For months now, I’ve been contemplating Energetic Promiscuity. I’ve never heard anyone use the term before, so perhaps I’m coining it, but it’s something that is prevalent…just about everywhere, and as a highly energetically attuned person, the thing I notice the most is how unaware many people are of its prevalence, in themselves, and in others.

So what is it? Well, we all know the traditional definition of promiscuity. A person who is promiscuous often has a long string of lovers, pursuits, and generally tends to “sleep around.” So if you take the physical realm out of the equation, and focus singularly on the energetics underneath that sort of behavior, you have the same thing, only much more subtle, because the action takes place, at best, in communication, and at worst, energetically through how we think.

Energetic promiscuity manifests in many different ways, but the two most common ones are as Leaky Sexual Energy (a term often heard floating around conscious relating communities), and emotionally involving others in your drama. Energetic Promiscuity is the byproduct of poor energetic containment caused by insecurity, low self-worth, lack of self-awareness, and lack of capacity and consciousness to contain your own energy. Otherwise put: people who are energetically promiscuous tend to have really terrible boundaries (or no boundaries at all).

I think the biggest challenge about this concept is that most people are completely oblivious to it in themselves (see: lack of self-awareness), and those who sense it in others are often dismissed as jealous, suspicious, avoidant, emotionally unavailable, or otherwise.

The fact of the matter is, we all have energy coursing through our bodies at all times. And because we are not actually separate from others, the people around us can feel it when we’ve identified with it, and depending on how conscious they are, they may or may not react to it. We may become impeccable in our behavior, but if we never learn to contain our energy with integrity and healthy boundaries, we may still create drama via energetic promiscuity everywhere we go.

An important part of the emotional maturity journey is becoming aware of our own energetic impact, a topic we cover quite humbly in Unbound, for a reason. How the people are around us is an important feedback loop for our own self-discovery, and if they are not at ease around you, that could be an important communication for you to take to heart. The tricky part is, if you, yourself, have never truly been at ease (because you’re insecure and not self-aware), it may be hard for you to recognize when others aren’t in your presence (even if they are everywhere else in their lives).

It’s helpful to understand that healthy people sense these things and don’t tend to stick around a person who is energetically promiscuous for long, unless the topic has come up and both people enter into a willing agreement to work on it, together. But mostly, resolving energetic promiscuity is an inside job.

So let’s break down the two most common ways this shows up, and what to do about it:

Emotionally involving others: This happens anytime you believe you’re a victim of your own circumstances. Involving others often looks like asking people for advice, blame, sharing your problems hoping to be rescued from them, being reactive and expecting someone else to regulate your nervous system for you (often through “emotional processing” or endless discussions or arguments to find alignment while you still don’t do the inner work to regulate your own nervous system), hooking other people into your victim story in pursuit of sympathy. We emotionally involve others because we don’t know how to hold our own feelings and emotions ourselves, and aren’t aware of the thoughts driving those feelings and emotions. Although it’s not really possible for anyone else to truly hold your feelings and emotions for you, your attempt to force them to will inevitably drain them. Emotionally involving others hooks other people into you, often without them being aware of it.

A note here about the importance of co-regulation. Co-regulation is something that happens naturally in healthy family dynamics where a baby feels safe in its mother’s presence, and her strong and stable nervous system is soothing for her anxious child. If you didn’t grow up in a stable home, you might need a continuous imprint of co-regulation as an adult, via a healthy, non-sexual, relationship with a coach, therapist, counselor, or guide. If, as an adult, you are around a person with a strong and stable nervous system, and they have the capacity to co-regulate with you, it’s essential that you allow them to lead here, so that you eventually learn how to regulate yourself. If you fight co-regulation and continually grab for the drama in your thinking that causes dysregulation, doubling down on your victim story and indulging in it, co-regulation is thwarted.

Leaky sexual energy: This happens when you have no awareness of your sexual energy, and yet attach it to your thinking. Both men and women do this, but it’s significantly more common in men, who have unfortunately been conditioned throughout their lives to be visually preoccupied with sexuality and are unaware of how the energetics of that type of attention impact the people around them. Leaky sexual energy in intimate relationships could look like entertaining emotionally or spiritually deep bonds that have a sexual undertone with people outside of your relationship, thinking “dirty” thoughts about a man or woman you pass on the street, fantasizing, or objectifying and sexualizing the people around you (this can be subtle, but shows up as evaluating their physical appearance or attraction in some way). In many cases, the place it shows up the most often is in sexual encounters with other people in your dreams. Something very important to note here is that leaky sexual energy always involves violation of some kind. If you’re having sexual thoughts about other people without their consent, you are, in fact, penetrating them with your energy, whether it’s happening in your dreams, or in your real life. Leaky sexual energy hooks other people into you, often without them being aware of it.

The core insecurity, and lack of awareness and self-containment of energetic promiscuity does something very important and destructive: it both manipulates others, and dilutes your potency, magnetism, presence, and impedes your ability to expand your consciousness.

So, what to do? One of the best ways to resolve energetic promiscuity is first through building self-awareness, and then working on your emotional maturity (by way of learning to navigate your emotional landscape, limiting beliefs, and most importantly, learning to feel without interpretation of those feelings so that you can transmute reactive behavior from their roots) and somatic agency. Somatic agency is body-awareness that becomes deeply attuned to the subtle electromagnetic field we are always creating from within and around ourselves, and learning how to shift your own energy all the way down to the physical level from moment to moment. Both of these things require you to redirect your attention inward on yourself anytime its inclined to look outward on others. The fastest way forward is inward, always.

Over time, as you build the muscle of holding the locus of attention on yourself, unpack your emotional landscape, and learn to feel, you also start to cultivate the capacity required to contain your own energy.

As I write this, I’m realizing I could probably write a whole dissertation on this topic and the ways it shows up in the world in detrimental ways, but I’ll stop here for now and end with this: containment and healthy restraint are synonymous with self-mastery, and mastery is being an empty vessel through which energy moves uninhibited.