Empathy is often misunderstood (I know, ironic).
Some will say “empathy is weakness”. Others will claim that their energy is easily drained because they’re too empathic.
Experientially, those phrases are pointing to real experiences.
Like the emotional challenge of making decisions that benefit the whole but harm someone you care about.
Or absorbing feelings from so many people to the point that it gets hard to discern which ones are your own.
But none of those things are directly tied to having too much empathy.
They’re a result of fuzzy or conflated definitions around the topic.
Meanwhile, empathy itself remains a crucial life skill.
And it’s arguably more common for it to be underdeveloped than to have too much of it.
So let’s have a look at what it is, what it isn’t, and how to deepen the skill.
Words Empathy Gets Conflated With
Let’s get this out of the way first. The following words all have slightly different, related meanings:
- Empathy = Feeling with
- Sympathy = Feeling for
- Emotional absorption = Empathy without personal boundaries
- Compassion = Holding in loving regard (doesn’t require empathy)
- Pity = Sympathy mixed with condescension (or sometimes, sympathy with a status differential)
- Co-dependence = Your own emotional state is tied to your impression of someone else’s (but that doesn’t mean you’re feeling theirs)
Distinguishing between these allows us to see some things more clearly:
You can feel empathy without absorbing another’s feelings.
We can believe we struggle with being an empath when the real issue is co-dependence.
Or we may believe we possess empathy when we only possess pity, and never develop awareness of not having it.
You can show empathy for someone’s experience without feeling sympathy for their intentions. If you conflate the two, empathy becomes harder to access.
So what does empathy look like then?
5 Different Levels of Empathy
Similarly to the “6 Levels of Conversational Depth“, which I outlined in their own article, I distinguish between 5 different levels of empathy, from shallow to deep.
Depending on what’s available to you in each moment, you can start at the most surface level, or dive straight into the depths.
1) Cognitive Empathy
Understanding someone’s experience, thoughts, or emotions intellectually. All this requires is listening to the person describe their experience and imagining feeling the same.
Sometimes you’ll imagine it accurately, sometimes you won’t. But the very act of trying is planting the seeds of empathy.
2) Contextual Empathy
“How would I feel if I were in your position?”
This can help us understand feelings we might dismiss when we try to cognitively make sense of the feeling itself.
Context shapes meaning, which shapes the feeling.
For example, imagine someone says “I’m scared of posting reels on Instagram”, and while you get the concept of scared, you struggle understanding why they would be scared of this.
But then you ponder about the implications, you realize that potentially the whole world can watch this person and give them their opinion about it. You remember how rejection feels. That the internet is permanent, that bullying exists, …
And you realize that if you were the one doing it, you’d probably feel scared too.
Maybe you even know which particular flavor of scared.
By thinking through the full context, you learn to grasp more of the specific natures of what they’re sharing, the feeling makes more sense to you.
Since the modern Western world is very thought-dominant, this is the level a lot of our empathy takes place. Still, it barely scratches the surface.
3) Personal Empathy
“How would it feel to be you, having your experience?”
This is very different from “How would I feel having that experience?”
The experiencer shapes the experience. Who is feeling it matters just as much as what’s being felt.
For example, maybe they are scared indeed. But while fear is a feeling that leaves you overwhelmed, for them fear is no big deal (or vice versa).
We all live in different worlds. Personal empathy involves leaving your own world, and visiting theirs.
To imagine not just what it’s like to be in their situation, but to be in it as them. And to get curious about any parts you do not understand.
Many questions and practice used in Authentic Relating are designed to help us do this.
Questions like “What’s that like for you?” help us separate the other person’s real experience from our own projections of how it would feel for us to have it.
And that’s why people often feel so seen when practicing Authentic Relating or Circling. When done well, we meet each other with a level of empathy you don’t often encounter in the wild.
4) Affective Empathy
Affective empathy is feeling the other person’s experience through your body instead of conceptualizing it through our thoughts.
