You’re Not Overreacting — You’re Overabsorbing with Dr. Amy Robbins - Episode 164

Ohhh this one’s juicy — and necessary. In this soul therapy session, Robyn is joined by her soul sister Dr. Amy Robbins (yes, that Amy Robbins — psychologist, intuitive, medium, and host of Life, Death, and the Space Between) to talk all things energetic boundaries. Ever felt like you picked up someone else’s mood just by standing next to them in line… or found yourself utterly exhausted after a Zoom that should’ve taken 20 minutes? Yep. Your energy might be leaking. And no, that’s not as cute as it sounds.

Robyn and Amy go there — breaking down what energetic boundaries really are, how to know when yours have been invaded, and the everyday rituals (some sacred, some super practical) that can protect your light without dimming your heart. They explore how trauma and people-pleasing mess with your energetic field, why guilt shows up when you say “no,” and how understanding your own energy is the ultimate spiritual flex.

Whether you’re new to this or you’ve got 15 crystal bracelets on as we speak (we see you!), this episode is a permission slip to guard your vibe like the treasure it is.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• What “energetic boundaries” really are — and why they matter more than ever
• How to tell the difference between your energy and someone else’s (and why that’s life-changing)
• Simple, powerful rituals to protect and clear your energy — golden light, sound healing, Swiss cheese...we said what we said
• Why guilt shows up when you set boundaries — and how to move through it
• How trauma impacts your ability to say no (and what to do about it)
• Why you are still your own best healer

MORE FROM DR AMY ROBBINS
Visit dramyarobbins.com
Listen to her podcast: Life, Death, and the Space Between

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You can also follow Seeking Center on Instagram @theseekingcenter.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:54 You’re Not Overreacting — You’re Overabsorbing with Dr. Amy Robbins

Transcript

Robyn: I'm Robyn Miller Brecker and I'm Karen Loenser. Welcome to Seeking Center, the podcast. Join us each week as we have the conversations and we, through the spiritual and holistic clutter for you, we'll boil it down to what you need to know now, we're all about total wellness, which to us needs building a healthy life.

Karen: On a physical, mental, and spiritual level, we'll talk to the trailblazers who'll introduce you to the practices, products, and experiences that may be just what you need to hear about to transform your life. If you're listening to this, it's no accident. Think of this as your seeking center and your place to seek your center.

Robyn: And for the best wellness and spiritual practitioners, experts, products, experiences, and inspo, visit theseekingcenter. com. 

Robyn Miller: Today's soul therapy conversation is a big one. We're talking about energetic boundaries, what they are, why they matter, and how you can protect your energy without shutting down your heart. If you've ever felt drained after being around certain people, overwhelmed in crowded [00:01:00] spaces, or like you're carrying emotions that aren't even yours.

This conversation is absolutely for you. I'm joined by my soul sister, Dr. Amy Robbins, a clinical psychologist, intuitive, medium, and host of the life death in the space between podcast. Amy is someone who bridges science and spirit in such a profound and accessible way. Her perspective is going to blow your mind and soothe your soul.

We're diving into the connection between trauma and energetic leaks, how to set boundaries without guilt practices to clear your energy. Yes, even if you've been carrying around stuff for years and why protecting your light isn't selfish. It's actually sacred. So let's take a breath and let's get into this inner shifting conversation.

Hi Amy.

Amy Robbins: Hi, Rob.

Robyn Miller: I am very excited for this conversation because it's something I think we all need, and having just got back from being at a theme park with thousands and thousands of [00:02:00] people, it is so important in any situation, but that one in particular to know

Amy Robbins: Oof.

Robyn Miller: to set these energetic boundaries. So let's talk about what they are.

How would you define energetic boundary?

Amy Robbins: I actually wanna back up even further because I think to talk about energetic boundaries, and I think we talked about this the last time . You have to know what's yours and what's someone else's. And so it's really important to put yourself even in your own space, in your home, in different.

Energetic experiences to see how things shift. So I'll give you this example. Yesterday I was doing this talk and was running from place to place and I went from my son's track meet to home, and I was going to this talk that I was giving, and I got in my friend's car who picked me up and she had the music that she had playing on the radio.

Was an amazing sound heal, and when I walked in the car, the first thing I [00:03:00] felt was this release. Everything in my body shifted and we can't know. Where other, how other people's energy is impacting us until we know what our own energy feels like in different situations.

And so you can play this game with yourself in your home, in your car, wherever, just. Play different music, play different sounds, go into different rooms and feel, what does it feel like to be in this space versus another space? Because you can start to tune into the energy around you and it's so important to be able to know what's mine versus what's someone else's, because then.

