Most negative or destructive psychic information-energy stored in your body or psyche isn’t your own. I believe that more than 80 percent of all life problems, in fact, are caused by energies not our own. Our own information doesn’t harm us. You might have beliefs that are wrong, feelings that are repressed, or issues that indicate misunderstandings, but these are ultimately challenges to work through, as each presents an opportunity for understanding and growth. Others’ information-energy, however`, causes real damage, for several reasons.     
From a scientific perspective, all information-energy is frequency- or vibration-based. The energy that makes a chair a chair runs on certain bands, or vibrations. The energy of your ears runs on its own unique set of frequencies—frequencies that are different than the energies of your kidneys. Harmonics are the full set of vibrations that make up who we are. Personal energies will match our harmonics, or personal vibrations. We can fail to release or recognize personal vibrations, such as feelings and ideas, or we can misplace them inside or outside our body. Unreleased, unrecognized, or misplaced vibrations will cause blocks, misperceptions, holes, “muddy spots,” rips, tears, and congestion in our energetic fields. In turn, those energetic problems will create physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual challenges. If we shift our misunderstood or misplaced energies, however, they will heal rather than harm, instruct rather than restrict, and help rather than hurt.
 
The Effects of Absorbed Energy
Energy internalized from others won’t match our own frequencies and will always harm us. Imagine that your face is burned, and surgeons graft skin from your thighs onto your face. The frequency of your own skin will match that of your facial skin, and this transplanted skin has a good chance of “taking.” Now, think what might happen if you undergo heart surgery, and the surgeon leaves an instrument in your body. The metal tool doesn’t synchronize with your physical tissue, and results in all sorts of problems! As close or desirable as the energetic match might be, others’ energies are not your own. They will not “take” and will cause problems. These psychic toxins—others’ energies that you acquire psychically—can transform into physical energies.
In addition to creating negative physical effects, absorbed energy can also adversely affect your personality and spirituality. When we internalize information that isn’t relevant to us, we become someone we are not. Psychic energy can carry all sorts of information, including instructions about careers, money, ideas, feelings, emotional states, attitudes, prejudices, religious ideals, body-image standards, and more. What if a 10-year-old girl internalizes the culture’s model of the “perfect body?” Well, many of them do, which is one of the reasons so many girls in our culture experience anorexia. Certainly there is a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, which involves inheriting the inability to produce a certain liver enzyme necessary to fully break down alcohol. The template for alcoholism, however, is a family matter and is energetically passed from parent to child. If you chronically experience an issue that never seems to change, no matter how much you work on it, you may have internalized or been imprisoned by a psychically transferred energy that is affecting your integrity.

Living in Integrity with Yourself
Why do we psychically absorb ideas that conflict with our spiritual wisdom? The psychic is designed to enable survival, and we innately believe that the key to surviving is to adapt. To adapt means to fit in. By adhering to—and suffering from—norms that don’t necessarily support our real self or spiritual purpose, we actually think we are assuring our own survival.  
But running our lives with others’ psychic energy prevents us from living in integrity with ourselves. This is not a judgment; it is a fact. The word integrity means integration of integrals—or in plain language, making wholeness out of parts. Most people list these parts as physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. You could also say that you are composed of your body, mind, soul, and spirit. If any one of these parts is programmed or run by psychic data that doesn’t match up with your “real self,” you will be out of integrity.
What does it look like to be out of integrity because of psychic sensitivity? The list of symptoms is endless. Really sensitive psychics will be constantly afflicted by the psychic victimization cycle, stressed by a seemingly endless succession of thoughts, voices, ideas, pictures, sensations, images, orders, or visitations that are unwelcome at best and dangerous at worst. Even laypeople are adversely affected by unwanted psychic instructions. Just about every person who comes to see me is experiencing the negative effects of others’ psychic information. Typical scenarios are:
• Hating your profession—because you’ve accepted someone else’s idea of what type of work you should do.
• Not having enough money—because you are living out someone else’s “poverty mentality” or religious beliefs about the virtue of being poor.
• Physical maladies—because of energies inherited from the family.
• Depression—because you are repressing parts of your real self.
• Anxiety—because you’ve accepted familial fears of the future.
• Relationship problems—because you keep dating or marrying people who remind you of a family member.
• Dissatisfaction—because if you are living for others, you aren’t living as yourself.
• Oppression—because parts of your self are being repressed by another.

These and other issues can be caused by any number of problems for which it’s important to see a licensed professional. In addition, the origin of some of your problems may be psychic energies that are not yours. Running your life on others’ concepts will keep you from integrating the various parts of yourself needed to live a full, happy life. It can also cloud your perceptions so much that you don’t even know who you really are, which not only affects your life, but also can keep you from becoming full of the spirit that you are.
It’s time to separate the wheat from the chaff, the useful from the useless, and the helpful from the harmful. And it’s time to put up boundaries so the harmful can never enter again.

This column is excerpted from Cyndi Dale’s The Intuition Guidebook: How to Safely and Wisely Use Your Sixth Sense (Deeper Well Publishing, 2011). Cyndi Dale is an internationally renowned author, speaker, and intuitive consultant. Her other popular books include The Subtle Body Coloring Book: Learn Energetic Anatomy (Sounds True, 2017); Subtle Energy Techniques (Llewellyn Publications, 2017); Llewellyn’s Compete Book of Chakras (Llewellyn Publications, 2016); Energetic Boundaries: How to Stay Protected and Connected in Work, Love, and Life (Sounds True, 2011); The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy (Sounds True, 2009); and The Complete Book of Chakra Healing (Llewellyn Publications, 2009), as well as nearly 20 additional books. To learn more about Dale and her products, services, and classes, please visit www.cyndidale.com.