What Other People’s Energy Actually Does to You
Subtitle: What three generations of the same energy taught me about frequency, silence, and when to disappear
Series: The Observer Series
The Body Always Knows First
I didn’t need a calendar. My body was the antenna.
Every ten days, without warning and without any logical explanation, my solar plexus would constrict. A wave of tension would move through me — sharp, specific, unmistakable. Not anxiety I’d generated. Not something that belonged to me. Something arriving. Something I had learned, over years of paying attention, to read like a signal.
My neighbor and close friend and I share a triplex. When she is alone, our building runs on a particular frequency — high, energetic, fluid. We move constantly, independently and sometimes together, like two people who have found their natural rhythm in the same space. Baking, creating, music, motion. When he arrives — her long-distance boyfriend, a man I have never met and who has made clear he has no interest in meeting me — the grid shifts. Her energy drops first. Then the whole building follows.
What I’ve come to understand is that this is not a feeling. It’s a physics problem. And the first laboratory where I learned to run this experiment wasn’t the triplex. It was my childhood home.
The Original Frequency
My father was a narcissist. I know this now with the same clarity I know anything — not from a book, not from a therapist’s language, but from years of living inside his frequency and slowly, painstakingly learning to read it.
His energy wasn’t always loud. That’s what made it so effective. It was a density. A gravity. When he came home, the air in the house changed before he reached the door. The routine shifted. The ease evaporated. Whatever my mother and I had been doing — the laughter, the movement, the ordinary freedom of an afternoon — quietly folded itself away. Not because he demanded it directly. Because his presence made everything else feel impossible.
I spent years trying to fix that. Years of trying everything — people pleasing, overgiving, helping my mother more than I could sustain, standing up to him, arguing back, eventually yelling. None of it worked. Each approach was a different version of the same mistake: I was plugging my energy into his frequency. I was feeding the exact thing I wanted to change.
The shift came only when I had exhausted every other option and arrived, almost by accident, at silence. I stayed in the room. I stopped reacting. I remained as high in my own frequency as I could hold while giving him absolutely nothing to grab onto. That silence was the one thing he could not control. It didn’t just neutralize him — it forced his true nature to surface. Without my reaction to sustain the dynamic, the mask came off. I went no-contact shortly after. Some revelations are final.
What I Got Wrong
There is a question I have sat with since my mother died. It is not comfortable and I am not writing it for sympathy — I am writing it because it is the most important thing this pattern taught me.
For years, I poured my energy into being near her. Spending more time with her, trying to convince her to leave, promising her I would build a life for her, filling the space that his control had hollowed out. I thought I was helping. What I understand now is that I was operating at the wrong frequency — mine pulled down to meet hers, to meet the heaviness of what she was inside of. You cannot inspire someone from inside their low frequency. You can only inspire them from above it. And I wasn’t above it. I was in it with her, trying to lift us both.
I wonder, sometimes, whether any of that changed her outcome. Not with guilt — with the kind of honest questioning that only comes after the grief settles. What I know now that I didn’t know then is this: my energy was on someone else. On someone in a lower frequency. And no matter how much love is behind it, that is not the same as being in your own high frequency and letting someone else be pulled toward it.
I couldn’t have known that then. I know it now. And knowing it changes everything about how I handle what I’m looking at in this triplex.
The Triangle Returns
The moment I recognized the shape of this situation, something in me went very still.
The same triangle. A woman I love, a controlling energy above her, and me — adjacent, close, woven into the fabric of her daily life. The same frequency I spent a childhood learning to read. The same gravity pressing on someone who doesn’t yet see how much she’s accommodating it.
Every part of me wants to step in. That impulse is old and it runs deep. But I am not the same person who spent years trying to save someone from inside their own low frequency. I’ve learned what happens when you do that. I’ve paid the cost of it. And the hardest thing in the world — harder than any conversation, harder than any confrontation — is to choose to do nothing. Not out of indifference. Out of understanding.
The pattern recognized itself. That’s the only thing that changed.
Italy
A year ago, the collision happened somewhere else entirely.
I was traveling through Italy, alone, in the full momentum of my own frequency — the particular kind of high that comes from being completely in your own life, your own rhythm, your own joy. My friend and her boyfriend were in the same region for a few days. We were going to connect afterward — just her, her mother, and me, continuing on to another city together. I was close enough to be nearby. Not close enough to be inside his field.
One afternoon, I went to a beach alone. I didn’t invite her because I already knew what that invitation would cost her. When she messaged to ask what I was doing, her excitement came through the screen. She wanted to bring her mother and her boyfriend to come meet me at the beach. She would tell him.
My gut tightened before I could even form a thought.
What followed was hours of silence. Then short, brief messages from her — drained of her usual warmth, apologetic, confused. Her mother reached out separately to tell me what had actually happened. The mention of my name — her wanting to see me — had sent him into a rage. He yelled at her. She was scared. We never spoke of it again.
The interesting thing is what that told me about physics. He had never met me. He didn’t know me. But my existence in her life was a threat to his control over her — and he could feel it even from a distance, even before we occupied the same space. His energy and mine had already registered each other without ever being in the same room.
The Triplex
Now we live in the same building. And the experiment became live.
When he’s gone, the building runs on its natural frequency. She bakes, creates, moves, sings. She has more energy than she knows what to do with. She gravitates toward my floor instinctively — not because I’m asking her to, but because high frequency pulls. She knows this. She can feel the pull. And when she’s in it, she thrives. More hobbies, more momentum, more of herself. My being here, running at my own high vibration and staying entirely focused on my own work and life, is doing something to her simply by existing.