Like when you got home from the theme park, right? You are very clear on what your energy is. So if that energy has been penetrated, you're like, okay. It's almost if you were carrying, if you like, stepped on stuff all day and then you tracked it into your home, right? you're carrying all of that with you.

But if you don't know what you're normally caring, you don't know what you've brought in.

Robyn Miller: [00:04:00] I am so glad you brought that up. That is so important. And I just even a step back from that, like just saying we are energy number one, and you do absolutely need to know what is yours. And I wanna also point out that from day to day, that can feel different,

Amy Robbins: Absolutely.

Robyn Miller: For the most part, I am a very positive person, and my energy very much let's go get 'em. Excited. However, I don't always wake up that way and I just, I want people to understand from day to day, there is so much energy around us. It's not only what may be in your home. There are things like, in my opinion, the planets and the sun and the stars and things like

This.

impacts

The earth, the energy from the actual Earth.

Amy Robbins: Right.

Robyn Miller: it's stuff that we don't see, [00:05:00] right? It's nothing we're seeing, but you as a being can feel it.

Amy Robbins: And you can absorb it. Just like you brought up the sun, think of the days where you walk outside and it's sunny how you feel versus days when it's not. So again, I'm saying this because it's just so important to know yourself. When I'm talking about. Spirituality it's knowing yourself and again, for some, we've separated, right?

The psychology and the spiritual, the energetic and the psychological. But our mood is energy. Our feelings are energy. So if you are feeling down, your energy's gonna be low.

And we make it like, oh, energy and I think there is something for energy healing, but there's so many, we think of it as like this place that we go and someone does something to our energy to help heal it, but we can do our own energy healing.

Every single day because our mood affects our energy level, our sleep affects our energy level. And we talk about it in, that way, like how your sleep affects your energy. But then we [00:06:00] discount the fact that we are energy

Robyn Miller: It's so true. Why do we do that? Why does our culture do that? You're totally right.

Amy Robbins: because it's not something that can be seen and measured in the same way.

And if it can't be tested in a lab in that, researched and scientifically proven, then we dismiss it. But again, we all talk about these things all the time. You walk in a room, it feels a certain way. You walk in a house, it feels a certain way.

We're all tapping into energy. You're with a person, they feel a certain way. That is energy.

Robyn Miller: yeah, and . One of the things that I actually have up in my office is you are the energy you bring to the room, it's taking responsibility. So in that sense of what you're talking about, knowing who and what energy you are bringing that day, that hour is so important because then you can start to assess. When other people walk in, or even when you get on a Zoom with someone, you can feel if [00:07:00] somebody's having a good day or not so good of a day.

Amy Robbins: A thousand percent. And I always think about this so stuck with me to bring it to Oprah when she had Jill Bolty Taylor on, who was the woman, she was a neurosci scientist, I believe, and she had a stroke and she talked about how she could no longer really hear, but I think it was like hearing or, she couldn't speak.

But when doctors walked in the room, she knew their energy. And I remember her saying something like, please be responsible for the energy you bring into this space. I wanted to hang it on my office door, but then I felt like that wasn't really fair to people to say, be careful not to bring your crappy energy here.

'cause that's really what it's for. But I work with people all day in their energy, even though I'm not an energy healer.

Robyn Miller: That's right.

Amy Robbins: It's intense. You pick up that debris. 

Robyn Miller: That's right. and you're meaning it from that energetic perspective.

Robyn Miller: And what I would also say is that even when you [00:08:00] mentioned energy healing, while we both know energy healing practitioners and I know for myself, I've taken. Different levels of reiki so I even understand how to facilitate it.

Amy Robbins: We can feel it

Robyn Miller: Even when you go to someone the only person that really can heal your. Self is yourself. You know what I'm saying? Like

Amy Robbins: Yep.

Robyn Miller: can allow someone to help start to manipulate some of that energy within you, but 

you have to really feel it and

Take responsibility for it. 

Amy Robbins: Know that if we're talking about our own energies, like you said, some days your energies are gonna be different, and it's important to tune in to. All the different aspects that can impact it. This week alone, yesterday and the day before, I was feeling so out of sorts and I was like, I should probably check the Schumann resonance.

And sure enough, I think it was like off the charts this week or something. And normally as much as I am into all of these tools. Some resonate [00:09:00] with me more than others. And so it's not usually the first place I go. Usually I'm like, where are my hormones this week? And what happened?

but this week it felt different to me that the energy and where it might be coming from, it was like my brain fog has been pretty bad all week and I'm like, there's gotta be something with the earth's energy this week. 

Robyn Miller: For those that don't know what is the Schumann resonance?

Amy Robbins: Let me hope I get this right. it's a scale that determines, I believe, the solar flares of the sun.

Robyn Miller: Yeah.

That's how I look at it. And

Yeah.

Amy Robbins: And how it impacts the energy here on earth. So if you. Think about anything, right? If you get close to an oven or if there's more sparks flying from a fire, it's warmer, it's gonna impact everything around it.

And so sometimes the Schumann energies have these big spikes, which then are said to impact the energies of the earth.

Robyn Miller: and so I think what. We wanna talk about here then is now that we've established you need to understand your [00:10:00] own energy and how that is on any given day, when we talk about boundaries, think what we're really talking, opinion, it's really talking about protection for yourself

How to clear too.

And so I think it's talking about what are different ways to protect yourself on any given day and also recognize the situations and or maybe people or places that impact your energy more than others.

Amy Robbins: Absolutely. And so there's obviously I think of psychological boundaries and energetic boundaries, and I think oftentimes I mean in the fields of psychology, right? There's been a. Boom. About talking about boundaries, but I think we talk about it very much from the psychological perspective and not so much from the energetic perspective.

And so when we're talking about it from the psychological perspective, what we're talking about is how you say no, how you say yes, how you [00:11:00] comport yourself in the world in terms of who you let in and who you don't, and How you wanna approach that, People are often afraid of setting boundaries.

We could talk about trauma. That's a whole, each of these could be their own discussions because people who have had trauma tend to have much more difficulties with boundaries because their boundaries were violated. If you've been over parentified as a child, likely gonna be more difficult to have boundaries because you didn't know the separation between you and your parent.

So we could go on and on about all the ways that make boundaries so difficult, but There's learning to set those psychological boundaries, both for yourself, and they're always for yourself, but how to set that with other people. And then there's thinking about energetically, oftentimes even when I go to bed at night, I will envision my house just enveloped in a golden light.

 When my kids go out, I will envision them enveloped in a golden light myself, enveloped in a golden light. And then. I'm not a big crystal [00:12:00] person, but certainly people who love crystals and that resonates with them, will wear crystals for protection. Again, I'm not sure what the science is behind that, but if it's something that you do that makes you feel more protected, great.

Robyn Miller: those that can't see me right now, I have about, I don't know, 15 bracelets that are all different crystals

Amy Robbins: And so if you feel like that works for you, the mind is a very powerful tool, right? So if you believe that works for you, it probably does.

And. I think also it's what do you do once you step back into a space where you wanna purify yourself? And I'm all about finding the practices that speak to you and that resonate with you.

I used to hate the smell of incense. I would hate when I walked into a room with them. Now when I walk in and I. Feel ungrounded or I walk into a room that has incense and immediate, my whole energetic field feels like it shifts. And there might be some that speak more to me than [00:13:00] others, right?

It's just about finding the things that work for you. People love essential oils. I love a bath at the end of the day with Epsom salts, which is so great at clearing out your energy. And then oftentimes I will also shower quickly after that just to rinse off that energy that I'm then sitting in.

 So smudging is great .

Robyn Miller: I was just gonna say smudging with Sage or Palo Santo. They're rituals and there's a smell

whether or not there's a science to it it seems to help that's for sure. I know in my own life, whenever I actually make the time and you set the intention, when you're doing

Amy Robbins: right, 

Robyn Miller: seems to help clear the space.

Amy Robbins: So many people have these rituals and they don't even realize that these are rituals to do that, right? So many people come home from work and they immediately take their clothes off and they put on comfy clothes. You are shifting your energy in that moment. You're taking off the day that you carried with you, you're putting it in the dirty clothes or airing it out or hanging it back [00:14:00] up in your closet or.

Whatever, and then you're moving into a different energetic space.

Robyn Miller: Absolutely.

Amy Robbins: have these rituals in many ways already built in. Sometimes we don't just think about 'em that way, but think about I don't like to get in my bed at night, filthy dirty. That's just my thing. I know that's not everybody's thing, Because to me it feels like an opportunity to cleanse myself. I just literally, before we got on, texted my sound and breath work healer, and I'm said to her, do you have time for me next week? I need some spring cleaning.

and I know that's gonna be for me, just a complete release. I'll be able to rid myself of whatever I've been carrying with me through the winter and I just wanna let it go.

So those are great ways to clear out and release energy. 

Robyn Miller: And I wanted to give some also on a daily basis, if you don't have time to smudge or you don't have anything to smudge with, and you just said showering to me, [00:15:00] like showering is such a cleansing. Purifying way to release energy, but also to me, like before I go to bed at night.

And this is something that one of our energy practitioners, said on our podcast. Something that she does is she pictures she's in bed. She pictures almost like a shower head above her and it's just rinsing you energetically of all the stuff

Picture gook and all the stuff flowing off of you and then replacing it with what you said, like a golden light that flows through.

