Energy vampires can be a real challenge for sensitive people. Basically, an energy vampire is someone who either intentionally or unintentionally drains your energy. You'll notice when you've been around an energy vampire because you'll get physically and emotionally tired after dealing with them. Or you may find that your stream of thought gets interrupted. One minute, you are contemplating your "to do" list. The next minute, after interacting with an energy vampire, your thoughts suddenly become jumbled, and the mental stream of energy you had going is sucked out of you. There are numerous times when a psychic vampire or an energy disruptor hijacks our energy. This is very common in our day-to-day interactions with people.

We all have times when we can become an energy vampire, and when we're feeling low, it's a completely normal thing to look for a "lift" from people around us. So when we're sick or tired, sometimes we'lll unintentionally"steal" energy from others. But some people are habitual energy vampires, and most of them are completely clueless about it!

Admit it. At some point in your life, you've found yourself in a relationship with an energy vampire. This may have been a friendship, a romance, or even a family relationship. Usually, if you are in the relationship by choice, you'll stay in it by telling yourself that "He's really a good person, bad things just always seem to happen to him; " or "I know I can help fix her problems, and she needs me." What you don't always realize is that you have become embedded in a situation where you are having your energies drained through a long-term relationship with an energy vampire.

Types of Energy Vampires

Energy vampires can take many forms, and they are not necessarily unpleasant people, either! Dr. Judith Orloff is a psychiatrist and intuitive who has come up with some wonderful terms to describe energy vampires. Some of them fall into the "charmer" category, dazzling you with their wit and charm, demanding your attention and adoration. Being an audience for such a person can be very draining. She also writes about the "drama queen" who goes through extreme highs and lows, sharing her life and death struggles and her intense personal dramas, expecting you to ride those waves of stress with her. Going along for the ride with a drama queen is exhausting. Orloff also writes about the "blamer" who hands out guilt and feelings of blame, always moaning about how he or she is the victim of some injustice. A blamer demands tons of sympathy and attention, draining you dry in the process. These are just three types of energy vampires, but there are many more.

Orloff has written a marvelous book about how you can maintain positive energy and minimize the effects of psychic vampires in your life. The book is called Positive Energy: 10 Extraordinary Prescriptions for Transforming Fatigue, Stress, and Fear Into Vibrance, Strength, and Love.

You can order it from Amazon here. (Just to let you know, by purchasing through this link, you help support this site and make it possible for the Lipstick Mystic to post more exciting and inspirational content.)

 Positive Energy : 10 Extraordinary Prescriptions for Transforming Fatigue, Stress, and Fear into Vibrance, Strength & Love

She also wrote a short article about her work on Oprah's site, and you can read it here:

http://www.oprah.com/spiritself/lybl/control/ss_lybl_control_13.jhtml

Healers and Energy Vampires

A lot of people in the healing professions are being heavily drained in energy vampire situations. When you're a professional "helper," clients or patients find you when they are down and in need of a boost. So people expect healers to provide positive energy on demand. This can be a mistake and can actually set up a bad feedback loop of dependency in the client.

What healers should really be doing is providing tools, guidance, and prescriptions which will help patients access their own powers of regeneration. That's what many of the holistic forms of healing are focused on. They are less involved with providing an "instant fix" and more directed at giving people tools for reconnecting with healing energy on their own. But it's hard sometimes, because people are used to what modern medicine has promised them. They expect a "magic pill" to make all of their pain go away, and they aren't taught that they need to assume responsibility for transforming the underlying causes of that pain. Symptom relief can actually be dangerous, because a pill or a drug can mask a condition that needs treatment on all dimensions - from the levels of body, mind, and spirit. By dulling the pain, you tune out those messages from the body and the spirit which are warning you that you need to pay attention and make changes.

The Natural Healers - Givers and Nurturers

There are also many natural healers out there who are loving nurturers who don't get paid for what they do. These are the sweet, generous spirits who are always lending a helping hand, a compassionate ear, and a shoulder to cry on. I've found these people to be the ones who are in the most danger of being negatively affected by energy vampires. They can be so caught up in helping all the time that they don't see when someone is just sucking them dry, draining their vital energy. And because these people aren't in a profession where they have had training in managing the healer/client relationship, they don't see that there is an energy exchange going on that is really detrimental to the healer's health. So they tend to have muddy personal boundaries, which gets them into trouble.

