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A review by bee_phe
The Empath's Survival Guide: Life Strategies for Sensitive People by Judith Orloff
2.0
i am highly sensitive, always have been, and working on cultivating a healthy spiritual practice. recently this book was recommended to me by 2 people so i gave it a read to see what it was all about and i uuuuhhhhh i hated it.
it was compassionately written and helped me understand myself in some ways. however i found it repetitive and problematic in a lot of places. i didnt care for the multiple implications that "your feelings are other people's responsibility." there were suggestions in it that genuinely made me nauseous, like the stories of empathic people making ridiculous requests of others. (for example, berating a friend for having a heated conversation on the phone in front of said empath, when it would be far more appropriate for the empath to simply leave the situation)
i think the message is universal: be kind, take care of yourself and others, do the work, live in compassion and love. but the tone of the book really seemed to emphasize "otherness" which is not what i want to see in a book with heavy spiritual leanings. i really wanted to like it and use it as a manual to help me live from my compassionate heart space in a grounded way, but it honestly just made my skin crawl a lot of the time.
it was compassionately written and helped me understand myself in some ways. however i found it repetitive and problematic in a lot of places. i didnt care for the multiple implications that "your feelings are other people's responsibility." there were suggestions in it that genuinely made me nauseous, like the stories of empathic people making ridiculous requests of others. (for example, berating a friend for having a heated conversation on the phone in front of said empath, when it would be far more appropriate for the empath to simply leave the situation)
i think the message is universal: be kind, take care of yourself and others, do the work, live in compassion and love. but the tone of the book really seemed to emphasize "otherness" which is not what i want to see in a book with heavy spiritual leanings. i really wanted to like it and use it as a manual to help me live from my compassionate heart space in a grounded way, but it honestly just made my skin crawl a lot of the time.