Empathy is not a feeling. It is a practice—a set of skills that can be developed, refined, and deepened over time. This distinction matters because many people believe they either have empathy or they don’t, that it’s a fixed trait rather than a capacity that grows with attention and effort.

During a time of reflexive judgment and polarization, empathy is more necessary than ever. And yet it remains widely misunderstood. Empathy is often confused with sympathy, with compassion, with agreement, with approval. It is none of these things. Empathy is the capacity to sense another person’s experience without losing yourself in it—to feel with someone without feeling for them.

This is harder than it sounds. And more important.

Understanding Empathy

Sympathy, empathy, and compassion are distinct. Sympathy involves feeling sorry for someone—it maintains distance, looking at suffering from outside. Compassion involves being moved by suffering and wanting to help—it generates action. Empathy involves feeling into another’s experience, sensing what they sense, without trying to fix or change anything.

Empathy is boundaried. Unlike sympathy, which can feel expansive and generous, or compassion, which motivates helping, empathy requires holding a careful line. You must be close enough to sense what another person feels, but separate enough to remain yourself. This is cognitively challenging work, and it can lead to fatigue when practiced without adequate self-care.

Empathy as Skill

If empathy is a skill, what does it involve? At its core, empathy means creating conditions where someone feels seen and heard, without judgment. This is rarer than it should be. Most people, most of the time, do not feel truly heard. They feel evaluated, assessed, categorized, or simply waited out while the other person formulates their response.

Empathic listening involves reciprocity: feeling what the other person feels, then reflecting it back. Not interpreting, not analyzing, not explaining—just noticing and naming. It sounds like you’re feeling overwhelmed. There’s something like grief in what you’re describing. I sense frustration underneath what you’re saying.

This kind of reflection serves multiple purposes. It lets the speaker know they’ve been heard. It helps them clarify their own experience by hearing it reflected. And it slows the conversation down, creating space for deeper exploration rather than rushing toward solutions.

The goal is noticing feelings, not changing them. This is perhaps the hardest part for helpers, who naturally want to make things better. But trying to change someone’s feelings—even painful ones—communicates that the feelings are wrong, that they shouldn’t be having them, that they need to be different than they are. Empathy accepts what is present without trying to make it other than it is.

Through this process, empathy cultivates belonging, trust, and safety—the essential experiences that form the foundation of healing.

Preparing to Listen

Before engaging with someone in emotional distress, preparation matters. The quality of your presence depends on the state you bring to the encounter.

What Gets in the Way

Several patterns commonly interfere with empathic listening:

  • Distraction and rushing. These communicate that you have somewhere more important to be, that the person’s experience is an inconvenience.
  • Skipping to solutions. Many people underestimate how much emotional processing matters. They want to fix. But feelings that are not acknowledged don’t go away—they go underground.
  • Giving advice. The impulse to advise comes from genuine caring. But unsolicited advice shifts the focus from the speaker’s experience to the listener’s solutions. It communicates: I know what you should do, even though I haven’t fully heard what you’re going through.
  • Convincing. Making an argument for why the person should feel differently. This treats emotional experience as a problem of logic, which it is not.
  • Judgment and discomfort. When someone expresses feelings that make us uncomfortable—rage, despair, envy, shame—the temptation is to redirect, minimize, or correct. This protects the listener but abandons the speaker.
  • Listener reactivity. What others share often touches our own unresolved material. When this happens, we respond to our own activation rather than to what the other person actually needs.

Emotional life is not neat. People feel contradictory things simultaneously. They say one thing and mean another. They don’t know what they feel. This ambiguity frustrates listeners who want clarity, but it is the nature of emotional experience.

Awareness of Biases

Everyone carries biases—shaped by childhood, family, culture, values, life experience. These biases are not moral failures; they are inevitable features of being human. The goal is not to eliminate them but to become aware of them so they don’t unconsciously drive responses.