Caregiving Can Make You Sick

If you're the type who sincerely wishes to uplift others or assist them in feeling better, it can seem counter-intuitive to withdraw your energy from the person who needs your help. But sometimes this is the healthiest thing to do, both for you and the other person. You see, once you set up an energy pattern where you are just giving and giving and getting drained, the other person settles in and gets used to receiving their "energy fix" from you. This establishes a dysfunctional pattern which leaves you with nothing. And over time, this ongoing energy deficit can severely damage your health.

Just within the past year, scientists at Ohio University revealed that they found that caregiving has a negative effect on the caregiver’s immune system. Being a caregiver means that your body produces higher levels of the stress hormone Interleukin-6, which is directly linked to chronic conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and arthritis. Researchers have also found that caregivers have weaker responses to pneumonia and flu vaccines, and their wounds heal more slowly.

So when you are caring for an invalid loved one and you really need to be in "helper" mode, your energy is being drained on many levels. In this case, of course, it's not the sick person's "fault." Usually, they are draining their caregiver on an entirely unconscious level. Still, it's a challenge for the caregiver, and he or she needs to learn how to psychically protect themselves. They need to learn how to ward off those cords, hooks, and energy linkages which are coming off of the other person and draining them. Otherwise, they can get severely burned out and even physically ill.

This is what happened to me when I was a full-time psychic counsellor for ten years. What happened was that people would call me in a crisis and I would drop everything to help them. It took me a long time to figure out that some people were ALWAYS in crisis, ALWAYS experiencing drama, and it wasn't just a one time thing. So they needed to make significant changes in their life and look at what, within them, was causing all of this constant melodrama instead of looking for a fix from a healer to (temporarily) make them feel better. After years of doing this work, I was starting to suffer from debilitating physical problems, including chronic fatigue, depression, and heart palpitations. That was my warning signal to change what I was doing with my work, and I listened!

Here's a little known fact: Did you know that across all professions, members of the counselling professions have the highest rate of suicide? This is because their energies are being so heavily drained by people who seek their help and are looking for an instant energy "fix," and it tends to catch up with them.

Assuming Responsibility for Your Own Healing

Modern medicine is wonderful for many things, but generally speaking, its practitioners aren't too interested in curing people of chronic ailments. Physicians' main emphasis is on pain relief or symptom relief. And this is very dangerous. Without truly addressing the underlying condition, all you're doing is setting up dependency in your patient. They get hooked on powerful drugs which can cause long-term damage to the liver, the kidneys, and other organs involved with elimination, because these organs have to work overtime to pass the drugs from the person's body. Addiction can set in because the body's electrical impulses and natural rhythms are drowned out and distorted from the drugs flowing through the body.

And, quite often, the person doesn't get better. I read somewhere that, I believe, the third largest cause of death in the US is being treated by a physician! So that's pretty sobering.

We all have many lessons to learn about managing our health, and we each need to take more responsibility for understanding how our bodies process and utilize energy. Holistic health techniques do a great deal to help us to bring our energy into balance. And applying the wisdom of researchers like Dr. Judith Orloff who have devoted their careers to learning about energy management from a more psychic/spiritual framework is a good idea, too.

Dorothy Harbor's Book: Energy Vampires

There is another wonderful book I want to recommend which examines energy vampires from a more deeply metaphysical perspective. It's called Energy Vampires: A Practical Guide for Psychic Self-Protection, and it was written by Dorothy Harbor. This is an excellent guide to learning how to clear your chakras and to self-manage the energy field of your body, protecting yourself from psychic attack or energy drainers. This is a brilliant guide which everyone should have on their bookshelves. If you're an "empath" like me, someone who absorbs energy very easily from her physical environment and the people around her, you'll benefit from Harbor's visualizations and healing exercises. And they're not hard to do, either!

I'll be writing more on this subject here at my site in future articles and books, so stay tuned to this space. In the meantime, I encourage you to check out Dr. Judith Orloff's book and Dorothy Harbor's excellent guide. Both will give you much-needed ammunition to remain healthy, happy, and balanced in your personal energy.

And that's what it's all about, isn't it? If the healer isn't well, how can she hope to help others? There needs to be more information out there about "healing the healers." Look for more to be posted here on just this subject in the coming months.

You can also order Dorothy Habour's book through Amazon here: