Empaths Are Stuck In Childhood (THE CURE)
In this self‑help video Aaron Doughty argues that many empaths and people‑pleasers are trapped in childhood conditioning that prevents them from living authentically. He explains how empathic sensitivity often originates from a parent’s people‑pleasing or narcissistic energy, leading to a pattern where the empath expands their energetic field to absorb others’ emotions, loses a personal center, and consequently attracts narcissistic partners. Using his own father’s story—a competent fire‑investigator who missed a promotion because he lacked a strong, individuated leadership presence—Doughty illustrates how people‑pleasing blocks leadership and opportunity. He introduces Jung’s concept of individuation as the core cure: pulling one’s energy back into the body, establishing clear self‑other boundaries, and embracing tension and polarity as growth forces. The video offers practical tools, including the “Frame Technique,” three reflective questions to assess personal expectations, and promotes a 21‑Day Confidence Love Challenge designed to rewire confidence, heal codependency, and develop inner magnetism. Throughout, Doughty blends personal anecdotes, psychological theory, and promotional content to guide viewers toward self‑realization and healthier relationships.
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If you are an empath or someone that can feel other people's energy, then this video may very well change your entire life. It'll explain to you more about how you show up. It'll show you how you create safety in your life. It'll show you why maybe you're blocking amazing connections from coming into your life and you keep similar childhood dynamics alive and you may not even know it. I'm gonna show you the one thing that if you go through will completely transform your life through the inside out. And this is what made all the difference in the world for me because this is a pattern that I had to shift. And it was a long journey that could have been so much quicker if I would've simply had a video like this showing me exactly what to do. Now, interestingly enough, when I was researching this video, I could see so many different parts of the things I was learning about the signs of someone that's an empath, why empaths attract narcissists, why from one family two kids will have that maybe of a narcissistic person in their life. Why is it that one kid will become an empath and one kid will become a narcissist? And it explains so much of this entire dynamic. Now, first off, let me say as well, this is something that in many time in family lines, it's something that's an acquired from normally one of the parents, one of the energies that was alive growing up. There's a similar energy alive that then a child or a kid takes on and has that pattern within themselves. For me, it was a pattern that I got from my dad. My dad is a traditional nice guy, people pleaser. He attracted my ex-stepmom who was and is a narcissist. They broke up and divorced when I was 15, but from 7 to 15 she was in my life and he was kind of like mitigating and always trying to fix the different situations and One thing that I was researching this and I became aware of though is very often people that are people pleasers, one thing they'll do is they'll always give, give, give, give at the expense of themselves. And I remember when my dad, a couple years ago, probably like 7 or 8 years ago actually, he was up for promotion at his job. He's a fire investigator. He's very good at what he does. And one thing that was interesting is he was applying for this higher level position that he was almost overly qualified for. He should have easily got it. And he went and he applied for this position in the fire department to be like basically the manager of what he was doing for like 15, 20 years as a fire investigator, managing all the fire investigators. And what happened was he had the opportunity to have it, but for some reason they gave it to someone else who was probably also qualified. But it almost made no sense from my dad's perspective and even me hearing about it because my dad was so qualified for it. And when I look at this more, I can see that this block that my dad has is the exact same block that a lot of people will have in their life when it comes to promotions or new opportunities in their life, and they're not even consciously aware of it. You see, what happens is when people are always pleasing— my dad, I think, is someone that's very good at what he does. He does everything by the book, and he was always like overdelivering on paperwork, and he was an extremely hard worker. At the same time, one thing that happened though is in order to manage other people, there needs to be a leadership energy, a person that is individuated within themselves that has authority and isn't going to let other people trample over him. And what I believe happened is they could see that while my dad was a great worker, he hadn't activated those leadership qualities within himself and therefore he didn't get that promotion. And instead, I think afterwards he was kind of bummed. He was definitely bummed out about it. But this is something that very often happens with people pleasers. They're very good. They're very good at pleasing and they'll work overtime. They'll do all of these things, but they many times will hold back from staying in their own frame of reality. And what happens is that then blocks leadership experiences from coming into their life. And also that depolarizes relationships. Think of an empath or a people pleaser that can feel someone else's energy and what happens is from feeling that energy, they'll tune themselves and they'll change themselves in order to make the other person happy. But a lot of times what that results in is someone not respecting the other person because that person doesn't have a center of gravity. They don't have the center of being