How do you know when emotions you feel are yours or someone else’s? You can’t necessarily know until after they express, when greater understanding is available. Either way, it’s going to be a “real” expression. You still have to vibrate the anger, fear or grief out of you (i.e. express it in sounds and/or body movement), whether it’s yours or not. Sometimes an empathic person might hold the emotions of another: someone else in the room, maybe a friend, or perhaps, their partner’s . Often, it’s a woman holding the emotions of her man. Generally speaking, this is because a woman’s energy field tends to be more magnetic in nature, whereas a man’s tends to be electric.

An example: a man is always haranguing his wife, a habit which lasts over the course of years. He lectures, bullies, and intimidates, but never really expresses his rage, just sort of “gives” it to her (and she literally holds it “for” him, but it’s really his all along). Finally, she snaps and screams at him and just keeps screaming. She’s trying to “move” the rage back out of herself to him, but he in all likelihood doesn’t recognize that what she is doing is trying to give back to him what was never hers in the first place. Some of it might be hers, but a lot is his.

Ideally, what occurs to rectify the imbalance is that when an exchange of strong feelings gets initiated by the woman, the man does not battle her and perpetuate the war; he instead receives her and has an appropriate response. That response could be his own expression in sound or just compassionate, silent receiving and validation of her feelings. If he can “own” his anger at that point, he will not rise up louder and bigger than her and send a volley of words back. If he feels guilty in response to her anger, he must ultimately recognize that any anger he might feel in response is quite often rage toward his own guilt and is not really about her, despite superficial appearances. Many of us have guilt, both denied guilt and conscious, that says we “deserve” to hold the toxic waste of someone else’s denied stuff.

If all emotional energy could freely travel to its rightful owner by saying a prayer or a ritual, we could all release other peoples’ emotions just by visualizing it happening or saying words with that intention. In most cases, it’s not that simple or easy. Emotional energy is very magnetic and in order to get the stuck energy moving freely, it needs to be vibrated with sound or strong energy of some sort. It needs to be expressed in some way, though not necessarily in raw sound. Some may be able to let it rip in words and feel lighter as a result.

I went through a long period in my early years of emotional healing being terrified of rage. I quickly learned I was frightened of my own unmoved rage. I had to have enough movement of pure, unfettered rage expression in raw sound to make friends with the vibration of deep anger. This helped me stop feeling victimized because another person in the room was angry. The more I owned my own unprocessed anger, the more I stopped feeling afraid of someone else’s rage and of “taking it on”.