In abstract sense, it is our body being “porous” enough to allow the other person’s emotional charge to enter it, so we can feel it too.
Note that this is not the same as emotional absorption.
Absorbing people’s feelings isn’t an empathy problem but a boundary problem. With healthy boundaries, the feeling is experienced but not internalized. We are impacted, but the feeling stays “theirs”. It was shared, rather than displaced into our body.
Absorption happens when we either identify with the feeling as “ours” or, if we allow it in but then brace against it (which means the emotion can’t be discharged, and stays with us, instead of passing through).
Since bracing against someone’s feelings turns empathy into absorption, deeper affective empathy only becomes accessible with deeper self-regulation.
When we have a wide window of tolerance, we can allow their experience to “pass through” ours, rather than “override” ours.
This distinction is crucial because overriding our experience with theirs leads to losing our experience of self.
Without the self, there’s no one to “do the empathy”.
Instead of feeling 2 people, we feel 0.
(Btw this is also why empathy feels so good: It’s the same emotional charge carried by multiple bodies. But that’s a rabbit hole for another article.)
5) Grokking
Not the LLM, but the word the LLM was based on.
Sometimes, we can understand a person’s feelings without even having to feel or think through them.
It’s non-verbal, non-linear, instant, intuitive and the full experience arrives at once, without processing.
We just Grok it.
Generally, grokking happens as a result of deep attunement. It’s an instant form of empathy that can’t be consciously practiced.
All we can practice is being increasingly, deeply present with each other from moment to moment, and this level appears whenever we manage to do so with sufficient depth of devotion.
Empathy In Arguments
A common criticism of empathy is that it can cause us to lose ourselves in another person’s point of view.
This viewpoint particularly shows up when it comes to debates, arguments or conflict.
But to me it makes no sense.
For starters, even if you were an all-out sociopath, you’d be a way better sociopath if you possessed at least some degree of personal empathy (level 3). And for the non sociopathic among us, not understanding the other would still be a handicap.
In fact, empathy is a key skill (often step 1) in resolving any conflict favorably.
But beyond that, the tension between empathizing and conceding your own position doesn’t hold:
Empathy can’t make you stand less firmly, because as we’ve seen when discussing affective empathy (level 4), you can only fully empathize with anyone when you are firmly grounded in your own experience.
Cultivating Deeper Empathy
Each of these 5 levels of empathy is what it looks like when the previous level is met with increased embodiment, grounding and self-regulation.
When we are severely dysregulated, even cognitive empathy becomes unavailable. When we are deeply embodied and attuned, grokking often happens
This means empathy is not a sign of weakness, but actually a sign of strength.
At least when we see strength as “total capacity”.
The weaker the state of a person’s system (and by that I mean the system being in a state of weak or decreased capacity to carry additional load, not the system itself being weak), the less empathy is accessible.
But what do we do then, when we are feeling completely overwhelmed or dysregulated? How do we access empathy?
That’s where some of these other concepts come in.
Emotional absorption is what empathy looks like in a state of collapse or hypo-arousal.
Pity is a similar story, in most cases it is what empathy looks like in a state of posture or hyperarousal.
(There’s an exception to the “deeper regulation = deeper empathy” framework, and that’s empathy across extreme power differentials. But that’s for another day. The compressed version I’m sharing here is how things work in most situations.)
Low Empathy and “Too Much Empathy” Are Related
This may be surprising, but it goes back to the same principle:
Empathic capacity is similar to capacity for nuance: we can only process as much as we can hold multiple perspectives at the same time.
If we can’t inhabit our own experience, we can’t inhabit other people’s experience on top of that.
So what we’re left with is a choice between emotional absorption, or active rejection of the other’s experience.
And it takes only one look at a comment section to conclude people usually choose the second.
When we are highly empathic but dysregulated, we often learn to close our hearts. Especially once we realize how much of the pain we’ve been carrying wasn’t ours to begin with.
But this is a skill you can practice:
You can taste others’ feelings without having to eat them.