Childhood and family norms create templates for how emotions should be handled. If you grew up in a family where anger was forbidden, someone’s rage may activate your own prohibition against it. If vulnerability was shamed, someone’s tears may trigger discomfort that has nothing to do with them.

Cultural norms are often invisible precisely because they’re so pervasive. What counts as appropriate emotional expression varies dramatically across cultures. Eye contact, physical proximity, volume of speech, directness of communication—all of these carry cultural meanings that can lead to misinterpretation.

Judgments arise from values and life context. These are normal but must be set aside during empathic listening. You can disagree with someone’s choices and still empathize with their feelings. You can hold different values and still hear their experience.

Biases are inevitable—awareness and management are the goals, not elimination.

The Practice

Empathy in action involves specific qualities and skills that can be cultivated.

Presence and Authenticity

Inconsistency between words and behavior triggers alarm—it signals that the situation is not safe, that this person cannot be trusted. When emotions are already amplified, consistency between words, body language, and actions is crucial.

This is what it means to practice presence: being yourself, here, right now. Not performing a role, not following a script, not trying to appear a certain way. Authentic presence cannot be faked. People sense the difference between someone who is genuinely present and someone who is going through the motions.

Presence is an active skill. It requires ongoing attention, constant returning to the here and now, repeated release of distractions and preoccupations. The mind wanders; presence means noticing the wandering and coming back.

Grounding

Practices that cultivate body awareness support empathic listening. Simply bringing attention to various sensations—feet on the floor, breath moving, weight in the chair—creates a foundation of stability from which to engage with another’s emotional intensity. The best way to practice grounding is the way that works for you: walking, gardening, singing, yoga, running. What matters is developing the capacity to return to bodily awareness when emotional activation threatens to pull you away.

A grounded listener creates space for others to settle. Your nervous system affects theirs. If you are agitated, they will sense it. If you are grounded and calm, this creates the possibility for them to settle as well. Your breath regulates theirs. A calm presence is contagious. When in doubt, return to the breath.

A caution: Bringing attention to breathing or body awareness can activate strong emotions in people struggling with unresolved challenges. The body is where unresolved emotions reside. Mindfulness practices are not universally calming—they can sometimes open doors that the person is not ready to enter.

Openness

Body language is the primary way we indicate openness to others. We are acutely sensitive to the small signals that others send about their availability for conversation or assistance.

When you practice presence, grounding, authenticity, and non-judgment, you tend to signal that you are open, approachable, positive, and safe. These signals are not performed; they emerge naturally from the inner state.

Openness is felt before it is seen. It begins with inner stillness.

The Clear Channel

Empathy enables what might be called the clear channel—a quality of connection in which communication flows without obstruction. Creating this channel involves getting yourself out of the way: setting aside your own judgments, advice, solutions, and agenda so you can fully attend to the other person’s experience. This is not suppression—it’s choosing when and how to engage your own material. (For more on managing your own activation, see Self-Awareness for Helpers.)

Getting yourself out of the way creates space. When you are not taking up room with your own reactions, there is more room for theirs. When you are not formulating responses, you can actually hear what they’re saying. When you are not trying to fix anything, they can explore their experience without pressure.

The clear channel provides safe containment. When someone has been holding something for a long time—a feeling, a memory, an experience—they need to know that sharing it will not destroy the container. Your grounded presence communicates that you can hear whatever they need to say, that you will not be destroyed by their intensity, that the relationship can hold what emerges.

Prompts and Responses

If empathic listening is primarily about creating space and getting out of the way, what do you actually say? The answer is: less than you think.

Scaffolding

Prompts provide conversational structure—a light scaffolding that supports the other person’s exploration without directing it. Prompts have no definitive forms or styles and can be as varied as any types of speech. The function of a prompt is to open space to focus on feelings.

The best prompts are simple, open, and without agenda.

Noticing

Self-awareness enables empathic response. When you begin by noticing yourself—your own emotional activation, your own reactions—you also become more capable of noticing the emotions of others.

