Why is my friend feeling my feelings and vice versa me hers?

QUESTION: I'm not sure if it is supposed to be here or if this has anything to do with witchcraft at all, it is just something really weird that happened to me and a former friend, I hope you can answer it and if not, it's okay, I understand.

The thing is that before I started doing research (I'm a baby witch and that's all I've been doing for a while) I had a friend and we shared names. The thing is we connected at the first minute we became friends and were really close. After some months talking strange things started to happen like sometimes, she got anxious and I experienced it too when she wasn't there, and nothing happened to make me anxious. I even learnt to notice when the feeling was her feeling and when it was mine. Sometimes she got hurt in her body and the bruise appeared on my body and not hers.

It really freaked both of us out and it doesn't happen anymore but because we stopped talking.

I know I shouldn't worry about this coz it already ended but I really want to know why did that happen.

ANSWER: Hello and thank you for your question. This experience of yours is partly a psychological thing and partly a magical thing. What you and your friend have been feeling is empathy.

On a psychological level, some people are born highly sensitive to the moods and feelings of other people and some are created through life events, usually traumatic ones. There are different kinds of empaths that I won’t go into here, but it seems to me that you were for some reason incredibly sensitive to this friend’s feelings and the things that happened to her. This can happen to strangers but usually happens to people that are deeply connected in some way, which is what you were describing.

Empathic people are often drawn to magical practices and paths because they can learn to hone their empathic skills through working with themselves. Witchcraft and its beliefs can also go some way towards explaining their experiences which sometimes do seem to be outside of normal human capability.

The question is what to do about it? Empathic skills can be a treasure trove of goodness if you can learn to set healthy boundaries for yourself and learn when its best to disconnect from another person and the things they are feeling. There is a problem with this range of skills though and that is that you can lose yourself if those boundaries aren’t securely in place. This can lead to feeling disconnected from the world and the people in it, becoming overwhelmed with the emotional load of other people and if left unchecked for long enough, serious mental health issues. Being empathic or highly sensitive in itself can be an extremely useful skill but be careful that you use it wisely and learn how to look after yourself.
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Bright blessings,
Sarah x