in their own body, of being in their own frame because they're constantly tuning to the outside. In order to get their needs met. Now I'm going to share with you in this video the thing that changes absolutely everything. But before I do that, you must understand this in order to understand that when we were kids, many of us may have had a parent in our life that had very high standards. That was maybe someone that was critiquing or criticizing, and there was a need as a kid to make either mom or dad happy. And what happens is from wanting to make them happy, there was a— in a way, there was— it's almost like mom or dad emotionally or physically stopped investing their attention and energy. And then what happens is the kid feels like they had to be self-sufficient. I won't let my needs be met. I will be self-sufficient. I will take care of myself. I don't want to be a burden to the world. And what happens is then the child tunes to the environment in order to find safety. It tunes to the environment to say, how do I have to be so I can feel safe? And what happens is then from wanting to feel safe, it was a constant tuning and morphing to not feel the resistance in the environment. Because if someone else feels resistance, that resistance then becomes their resistance. Think of it like an empath. Imagine an empath has an energetic field around them like everybody does. Everyone has an energetic electromagnetic field. But as a kid, you have a field around you and you can very easily delineate if you are properly individuated between self and other, where you learn that growing up, you learn and you are encouraged for having your own perspectives. You're encouraged for exploring your own passions. And if somebody else has a problem with it, you can see that's their stuff. You learn that through the proper parenting of growing up. And you can say you can delineate between self and other and you feel worthy in having your own opinions and having your own thoughts. Now what happens as a people pleaser or an empath is in childhood they expanded their energetic field to include everyone in the environment. It's almost like the bottom 3 chakras of the root chakra where someone feels safe, the sacral chakra, and the solar plexus. Instead of feeling grounded in there as a kid, what happens is empaths and people pleasers, it moves up into the third eye. So that I can be intuitive and can tune to everybody else to understand what everybody else is thinking and feeling because there's a responsibility energetically that their field is my field. And that's one of the biggest problems with empaths and people pleasers is they take responsibility for everyone else's emotions. They take responsibility for how other people feel because how other people feel is literally what they feel because their energy isn't within their own frame. So one of the most important things to understand as an empath or a people pleaser is that you must reel your energy back and understand that the empathy, the not just empathy, by the way, but as an actual empath, someone that's very sensitive, that has trouble delineating their energy from someone else's and takes on the burden of everyone else's and morphs themselves for everyone else, you must understand it's time to reel the energy back. And one thing a lot of people don't understand is the degree to which you're in your own frame inside of your own body is the degree to which you are magnetic. So the more present you are, the more in your own frame you are, the more magnetic you are, and the more you then also repel away the people that don't really resonate with the real you. And that's not a bad thing. A lot of times empaths and people pleasers, they're afraid of tension. They're afraid of polarizing people when actually the polarization is a good thing. So realize that that changes everything. Now, one thing we are doing that starts on October 13th, by the way, is the 21 Day Confidence Love Challenge. It's 21 days of a mix of lessons, live videos, breathwork. It's an entire process that you go through with thousands of other people that will help you to literally wire in you being in your own confident frame, healing codependent patterns from the past, healing your attachment to feel more secure attachment, letting go of emotional unavailability or attracting emotional unavailability, and understanding how you can create magnetism from the inside out. Now, if you want to join that, you can join that by clicking the link below or going to www.confidencelovechallenge.com, but grab your spot because we're starting soon. And it's something that also taps into the power of group energy, which makes it very powerful, especially during the live sessions. I'm going to be doing a whole talk as well on how to individuate and how you can— we're gonna do a guided meditation for going through the individuation process of self. So if you're interested in that, I'll go ahead and link it below. Now, this will change your life just understanding this one idea too. Why is it that from kids, you might have one kid become a narcissist, one kid become an empath from the same childhood trauma? I've had people on my channel ask this question before, and I looked into this, and I think this is very interesting. Well, imagine as a kid, you're trying to get your needs met. And there's a lot of tension in the household. And imagine that there's two kids going through the same trauma. Now imagine one kid, in order to deal with the tension, turns down the ability to feel, to feel the tension because it's too much. They turn down their ability to feel it. So then there is this feeling of, it doesn't matter, I don't have to feel it, I'll just completely like disassociate from it. And imagine someone else who turns out to be an empath turns up their sensitivity up so they can feel what's going on in their environment so that they know how they need to be in order to survive. Both the empath