May 12, 2020 by Renee Linnell

There is a line in Dr. Christiane Northrup’s new book Dodging Energy Vampires: An Empath's Guide to Evading Relationships That Drain You and Restoring Your Health and Power  that says, “ . . . you were not chosen, you were targeted.”  She is talking about relationships with Energy Vampires.

And I think of the people in my life that are the most difficult for me to spend time with. I love them. They have some very wonderful qualities. But, they drain me. They leave me exhausted and depleted and upset, almost every time I see them or talk to them on the phone. Most of them monopolize the conversation, and almost always turn the topic to how wonderful they are; either that or they complain about others. Putting others down so that they can feel better about themselves. They are the ones who talk the loudest and who put their phone on speaker in a public place so everyone can hear their conversation. 

Most of them also struggle with money, so I pay every time we are together. Most of them are very opinionated about what we do, how we do it, and where we do it; needing to control as much as possible. Most of them have very rigid eating habits and are a pain in the butt to dine with. And most of them criticize me, either overtly or through passive aggressive behavior.
 
So my time with them consists of me getting my ear talked off, paying for them, picking them up and dropping them off, and going where they want to when they want to, while being criticized and told my views of the world are wrong or crazy or delusional. And then, when I get tired of it, they give me a hard time for wanting to go home or for not wanting to make plans.

And the worst part about this is: I make myself wrong. I give myself a hard time for avoiding them. I talk myself into overriding my Inner Guidance and calling or seeing them when I am getting clear messages not to. And I buy into the thoughts that they are going to say that I am not a good friend, which they do when I distance myself. 

Letting go of friendships that no longer fit is not easy. We are born to love. We love being loving. And admitting to ourselves that a relationship has run its course is not easy. Thoughts of being disloyal appear. But, the truth is, we are not meant to be in relationship with everyone or for our entire lifespan. If we are doing the healing work to grow and evolve, we will outgrow people. And if we are mending ourselves after being broken, we will notice those we drew into our lives when we were broken no longer fit once we are whole. 

It’s fascinating to love another and to not enjoy her/his company. It’s fascinating to love another and detest the conversations they always start. It’s fascinating to be able to see the self-actualized soul inside a troubled ego and to love that part, yet hate the interacting.

I am at a crossroads lately. With the whole Coronavirus thing I realize I have no tolerance for being around people who love to talk about the news, or illness, or others. I have no tolerance for complainers and whiners and people who won’t take responsibility for their own health or their own lives. And it breaks my heart because I miss these friends, in a weird way. I wish I could be with them and have them speak about uplifting themes. But, it does not seem possible. Even if I ask.

And so, like in the tale of the scorpion and the frog, it seems I have to realize some people are just downers and drama queens. They do not know how to get their energy from Source so they have to get it from others, and they do that by speed-talking, or by starting an argument, or by complaining/gossiping/creating drama. And I just don’t want to play this game any longer. I no longer want to be the energy source. I wish they could find it within.

I have realized this is why so many people love the Coronavirus. It gives them something to get excited about. It gives them a constant source of fear to tap into. It feeds them. Right now they are not as able to get their energy fix from others so they turn to the news and the fear. It finally makes sense to me why they ignore all the statistics that show this flu is so mild more than 50% of the people who get it don’t even have symptoms, or that less than .00025% of the US population has actually died (and most of those were already ill.) It makes sense why they love the face masks and the gloves and the economy collapsing. It’s chaos, and they feed on that.
 
It makes me sad to realize people I love feed on chaos and fear. It makes me sad to realize they are addicted to toxic news. It makes me sad to realize they actually perfer to believe there is a viurs that will kill them rather than read all the accessible information that proves otherwise. And I think it makes me sad because I realize these people just do not fit in my life; we have different energy signatures, as Shaman Durek explains in his new book Spirit Hacking.

But, this world is so large, there are so many of us, and each one of us is born with the right to be exactly who and how we are. Each one of us gets to believe whatever we want to believe and create whatever reality we want to live in. So, I cannot make these friends wrong. They are not wrong. They simply choose a radically different viewpoint and a radically different approach to life.

I can, however, realize we do not match and I can allow them to fade away. With tremendous gratitude for all the wonderful time we spent together when I enabled toxic conversation, before I had boundaries, before I knew who I was, before I was strong enough to say “no more,” and before I loved myself enough to realize life is so short that I cannot spend another moment of it in the company of someone who does not uplift me and make my heart sing. I can hold in my mind a vision of them self-actualized. I can hold in my mind all the parts of them I love. I can hope that in rare moments when they are not complaining or focusing on doom and gloom, that we will be drawn together in light and love and gratitude and appreciation for all we have, and other than that I have to let them go. 

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