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For Life on Purpose Episode #73, my guest is the pioneering therapist Dr. Judith Orloff, a New York Times best-selling author and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA who has helped patients find emotional freedom for more than 20 years. Dr. Orloff synthesizes the pearls of traditional medicine with cutting edge knowledge of intuition, energy, and spirituality to achieve physical and emotional healing.
In this enlightening conversation, we discussed her brand new book, The Empath’s Survival Guide: Life Strategies for Sensitive People (Sounds True, 2017), in which she offers an invaluable resource to help EMPATHIC people survive in an often insensitive world, plus her life and career as “the positive energy guru.”
“Empaths feel things first, then think, which is the opposite of how most people function in our over- intellectualized society,” says Dr. Orloff.
“The key to self-care is to recognize when you’re experiencing the first signs of sensory overload or when you start absorbing negativity or stress from others. The sooner you can act to reduce stimulation and to center yourself, the more balanced and protected you will be.”
About Dr. Judith Orloff:
Transforming the face of psychiatry, Judith Orloff MD asserts that we are keepers of an innate intuitive intelligence so perceptive that it can tell us how to heal — and prevent — illness. Yet intuition and spirituality are the very aspects of our wisdom usually disenfranchised from traditional health care.
Dr. Orloff is accomplishing for psychiatry what physicians like Dean Ornish and Mehmet Oz have done for mainstream medicine — she is proving that the links between physical, emotional, and spiritual health can’t be ignored. Dr. Orloff is a New York Times bestselling author and is on the UCLA psychiatric clinical faculty. She specializes in treating empaths and sensitive people in her Los Angeles based private practice.
She has spoken at medical schools, hospitals, the American Psychiatric Association, Fortune Magazine‘s Most Powerful Women Summit, and alternative and traditional health forums — venues where she presents practical intuitive tools to doctors, patients, and everyday people. In response to her work, The Los Angeles Times calls Dr. Orloff “a prominent energy-based healer.”
Dr. Orloff’s latest book “The Empath’s Survival Guide: Life Strategies for Sensitive People” (Sounds True, 2017) is an invaluable resource to help sensitive people of all kinds develop healthy coping mechanisms in our high-stimulus world without experiencing compassion fatigue or burnout. Then empaths can fully embody their gifts of intuition, creativity, and compassion.
In Dr. Orloff’s first book, “Second Sight” she chronicles her struggles acknowledging and then finally embracing her gift of intuition. Her second book, “Dr. Orloff’s: Guide to Intuitive Healing” shows how breakthroughs in healing our body, emotions, and sexuality can be accomplished by listening to intuition.
“Positive Energy,” which has been translated into 25 languages, takes a probing look at the American epidemic of exhaustion and how we can reverse it using specific strategies to build energy and combat draining people. Her New York Times Bestseller, “Emotional Freedom” describes how to transform negative emotions into positive ones with specific techniques.
Finally, “The Power of Surrender” describes the power of letting go in everyday life, health, and wellness–an enlivening and sane alternative to pushing, forcing, and over controlling people and situations.
Dr. Orloff’s work has been featured in O Magazine, Forbes, Newsweek, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Self, Cosmo, The Washington Times, Teen Vogue, Scientific American, and the New York Post. She has appeared on The Today Show, The Dr. Oz Show, CBS Early Show, CNN, PBS, BBC5, and NPR. Dr. Orloff is also an Elephant Journal, Huffington Post, and Psychology Today blogger.
To learn more about Dr. Orloff’s work, visit: http://www.drjudithorloff.com/.
About The Empath’s Survival Guide:
New York Times bestselling author and UCLA psychiatrist, Judith Orloff, M.D. created this practical, empowering book for everyone who wants to develop their sensitivities and empathy to become more caring people in an often insensitive world.
Whether you’re a highly sensitive person, or an empath who absorbs other people’s stress, or simply someone who wants to live a more open-hearted life without burning out or experiencing compassion fatigue—this book is for you. It’s also for the loved ones of sensitive people who want to become more supportive of them. Sensitivity is a great gift that needs to be honored and developed.
The Empath’s Survival Guide begins with self-assessment exercises to help you understand your sensitivity, then offers potent strategies for protecting yourself from overwhelm and replenishing your vital energy. For any sensitive person who’s been told to “grow a thick skin,” here is your lifelong guide for staying fully open while building resilience, exploring your gifts, raising empathic children, and feeling welcomed and valued by a world that desperately needs what you have to offer. It’s also about embracing the empath in all of us.
As a physician and empath herself, Dr Orloff is passionate about this topic as she sees how sensitive people too often get misdiagnosed in the mainstream health care system with depression, agoraphobia, panic disorder, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. In this book, she offers empaths and all sensitive people a range of “survival guide” strategies to positively manage their sensitivities and avoid sensory and intuitive overload.
She covers topics including health, work, love, sex, parenting, narcissists and other energy vampires, and developing intuition. Then, with these strategies in place, they can enjoy their gifts of depth, creativity, intuition, love of nature, capacity to deeply love, and fulfill their desire to help others and better the world.
What is the difference between having empathy and being an empath? “Having empathy means our heart goes out to another person in joy or pain,” says Dr. Judith Orloff “But for empaths it goes much farther. We actually feel others’ emotions, energy, and physical symptoms in our own bodies, without the usual defenses that most people have.”
With The Empath’s Survival Guide, Dr. Orloff offers an invaluable resource to help sensitive people develop healthy coping mechanisms in our high-stimulus world—while fully embracing their gifts and power.