Sensitive Children: night fears, visions, the empath

 

• Night Fears

I slept with my head hidden under the blankets until I was 12 years old. Why? Because at night, in the silence and the dark, I was keenly aware that I was not alone. I could sense the presence of something, or many things, by my bed. I could hear whispered voices, I could see shadow people, and often I could feel something unnamable trying to connect with me.

As a child, I didn’t understand what I was experiencing. I didn’t know that the presence I was aware of couldn’t actually harm me, and I didn’t know how to consciously protect and claim myself and my space, or how to consciously send these ethereal energies away. I didn’t even know that this was possible.

Like any child who feels afraid, my instinct was to hide. And this I did — under the covers.

When I was 12 years old, something happened. I think it stemmed from the fact that I was exhausted from these nights of fear and the lack of sleep. I was sick of waking up drenched in sweat. It may have been a new maturity and more insight coming with puberty. I was tired. I was tired of being terrorized at night. I was tired of feeling like I had to hide in order to be safe, and I finally got to a defiant angry state.

One night, I simply flung the covers back, sat up, and very forcefully said, “This is my room! This is my bed! If you want to come and get me, then do it… or Leave Me Alone!” That was all I needed to do. Little did I know that’s all I had ever needed to do.

1. I showed no fear.
2. I reclaimed my space by ordering the presence to leave.

Be sensitive to small children with night fears. Allow them what they need for comfort. And as is often the case, they need a way to block some of these entities and experiences, whether with a night-light that’s left on, some cozy time in bed with a parent (so comforting!), or someone just to sit with them until they feel calm or fall asleep. When most insensitive or ignorant adults chastise them, telling them that there is nothing there, those adults don’t know how wrong they may be.

• Visions & Psychic Information

I’ve written before of a psychic vision that I had when I was 12 years old, some sort of coming of age time this year must have been for me. On the day my Uncle died, several hours before this occurred, he was laying on the living-room couch listening to music. I was sitting across the room from him, and as I watched, the back of the couch closed over him.  It became the lid on a coffin.  Less than four hours later, he would die of a heart attack.

As most children do, I thought that because I could see this, everyone else in the room could see this also. But as I looked from each adult face to the next, I realized that they were totally unaware of what had just happened. I was too immature and not knowledgeable enough to realize that this was a premonition, a psychic revelation of what was to be just a few hour later.

It would be six years, when I was 18, that I would first talk about this experience with my grandmother. Without any understanding of premonitions or psychic visions, as a child I thought that by SEEING this vision, I had CAUSED this thing to happen. I spent those six years desperately trying to block any visions or psychic information that came to me.

Be aware that young children do not have the mental faculties to digest the psychic visions and information they are picking up. They may not understand the implications of visions and other psychic information. It's very common for children to think that everyone else hears, sees, and feels what they hear, feel, and see. Children don’t realize that they have abilities and are experiencing something that most people do not experience.

• The Empath

Any situation that puts an empath in a group setting can be a nightmare. It is not only an overload of other people’s energy, it is a flurry of unwelcome "knowing"... knowing what other people are thinking. Your brain is rattled and filled with other people’s true thoughts. You can feel their sadness, their happiness, their boredom, their pleasant thoughts, as well as their nasty private thoughts, and their dislikes.  You know what they're truly thinking behind every word they speak.

The classroom is a horror story for a lot of very sensitive empathic children. What’s coming through in a flurry to your conscious mind is also making it difficult, if not impossible, for you to concentrate, to focus on what the teacher is saying. It makes it difficult, if not impossible, to digest the words in a textbook, to focus on a math problem, to stay in the present with clear thoughts. I have to wonder how many children are labeled with attention disorders, when actually, they are receiving an overload of data from the individuals around them.

The perfect classroom experience for the empathic child would be soft instrumental meditative background music. It would be a room filled with live plants, windows open for fresh air and bird sounds and sunshine, or the smell of rain. It would be rooms large enough to have ample space around each desk, around each child. It would be the quiet presence of an animal, a voiceless living thing, a cat or dog or bird or hamster. Until that type of classroom exists, the most we can do is to educate people on the topic of empathic children and what they need to function in this group setting.