How We’re Getting Empathy Wrong

You can feel deep empathy for someone and still leave them feeling unseen. It’s a hard truth, especially for those of us who care.

Empathy is often misunderstood. It isn’t about being soft, or agreeable, or lacking boundaries.

Empathy, in its essence, is about perspective-taking: the ability to shift from your own lens and imagine the world through someone else’s.

As Atticus Finch put it in To Kill a Mockingbird:

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view—until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

That’s cognitive empathy. Sometimes empathy is emotional—we resonate with someone’s sadness or joy. Sometimes it’s somatic—our body flinches when we see someone get hurt.

These distinctions matter. Because in today’s world, empathy seems to have become transactional: offered selectively, confused with agreement, and dependent on status, identity, or proximity. Empathy does not require agreement, or fixing, or sameness. 

Empathy is expansive. It allows us to understand someone even when their world is nothing like ours.

But here’s the trap: Feeling empathy and being experienced by others as empathetic are not the same thing.

You might be fully engaged in perspective-taking and the other person may still walk away feeling invisible. That doesn’t mean you’ve failed. But it does mean empathy alone isn’t always enough.

Empathy becomes real when it lands. That means not only tuning in to your intent, but the other person’s experience of your intent, too.

Here are three ways to bridge the gap:

• Listen fully without rehearsing your reply.
• Make space for discomfort without rushing to solve the problem.
• Acknowledge emotion—you don’t have to agree in order to say: I see you.

Empathy that lands creates connection. It’s what helps a child feel safe, a team feel seen, and a stranger feel like a neighbor.

And in a world of fast takes and fractured attention, it is nothing short of radical.