When he arrives, everything I described earlier begins. The building changes. Her energy drops before he’s even through the door — she starts to prepare, to contract, to manage. By the midpoint of his visit, she’s compliant and quiet. By the end, she’s barely present. She becomes someone else.
The most recent visit, the energetic collision was so strong it manifested physically in my body — a wave of nausea so specific and so forceful that it was unmistakably not mine. It was the signal, louder than it had ever been. My body was rejecting something in the immediate environment. I’ve felt this before. I know exactly what frequency produces it.
The question I started asking was: what do I do with that knowledge?
The Math of It
Here is what matters about the timeline, and it matters more than almost anything else in this observation.
He is here for ten days. They are apart for three weeks.
That ratio is not incidental. In the time they are separated — twenty-one days against his ten — her frequency has the space to reset, rise, and grow. The high frequency is doing more work than the low frequency. She is evolving, not deteriorating. She is baking and moving and singing and becoming more of herself — not despite the ten days, but because twenty-one days is long enough for her to remember who she is. For the frequency she’s capable of to reassert itself. For her own nervous system to recalibrate toward something better.
If that ratio were reversed — if he were here twenty-one days and gone for ten — I suspect we would be looking at a very different story. People do get sick around sustained low frequencies. Not metaphorically. Physically. The nervous system, under constant suppression, finds somewhere else for the tension to go.
The math is in her favor. What she does with the time is the variable.
The Blind Spot
I came to the strategy the way I come to most things — by exhausting every other option first, and then arriving at the answer almost by accident.
My first instinct was combat. I wanted to crank my own frequency loud enough to shatter his hold on her, to feed her enough of my energy that she could find the strength to stand her ground. The physics of why that doesn’t work are precise: if she uses borrowed energy to challenge a controlling partner, she is fighting with strength that isn’t rooted in her own system. The moment he escalates — and he will escalate, because that’s what controlling energy does when it senses resistance — the borrowed wave collapses. She comes down harder than she started. The submission that follows is deeper than it was before.
Resistance is just a different way of plugging into the same power grid.
What I learned with my father is what unlocked this. The silence. The complete removal of my reaction from the equation. Not passive — active. Intentional. Staying fully present in my own frequency while giving him absolutely nothing to grab onto. That neutrality wasn’t withdrawal. It was sovereignty.
The version I’m running now takes that further.
When he enters the building, I don’t just stay neutral. I disappear from the equation entirely. I lock so completely into my own work, my own creativity, my own momentum that their floor drops out of my awareness altogether. Not as a performance — as a genuine state. I become oblivious to them the way he is oblivious to me. He believes I’m not here. I choose to act as though they aren’t there. There is no friction for his energy to grab onto because I have removed the antenna entirely.
This is the blind spot strategy. And it does something I didn’t fully anticipate.
What She Might Hear
When I am present in the building — even silently, even downstairs behind closed doors — my frequency is doing something. It’s providing a counterweight. A subconscious buffer. A reminder, below the level of thought, that something clean and high exists very nearby. That buffer takes the edge off. It gives her something to lean on without her even knowing she’s doing it.
When I disappear completely — when I pull my frequency inward and remove myself from the energetic equation — that buffer disappears with me.
What happens in that space?
My hypothesis is this: without the white noise of an external high frequency to soften the contrast, without any distraction or buffer or subtle lifeline running beneath the floor, she will feel the weight of his frequency more completely than she ever has. The density, the isolation, the slow flattening of her own wave — all of it, unfiltered and unbuffered.
And in that stark, heavy silence — with nothing to distract her nervous system, nothing to reach for unconsciously, nothing running beneath the surface to remind her that something different exists — she may finally be forced to hear the one frequency she’s been avoiding.
Her own.
But here is the part that matters most — and the part that makes this moment different from any version of it that could have happened before.
This is not borrowed energy. It never was. Borrowed strength collapses the moment the pressure mounts — I’ve seen it happen, I’ve explained why it happens. What she has been building since I moved into this triplex is something else entirely. Her own. Slowly, incrementally, without announcement. The baking. The music. The hobbies she picked back up. The independence she started exercising without being asked. None of that came from me. It was always hers. I was just a frequency that reminded her nervous system what it felt like to be free.
This is what I would call the glow up phase. Not a dramatic transformation — a gradual rising. A quiet accumulation of herself, built across every three-week window of separation. Each cycle, she returns to her own frequency a little more fluent in it than before. Each time he comes back, he is meeting a slightly different version of her than the last time — even if neither of them has registered it consciously yet.
What that means is this: each time he arrives and the familiar dynamic begins, she is not the same person accommodating the same pattern. She is a newer version of herself being asked to step back into an older one. And that friction — the collision between who she is becoming and who she learned to be around him — that is the integration. That is where the real work happens. Not in the conversations she has with me. Not in anything I do from downstairs. In the gap between the woman who stands her ground and the woman who learned to move out of the way. Fighting that old version of yourself with the newer version is what growth actually feels like from the inside. Uncomfortable. Disorienting. And completely irreversible once it starts.
What I am watching — from a distance, without interference, from the height of my own frequency — is someone growing entirely on their own terms. And I will tell you this: there is no greater gift than witnessing that. Not participating in it. Not directing it. Just watching it happen the way it was always supposed to — with her as the one who chose it.
There is a particular kind of wisdom that only arrives after you’ve made every other choice first. The anger comes before the clarity. The saving comes before the understanding. The noise comes before the silence. And sometimes the most powerful thing you can offer someone is not your energy — but the space where they might finally find their own.
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