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Real Empathy vs. Fake Empathy: How to Truly Connect
Visualize a time you were sharing something painful with someone. They were nodding, saying “I hear you,” reacting in all the right places. But something felt off. You could tell they weren’t really with you. The words were there, but the energy wasn’t. You left feeling more alone than before you started. Now think of a time someone truly sat with you. Maybe they barely said anything, but you could feel them feeling it with you. That’s the difference.
What Faked Empathy Feels Like
When we’re wearing a mask and putting on our best show to validate the other person and make them feel seen or heard, we feel the incredible work and labor that goes into performing empathy. It feels like gears grinding, something painful and labor-intensive. When true empathy is activated, you’ll feel an energetic flow, like a string between you and that person. True empathy can feel weighty and heavy, because we’re sitting in the heaviness of the emotion, embodying it, feeling it all over. That’s another way to tell whether it’s true empathy or simply acting.
With true empathy, we feel it through our body, feeling how it must play out for them, as if the experience were happening to us while we hear the other person out. When you’re faking empathy, trying in a way that doesn’t match how you’re really feeling, it lives in your head, maybe your shoulders, like you’re trying so, so, so hard to understand, or to pretend, so that you come off like you understand the emotions of others.
When we truly empathize, it stays with us. We’ll feel a lot of heaviness. You may want to cry. You’ll feel it in your body and your emotions, as if it’s happening to you. However, it will be temporary, and once the interaction is over, we should be able to return to our normal balance. That’s not to say we won’t sometimes remember the moment and feel some of it again, but it’s not a burden we carry for the rest of the day. Compare that with the exhaustion that comes with fake empathy, because we’re trying so hard, in our heads and our hearts, to connect, and failing.
How to Truly Connect
To truly connect with someone, step out of just understanding them in your head. If you get stuck in thinking, “they’re feeling this because of that,” the context might help, but we can start to miss the actual feeling. The key is to remember that we already know it. We all know how it feels to be angry or sad, how heavy, how chaotic, or how energizing it can be. Can you feel what they’re feeling? Can you remember a time you felt that way yourself, call that feeling back, and start there?
This requires being comfortable sitting in your own feelings, even when it’s uncomfortable. Have you been able to sit in your own anger? In your own sadness? It’s going to be really hard to sit in someone else’s emotion if you have trouble sitting in your own. That doesn’t mean you have to be perfectly put together and able to handle anything, just that your system won’t shut you down to protect you from what it sees as a threat.
Leading With Love
I think the way to build that empathy is through practices of love, cultivating the feeling of “I may not like this person right now, but I have a deep love for them.” If I can start to embody that, then I can see myself as the kind of person who loves and who leads with love. When I say love, I mean the kind of connection you feel with people you care deeply about. It doesn’t have to be someone you know at all, just something you can offer them as a fellow human being, out here trying to live their life.
You can trust that they know their own experience. They’re trusting you. That trust stops us from invalidating them, out loud or in our own heads, with “well, they shouldn’t be feeling this way.” Well, they are. This person is standing in front of you expressing that emotion. How can you see that vulnerability in someone else?
How This Shows Up in Therapy
So much of what brings people into couples therapy comes back to this. One partner is sharing something painful, and the other is nodding, saying the right things, maybe even trying to fix it, but the first partner still walks away feeling unheard. Over time, that disconnection builds. In couples therapy, we slow those moments down. We work on noticing when you’re in your head trying to understand versus actually feeling with your partner, and we practice staying present with each other’s emotions instead of defending, explaining, or shutting down.
Individual therapy is often where this work starts. If sitting with your own anger or sadness feels overwhelming, it makes sense that sitting with someone else’s would too. Your system is doing its job, trying to protect you. In individual therapy, we build your capacity to feel your own emotions safely, so they don’t have to shut you down. And as you get more comfortable with your own inner world, empathy for the people you love starts to come more naturally, without the exhaustion of faking it.
A Practice for Building Empathy
First, get to know the emotion in yourself. When you feel sad, angry, or happy, pause and recognize it. Name it. Give it a color. Notice where it lives in your body.
Next, recall other times you’ve felt that same emotion. What did you see? What did you hear, maybe even the voice in your head? How did you feel about having that emotion?
The more you build up this library of your own feelings, the easier it becomes to call on them. Then, when someone across from you is sad, you can bring back those memories, visually, in your mind, and in your body, and feel with them instead of just thinking about them.
If you’re in Connecticut and looking for a therapist to help you build deeper connection, with yourself or with your partner, you can learn more about working with me here for partners and here for indivduals.
Take care,
Emma Katinia Brumenschenkel, MFT-A