, exploitation and manipulation of our kind.
19 thoughts on “Sins of the Empath : Honesty”
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If honesty is both an innate part of who an empath is and cannot be changed or even hidden for long
AND
… it is a sin because it attracts narcissists and leads to being manipulated
…it makes me wonder what is the best thing for an empath to do when dealing with unknown people who they don’t know well enough?
It’s difficult to be suspicious all the time and to build walls around yourself. It’s also difficult to communicate with people without showing your true self and your true beliefs.
Also, if you hold back and wait to see red flags or signs of narcissistic behaviour, the narcissist may be playing the same game and simply acting like a mirror while biding their time until they covertly lead you into a trap.
It is difficult to live your life in the outside world while continually being on guard. How do you reduce these “sins” without becoming paranoid?
Wisernow
Youre right-you cant live your life in paranoia and in mistrust of everyone or its not much of a life, but you can operate as usual and learn to listen to your gut. To pull back a bit when you get that weird feeling that something is off or just not right instead of discounting it or explaining it away to yourself. To clarify by asking the person giving the signal: what caused you to say/do that? Can you explain or expand on what you meant by that? and really concentrate on their answer instead of applying your own empathic interpretation (which will always be more forgiving). I think the biggest one is not to give away too much personal information too soon. People should earn that, and good people understand that and will let you share at your own pace. If you wouldnt want to see it on Facebook or in the newspaper dont share it. It may come back to bite you. Pay attention to a persons actions over their words. Its harder for them to hide instinct over calculated dialouge. I dont consider these things as being paranoid but rather cautious and self-respect in not letting people cross your boundaries. Hell, theres one-establish personal boundaries and honor them. Listen to your gut. Listen, listen, listen, its almost never wrong.
Thank you Narc Angel. You give very good advice, and all of your suggestions are practical “in-the-moment” things that are easy enough to apply as long as you stay focused on applying them.
I think it takes practice and consistent application to do these things, especially for people who are naturally trusting, as many empaths are. That is, until they’re burnt enough times that they truly learn the lesson. As you say, the emotional thinking of an empath is always more forgiving than logical thinking would be. After some time has passed, with consistent application, your suggestions should hopefully become second nature.
On a more positive note, empathic people generally have strong intuition as well as sensitivity, and can usually tell fairly quickly what a person is like just from gut instinct. When you add awareness and knowledge to the gut instincts, then you have the means to be well-armed.
I think there’s another aspect which comes into it too and that is fear (or dread). At least in my own case, I’ve noticed that. If I operate with a sense of fear that I’ll be targeted and that my natural tendencies are sins that need to be hidden, I find the fear overrides my self-belief and confidence in my own intuition and boundaries. Its easier to trust your intuition when you tell yourself to push through the fear.
Before I knew about narcissism, I generally felt almost invincible because I thought I could overcome difficulties and run-ins with people simply by using my gut instincts and working towards a peaceful outcome. Some would call it confidence, while some would call it being naive (or even stupid!)
Now that I know how deceptive and manipulative some people actually are, I don’t feel that invincible anymore. I feel more cautious and wary, which is much better when it comes to self-protection. Establishing personal boundaries and honoring them is definitely a good thing.
Thanks again for your answer 🙂
My ex mid-ranger used honesty as an excuse for most of the verbal abuse he threw at me. He knew that commenting on my daughters (not his) would automatically result in a reaction from me. He would say horrible things but mix in a bit of truth. He would say, “your daughter is just a drunken whore and it’s your fault!”. Well, yes my daughter is a recovering alcoholic, but she is not a whore, nor am I a bad mother.
I of course would tearfully deny this. He always shot back with, “but I’m just being honest.”
It took me several years to realize that while he WAS being honest, his honest opinions did not necessarily constitute what I knew to be the truth.
When it finally dawned on me that my narc was purposefully upsetting me and that I needed to stop emotionally reacting to his provocations, the creepy thing was, he knew IMMEDIATELY that something was “wrong”. I didn’t feel like I was acting any different, and he hadn’t tried to provoke me yet. The minute I greeted him after I got home from work that day (with a “hello” and a kiss), he gave me this weird worried look. I remained in a good mood that evening. We watched some tv and it remained pleasant and uneventful, but when I was going to bed that night, he sat on the edge of the bed and asked me if I was okay with a serious look of concern. Totally creeped me out. I guess I’m far more “honest” than I even mean to be. Crazy that he picked up on it before I even had a chance to show it to him (and he did unsuccessfully try to start a fight the next night). This was a mid-ranger, too, definitely not a Greater. It still weirds me out. It’s like he could read my mind. What do you think tipped him off?
You may have acted differently with him (not realising that you were) and he picked up on it. Alternatively, he was looking to manipulate you further by an apparent show of concern and this coincided with your change in approach and therefore you thought he had picked up on it.
Interesting alternative theory. I hadn’t thought of that. I WAS reaching a tipping point, which is what finally lead me to the truth. So maybe I had been acting slightly differently for days previously, triggering a show of false concern that night. Thanks for the response!
HG
Please would you explain, besides fuel and possibly punishment, for what reasons does the (mid range) narcissist commence the FR once again with a) the IPPS and b) the IPSS?
Thank you
Residual benefits.
Of course.
Could it in addition be because, in the case of the IPSS, he has now decided to promote her because he has become infatuated with her?
Yes.
I see.
Please could you tell me how to distinguish between the FR being resurrected because of infatuation as opposed to being resurrected for residual benefits.
Thank you kindly, HG, for your answers and speedy replies as always.
Daisy
You may not know, or you may realise that you provide considerable residual benefits and if the narcissist is homing in those, for example, wanting to borrow money repeatedly, then you have your answer.
Excellent explanation!
Very grateful to you HG.
Daisy
“Once more you light up like the brightest beacon.”
I understood (at first) bacon instead of beacon…I must sharpen my English skills, otherwise 😂imagining nex looking at my picture and seeing his meal. Just like in the Little Red Riding Hood by Grimm Brothers: “She did not know what a wicked animal he was, and was not afraid of him.” Can someone tell children stories are not true? It’s only that girls doesn’t expect such gorgeous men (because physically and mentally your kind of men – the UMRs and Greaters at least – are attractive men) to embody the Wolf.
Erratum: “girls don’t expect” instead of “girls doesn’t expect”.
I’m a person so honest I will return the change, if I noticed that the cashier handed too much back…however, thanks to HG, I am becoming more of a “false positive”. When I meet someone new, I become wary at the first red flag, and gone by the second. Thank you again, HG.
Been there, done that.
But to be honest now I only feel happy and peacful when I see him “hurt”.
For example, when he listens some depressive music online and it signals he doesn’t have enough fuel or that his new IPPS is starting to let him down and the empty hole in him enlarges again.
When I see it, for a moment I come alive, I feel some positive energy inside, I am happy and active.
Is it the same feeling that narcsissist feels when he sees his ex is still depressed because of him?
LilAng, yes, it is. And it is more than that. He is satisfied when his present girl-friend is depressed. He likes it, when people around him are hurt. He does not like it to see people happy, because he is envious of that feeling he cannot feel. If he shows some joy about the other ones joy it is only an act, nothing else. It is only for the facade.