You should not try to label or assess others’ emotions; instead, simply acknowledge that they are having emotional reactions. Something like I notice you’re having a reaction is a simple and reasonable starting point for a conversation about emotions.

Remember to use your own words. If others use their own words to define their emotions—I’m sad, I’m angry, I’m bewildered—affirm those feelings. Don’t translate them into your preferred vocabulary.

Noticing without interpreting keeps the focus on them, not you.

Timing and Tone

A simple just checking in is a non-intrusive way of signaling that help is available—an opening without obligation. Combining it with I notice you’re having a reaction creates a template for engaging with someone who is emotionally activated.

But it is not the words themselves that are effective. It is how they are delivered, and when. Pause, breathe, and sense the moment before speaking. Timing and tone matter more than perfect wording.

Affirming Feelings

When someone names their feelings, affirm them. Listen for the words they use to describe their experience. Use the same feeling words in your reply, or use similar words that convey the same feeling.

Try not to impose your own feelings or perspectives. Simple responses work: Yes, I can see that you’re angry. Or: Help me understand what you’re feeling.

Skilled listeners use body language, minimal encouragers (hmm, uh-huh, yeah, OK), and careful timing. Words matter less than delivery.

Possibilities

Some phrases that support empathic engagement:

  • Just checking in… or Thought I would check in…
  • I notice… or It looks like…
  • It sounds like… or It seems like…
  • I’m curious…
  • If I understand you correctly, you’re feeling…
  • So, it’s like you feel… (using a metaphor)

What Not to Say

Certain responses, however common, consistently undermine empathic connection:

  • Calm down. (Dismisses their experience)
  • This is not the right place/time. (Rejects their timing)
  • I can’t help you. (Abandons them)
  • You are annoying/inappropriate. (Attacks their character)
  • Why can’t you be like others? (Shames their difference)
  • Maybe this is not for you. (Questions their belonging)
  • It’s your fault. (Blames them)

These responses all share a common feature: they prioritize the listener’s comfort over the speaker’s experience.

Listening and Advocacy

There is a potential harm if you never speak up to advocate. Silence in the face of injustice is not neutrality—it is complicity.

However, in situations of emotional distress, a listener who immediately pivots to advocacy can cause harm by removing or minimizing emotional processing. Jumping to action before feelings have been acknowledged communicates that feelings don’t matter, that the important thing is doing something, that sitting with discomfort is a waste of time.

In most situations, lead with empathy. Solutions and strategies come later.

This is not a prohibition against advocacy. It is a recognition that advocacy is most effective when it emerges from a foundation of genuine empathic connection. People are more likely to receive and act on advocacy when they first feel heard.

Know When to Engage

Strong emotion is normal and often healthy—but can also signal distress and trauma. Learning to distinguish between these requires practice and self-awareness.

A person who can express strong emotions but also bring themselves back to emotional safety and calm is typically safe and does not need intervention. The nervous system activates, expresses, and settles. This is healthy emotional functioning.

A person who is unable to contain or manage emotional activation needs immediate help. The signs include escalating intensity, loss of contact with surroundings, inability to respond to verbal engagement, or physical symptoms like hyperventilation or trembling that don’t resolve.

Knowing the difference requires much practice and self-awareness. When in doubt, err on the side of gentle engagement: I’m just checking in. I notice you’re having a reaction. Is there anything you need?

A Lifelong Practice

Empathy is not a destination to be reached but a practice to be maintained. It must be renewed in each conversation, each encounter, each moment. The skills can be developed, but they require ongoing attention. The capacity can grow, but it needs continued cultivation.

This is what it means to be truly present with another person: to set aside your own agenda, to listen without judgment, to create space for whatever needs to emerge. The skills can be named in a sentence and take a lifetime to master. And it is one of the most important things a human being can offer another.

Return to the Mental Health Guide introduction for an overview of all articles in this series.