and the narcissistic quality stems from the same trauma. One turns down their ability to feel empathy. One turns up their ability to tune to other. Now, one more went more so into their self, even though it's a false image of self. Self and then one went into other and they made both of these very important. So the narcissist makes their self very important to kind of numbs out from everyone else's emotions and energies. And then the empath, the empath only focuses on other and makes what other people feel very important and discounts their sense of self. This is why, by the way, they attract each other. They both have the same core wound. The core wound is abandonment and there's a choice that's made. One says, I need to control my feeling of safety. The narcissist says, I will give, or the narcissist says, I will take and demand and only feel within myself and project this false self image out into the world so that I can feel safe. And then the empath says, I will give and I will give and then get. I will give to feel the safety, to feel, that's how they create safety. They give in order to get Safety, validation, and approval. By the way, they're both certain forms of manipulation. One's way more intense than the other as far as from the outside looking in, but they're both forms of manipulation. It's important to recognize this because a lot of times what happens is people that have this empath ability, they almost stay in the victimization of it because it rationalizes childhood. I know for me, I was like, oh, why can I, I can do this. I can feel other people's energy so strongly. It's a superpower. But that superpower perspective is also kind of like, I realized for myself it was an egoic perspective so that it would rationalize why I was different than other people. It's almost like sometimes you see it in the spiritual community. People are like starseeds. I'm a starseed, Pleiadian starseed, and it's so cool and I'm so special, but it creates this spiritual ego and it becomes even harder to connect with people. And that was what happened to me for a while when I was going through my different stages of awakening. But when it comes to being an empath, the one thing you must go through, let's get to that now, The one thing you must go through is through the process of what is called individuation. This is something that was known and talked about by Carl Jung, famous philosopher and psychologist. And individuation is the process by which you individuate from tuning to mom and dad to know who you're supposed to be. It's the process where you bring the energy back inside of your own body and you start to realize self-realization within yourself. You start asking yourself the question, who am I? What am I about? Now, a lot of empaths will stay stuck in wanting to do what mom wants them to do, what dad wants them to do. I know growing up I had to individuate from what my dad wanted me to do. I knew he wanted me to go to college. I knew he wanted me to do something there, and as a smart kid, that's what I'm supposed to do. I remember even growing up, like my dad being a firefighter, he had, there was a certain image he wanted his kids to look like. I had to tuck in my shirt when I was going to school. And then as soon as I got to school, I'd untuck my shirt. I had to comb my hair to the side. And a lot of times they would buzz cut him and my stepmom. I had my butt, I wasn't allowed to have my hair the way I want. So I'd have like a buzz cut. I had to pull up my pants up to like my fricking belly button or above. I always say, pull up your pants, pull up your pants. And there was a certain way that I had to look and I had to be and I had to act in order to be worthy of being the firefighter's kid. And I remember that as I started growing up, I started realizing I was different. I wasn't going to, like, control to me became something I fought against. So I remember one thing that I did was I started to break away. Once my dad divorced my ex-stepmom when I was 15 years old, I started to have a lot more freedom. But I kind of had to, wanted to wire it into my dad that like, hey, you don't, like, I'm gonna choose who I am. And one thing I did is I started growing out my hair. Another thing I did is I remember, it's gonna sound stupid, but on my 18th, I lived in, born and raised in Las Vegas. On my 18th birthday, I decided that I was going to, I remember sitting down with my dad. I'm like, I'm 18 years old now. I just want you to know I'm going to a strip club. I'm going to a strip club tonight and there's nothing you can do about it. And I remember my dad just sitting there thinking, and I just, I was almost just saying it just so he knew that the power had shifted within myself. Like, I'm not, I don't need to tuck in my shirt, do all this stuff anymore, even though that kind of went away years right after the divorce, kind of my dad started loosening up on that. But there was this, I was individuating in a sense of doing my own thing, even though I was going against the authority, even though I lived at my dad's house, his house, I don't know what I, He could have maybe said, oh, if you do that, you're not gonna live here or something. He didn't do that. He's a nice guy. But eventually, even years later, when my dad wanted me to go to college, here I am like, I'm gonna get on YouTube. I'm gonna individuate from what you want me to do. And he wasn't super like, you have to go to college, you have to do this. But I could tell he really wanted me to go to college. He really wanted me to do anything else but other than YouTube because it was unpredictable. My dad had a 9 to 5 job where he got paid like a pension and a salary. And he thought that was what's safe for me. Even though it was never me. I worked a commission sales job for most of my life. I didn't have a consistent paycheck I would make and I'd get to kind of control what that was. And I loved that. I loved being able