Please know that you’re not alone in this struggle. And by simply reaching out for help, that tells me you’re capable of empathy. You took your friends’ comments seriously, considered their point of view, and set an intention to become a better friend. Well done!
Let’s start with clarifying our language. Empathy, which is the ability to understand the feelings of others, is similar to sympathy, which is a feeling of sadness for someone else’s misfortune. Here’s where they differ: When someone’s empathetic, they’re able to put themselves in the other person’s place and feel things from their point of view. Sympathy is filtered more through your own perspective and how you’d feel in the other person’s shoes.
I’ll address your last question first. No, you aren’t doomed to having only superficial relationships. As humans, we have empathy. In many cases, it’s not entirely absent in certain individuals but may be reduced. Fortunately, empathy is an emotion people can develop with practice.
In cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), we refer to a cognitive triad—the bidirectional connections between thoughts, feelings, and action (or brain, body, and behavior). By changing one of those elements, you often can impact the others.
For example, by acting the way an empathetic person would, you can train yourself to think with empathy and eventually feel it too. Listening actively and paying attention to body language and other nonverbal cues can help as well.
As for why you might have difficulty feeling or demonstrating empathy, there are several reasons this might be the case. Sometimes it stems from an experience, such as trauma, illness, or burnout, where a person has a diminished capacity to take on another person’s problems.
A lack of empathy can also be the result of an individual’s upbringing and how social skills were modeled or taught. For example, in some cultures or religions, boys may be discouraged from displaying vulnerable emotions.
Low empathy may also be caused by mental health conditions, such as antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and borderline personality disorder.
And someone who is neurodivergent may seem blunt or have a harder time putting themselves in another person’s place. Neurodiversity is an umbrella term for a range of conditions including autism spectrum disorder, learning disabilities, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). How these conditions present in people varies. Being neurodiverse simply means your brain processes information differently than how it’s typically processed by most people.
Does that mean that if you have neurodivergent qualities, you also lack empathy? Certainly not. Every individual is unique. But allowing for differences in how you or someone else may take in information, understand it, and interact with others fosters a kinder interpretation of these differences, rather than writing someone off as uncaring. We all have the capacity to feel empathy and recognizing that will be the first step in your journey.
