Intuition for Queer Empaths
A black person with sunflowers over their eyes and a nose ring. The background is apple green and orange.
If you've been to a zoom mixer or a pride brunch, you've met someone who immediately revealed they were an empath.
Queer empaths are everywhere: becoming overwhelmed by emotions that no one shared, bursting into tears, being suckered into complex emotional ordeals.
Which makes sense, because empaths often lack good boundaries. Much has been said about how this leaves them mistreated. It's less common, but quite true, that it makes them more likely to mistreat others.
Empaths don't always know the difference between helping and butting in. They struggle with staying out of other people's business, because it's often accessible to them. They may even have trouble separating their feelings from those of others.
People pleasing is a common problem for empaths. Yet even this term hides why it's so common.
People pleasing is manipulative, not neutral. It's a way of controlling relationships to avoid accountability, or even abandonment.
You're tired of crying when you see a couple breaking up at the coffee shop. You know it's none of your business that your boss is cheating on her wife.
Maybe you're sensing the world around you. Maybe you're using your intuition. Can you even tell the difference?
If you're an empath who wants to develop a healthier intuitive practice, here's some tips:
Understand the Difference Between Intuition vs. Sensing
Figure Out What You Want to Know
Mind Your Business
1. Understand the Difference Between Intuition vs. Sensing
Sensing and Intuition are both important skills.
Both are valuable ways of interacting with the world, but they aren't the same. Sensing is what it sounds like. It's about paying attention to what can be understood through the body.
Empaths are pretty great at sensing. If somebody gets a tummy ache at their birthday dinner, they may feel it too. They may hear a change in a friend's voice when they talk about their relationship, and suspect something is wrong.
Intuition is about pattern recognition. These patterns may not be obvious to others, but make perfect sense to an intuitive.
A good example of queer intuition (and I'm dating myself here) is when Carmen had the dream that Shane "fucked Sheri Jaffe, then flew away like a bird." "You gave her our tattoo!"
That line is burned in my brain! Carmen had a true dream and was immediately convinced that her lover would cheat again. And, of course, she did.
Sensing, in my understanding, works with sensations actually going on around you in real time. It's a body-based modality rooted in the present.
Intuition is sometimes rooted in the present. Intuition can come through the body. But intuition is primarily a future focused modality.
Let me be CLEAR, ok? One is not better than the other. There are plenty of intuitive girlies, ghouls, and gworls that could use some sensing. I am no exception!
This is not about sensing bad, intuition good. They both have their own plusses and deltas.
These distinctions are important to understand because they inform your motivations. Which brings me to my next tip.
2. Figure Out What You Actually Want to Know
Have you ever asked yourself why you take on the emotions of others?
Is it helping you in some way? When did it start? Are you getting what you want from it?
What is it that you actually want to know about the situation.
A lot of extrasensory power, and our urge to develop it, comes from a place of pain.
If you''re caregiver was unreliable, it was very helpful at some point in your life to be able to feel their emotions. That way you could anticipate what was to come.
If you've lived with abuse, it can feel powerful to know when someone is about to erupt, putting you in a dangerous position. If you're use to rejection, it can be great to share feelings of love.
No one teaches us the plusses and minuses of queer(ed) empathy like Lauren Oya Olamina. Octavia Butler's androgynous Parable of the Sower protagonist was born with hyperempathy. The condition allowed her to feel other people's emotions and physical sensations.
For Olamina, the condition was disabling, leaving her in constant pain in a violent world. It also taught her how to adapt to an environment characterized by chaos.
Olamina's adaptation was possible only through self-knowledge. She shoots a dog, and finds that it harms her as well. This leads her to change her behavior.
She allows the sensations to teach her what she wants and needs to know. She avoids indulging it for her own sake, though not entirely. What's life without harmless transgression, after all?
Sensing isn't bad. It can be great. Empathy can be very useful, even when it doesn't give us exactly what we want or need.
It's about getting what you want from it. That comes from self-knowledge, as we saw with Olamina. It can also come from intuitive reflection, like the kind that comes from tarot. Here's a spread and some journal prompts for that:
A black person with sunflowers over their eyes and a nose ring. The background is apple green and orange. The text say “Intuition for Empaths” and “Get the Worksheet”
It's also a question of boundaries. Which brings me to the final tip, which is useful for empaths, intuitives, psychics, mediums, and queers in general.
3. Mind Your Gottdamn Business!
Minding your own fucking business is an essential part of healthy boundaries.
Let's check on our friend crying in the coffee shop while watching some people they don't know from a hole in the wall break up, for instance.
Why are they having this response? Why did they take in the feelings of random strangers? When would that be useful to anyone?
Most importantly, what did they actually want to know about the scene they were watching? How could it possibly be relevant to their lives?
No one was in danger. Neither was a loved one. People were just...living their lives!
So why all the rigamarole? It's nosiness!
This is something that intuitives and empaths have in common. When left unchecked we can both be nosy as hell.
To make matters worse, queers in general are gossips! It muddies the water between your business and my business.
That makes it harder to hold healthy boundaries. It makes it easier to overshare, and spiritually pry, and distance spy on folks.
And what do we get for it but strained and strange relationships? What do we get but emotional hangovers and the need for a multi-day spiritual bath?
Not a damn thing.
So let's mind the business that pays us. Let's stay focus on our own emotions. And yes, I said "us" because I have my own boundary work I'm doing.
It's a process and it's worth it. After all, empath and intuitive aren't mutually exclusive.
"You can be both, meet in the middle, dance all night" as the Creole Lady said.
So let's keep it cute because pride is comin' and you know how everybody likes to be all up in each other's shit come June :)
Good luck!
Don’t forget to get your free spread and worksheet on Intuition for Empaths!
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hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Temperance Queer Tarot. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.