to put the energy into something and get something out of it. So eventually I committed to YouTube and I was like, this is who I am. And my dad let me live with him and everything while I was going through that. And sometimes he would say things like, I remember he would say, oh, if it doesn't work out, you can always go back to your old job. And he used to get so triggered when he'd say that, even though he meant well. but I was like, don't, like, even after it grew to like $50,000, I'm like, it's growing. Like it's working. Like it's not like I need to go back to my job. I know it's like, and the best thing is if it doesn't work out, it goes back to your job. Like there is no opportunity. There is no chance this doesn't work out. I'm committed. But individuation is when you begin to pull back from what you want your parents to do. And also realizing that you may have not received a lot of attention growing up. So sometimes we'll try to create attention in our lives, sometimes through Instagram or even me on social media. I've definitely been aware that getting on social media, adding as much value as I can and growing a huge audience, some of it was a side effect of me becoming aware that there was this feeling of wanting attention 'cause I felt like I didn't get it growing up. And I wanted to add value because that would make me feel more worthy if I could add value to a lot of people. But a lot of people, what they do is they're attached to what mom and dad wants them to do and they abandon themselves in the process. And when you individuate is when you actually start your own growth and you enable other people to grow. Maybe your mom and your dad need to go through the growth lesson of accepting you. You see, so people pleasing and empaths have trouble detaching from what mom and dad want them to do and also being who they think they should be in order to gain the approval and love of society. When instead, the more you step into who you came here to be, the more you start feeling more confident within yourself. The thing is, is a lot of empaths and people pleasers may not like change because it does create change when you start making choices for yourself and you stop abandoning yourself for other people. So individuation is when you stop being who everyone else wants you to be and you start being who you came here to be. Another good example of this is think of Harry from the Kingdom of What is it from like the church or the kingdom or whatever? Harry and his wife, was her name Meghan? He broke, he was supposed to be the prince. Prince Harry is supposed to be the king and he rejected it. In fact, him and his wife both rejected it and they went on their own way and they did what they wanted to do. You wanna know what that happened there? He individuated. He stepped into his own power and by stepping into his own power and individuating from what mom and dad wanted him to do, he was doing what him and his wife wanted to do. And that was a, a part of their own development because most empaths and people pleasers, they may be stuck in childhood patterns. They may be stuck in the energy of what everyone else wants them to do and they're playing out similar childhood dynamics over and over and over again because they're not aware that they can step into their own power and begin to express the real selves. So empaths, People pleasers, the thing that you most need to do that'll change your life forever is when you individuate from mom and dad. When you individuate and start feeling safe in your own body. I have a video on this called the Frame Technique. It's a very powerful process that will show you how to delineate self versus other. Now, real quick, I wanna give you 3 questions that'll change everything for you if you use them. Now, one of them, I wanna ask you this, is who you are in your life who you are meant to be? Are you embodying who you came here to be? Going to take a moment and write that down and ask yourself that. Or are you playing for other people? Are you doing what mom and dad want you to do instead of what you want to do? Whose expectations are you fulfilling? Is it yours or is it someone else's? Whose expectations are you fulfilling? Becoming aware of even what your expectations of yourself are and realize they don't have to be the same expectations mom and dad have had of you. A lot of times where perfectionism can come. I need to be perfect in order to be enough. And third, are the things you do each day things that make you happy? How can you choose yourself more often? Because every time you say yes to something you don't want to do, you say no to the inner part of yourself and your inner child and who you came here to be. So to recap, the two things that changed my life more than anything else was one, individuating from mom and dad, what they want me to be, and also trying to get my needs met by being what everyone else I thought wanted me to be instead of being who I chose to be. The more I have embodied that, yes, it does repel people that don't resonate with that version of me, and that's okay. Leaning into tension is a good thing. The more I've leaned into tension, the more I have also grown, the more I have individuated and became who I came here to be. Because remember, you came here to go through a process of remembering who you are, to go through the self-realization process, but you can't begin the self-realization process if you're still doing what the parent realization process was. You're trying to do what everyone else wants you to do. So make the choice to be who you came here to be. Understand tension is a good thing. Understand that you don't have to live in the childhood dynamics anymore. Simply becoming aware of the patterns is a very powerful step and understand the more you are who you came here to be, the more you give other people the gift in the world of knowing the real you.
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