You put an energetic bubble around you before you go to bed. And then when you wake up in the morning, you can put that energetic bubble back again, as you said, around yourself, around your family, around your pets, whatever you need to. But those are, they're all part of these rituals. She also mentioned thinking about of yourself, almost like Swiss cheese. If the shower doesn't work for you, think of yourself as having holes and the wind blowing everything, [00:16:00] all the gook, anybody's energy that should not be on you out. 

Amy Robbins: I sometimes imagine like I'm in one of those exercise balls. And it's just like deflecting off of me.

Robyn Miller: Yeah.

Amy Robbins: , I do wanna say though, when you are rinsing energetically in that way, it's important to make sure that you're moving that energy like fully out.

Pushing it towards either the ground and out the door or some sort of drain so that you're just getting rid of it. My energy practitioner here has this tree outside of their door, and she and her partner always push energy out there, and the tree is dead.

Robyn Miller: Oh my God, I believe that. Wow.

Amy Robbins: It's the one tree on the block that's dead.

Robyn Miller: wow.

Amy Robbins: Yeah.

Robyn Miller: That's how powerful this work can

And I think that one other thing I do wanna bring up before we end our conversation today is setting those [00:17:00] boundaries without feeling guilt. Because I think sometimes, and when we say boundaries and protecting yourself, the protecting, I don't think people are gonna feel, you're not gonna feel guilty about that.

But setting boundaries with certain people.

I will ask people who are listening or watching to let us know when you start to set these boundaries on a daily basis for things that are currently triggering you. People situations, do they lessen? I'm really curious, there's sometimes where people do feel guilty sometimes you need to set that boundary with someone like, I can't talk between the hours of nine and five, or, 

Amy Robbins: yeah, so I think there's a couple things. One, of course, the psychological. Side of me is always thinking, okay, why is it so hard for you to set that boundary? What does that feel like? What does that mean? We carry all sorts of meanings around what it means to set a boundary. The [00:18:00] second thing is.

People like homeostasis. So when, and I talk about this in with my patients all the time, when we talk about setting boundaries, when you set a boundary, it's gonna be really hard initially because people want to pull you back into what you're used to. My favorite quote about boundaries is the only people who dislike you setting boundaries are the people who benefited most from you not having any

Robyn Miller: So true.

Amy Robbins: right.

And.

Robyn Miller: true.

Amy Robbins: know I love it because that's who you see the most pushback from, is the people who took advantage of you and were able to walk all over you because you didn't set a boundary. So if they're having a hard time with it, it's because they were taking advantage of you. And really, I can't just say, don't feel guilty about setting boundaries because I think you want need to understand more deeply what it is about.

Each person who's listening, and if they do feel guilty, what it is about setting a boundary that makes them feel that way.

Robyn Miller: That's good. That's deep.

Amy Robbins: Is it not that felt like the only way to be [00:19:00] loved was to, let people take advantage or be at someone's beck and call whenever they needed you, or, if you had trauma right, and you didn't know that it, that you could say no, or that you were so horribly abused that there was no, there was no one to go to, or you felt such shame by it, that you didn't do that, that now it'd be so uncomfortable.

 There's so many different meanings that this, it could have for someone. So it's hard to just say sure, don't feel guilty about it, because the reason you feel guilty is because it has some sort of deeper meaning to you about why you feel that way.

Robyn Miller: and listen, that will lead to other conversations. So I'm just glad that you brought that up. And I'm really grateful that we brought this whole. up because hopefully people can really take hold of the energy they're bringing to the table on any given day. And there are tools now to clear [00:20:00] yourself and protect yourself. And we'd be really curious, how does your day change by putting some of these practices in place? We're gonna be talking on an ongoing basis around energy. And these soul therapy conversations are going to continue, so let us know. you, Amy.

Amy Robbins: Thank you. I just wanna leave people with one thing too. You can smudge yourself to death. If you don't do the work of understanding why your boundaries keep getting violated, no amount of smudge, showering, golden light, Palo Santo crystals, like any of it, is going to not make you feel constantly intruded upon.

So this is why I love these conversations because the two are hand in hand. They are not separate. They go together.

Robyn Miller: they totally do. And thank you for saying that. And thank you for sharing all of the wisdom that you just did in this really, packed half hour or [00:21:00] less that we had. 

 You can check out Dr. Amy Robbins podcast, life, death in the Space between , wherever you listen to your podcast. You can also go to Dr. Amy Robbins, that's with two Bs, R-O-B-B-I-N-S, dr amy robbins.com to see all of her offerings. So thank you. Thank you, Amy.

Amy Robbins: Rob. Thank you.