The Issue Isn’t Empathy, It’s Compassion (And The 6 Steps To Build It)
I was slouched in my chair this morning, mindlessly thumbing through Threads when a post snagged my attention—someone lamenting about how they just don’t understand why empathy doesn't come naturally to everyone.
As I watched that post's comments tick upward—36, 51, 73—my mind glitched and portaled me back in time. Suddenly, I was hunched over my designated desk in the Case Library basement at Colgate University. It’s 2019, and I’m polishing up the final touches on my senior thesis.
For four years, I burrowed into academic halls, letting myself become hypnotized by the neuroscientific and psychological research swirling around empathy, narcissism, and the pursuit of personal freedom. I burned with unrelenting curiosity and barely contained passion, desperately seeking to understand what had triggered such a complete and utter breakdown of personal fulfillment and healthy relationships in our society.
As I watched people around me suffering and accidentally inflicting harm despite what they preached (myself included), I knew we needed more than just theories and research—we needed real, lasting solutions. On a personal level, I needed a path to real change and empathy just simply wasn’t cutting it.
The United States does not have an empathy problem, it has a compassion problem.
Since 2020, conversations about empathy's decline and narcissism's rise in American Society have exploded across the internet, ricocheting through our collective consciousness. Over the last 5 years, wellness gurus, new age influencers, and spiritual thought leaders have flooded every platform with declarations of purging out darkness and promises of immanent collective ascension. Oodles upon noodles of books, blog posts, articles, podcasts, and social media manifestos continue to be churned out about this epidemic supposedly ravaging our society and the desperate need for more love and light empathy.
I’ve watched humans I knew to be compassionate, intuitive, and kind fling terms like sociopath, narcissist, and psychopath around as casually as they referenced the latest viral TikTok sounds. Each diagnosis sliced through nuance like a dull knife, declaring ever single person who’s ever caused harm as a pure and rotten villain. Not only did was I witness it obliterate relationships and faith in other humans for my dear friends, but I watched it do the same in my own life.
Empathy is the ability to understand and relate to another person’s thoughts, feelings, and experience.
The concept of lacking empathy’s always perplexed me because empathy is a biological brain mechanism—aka humans are hardwired for it. It’s how we form relationships with other people and creatures. There’s a mountain of research that strongly suggests that a high capacity for empathy is linked to a person’s neuroanatomy and physiology—so either you’re born with the hardware working or you’re not.
Empathy been linked to genes, a special type of brain cell (mirror neurons), certain brain structures (ex. pre-frontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex), and how certain parts of the brain communicate with each other. There’s a huge debate within this field of research about the impact of nature (what you’re born with) and nurture (what you learn and develop through experience) on one’s capacity for empathy.
Only 0.5 to 5% of the general population has been diagnosed with the Dark Triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) but somehow everyone I know has encountered a string of narcissists in their lives. The math doesn’t math. So, what’s was actually going on?
To get someone else’s feels, you have to feel safe feeling your own.
But the thing about the human brain is that if we humans experience anything doesn’t feel safe, it sounds DEF CON 1 and pulls the emergency protocol in the nervous system, shutting off all lines to anything that mandatory for survival.
If you grew up tiptoeing around emotional landmines at home, survived trauma, or simply experience life with heightened sensitivity and emotional intensity, feeling emotions probably does not register as safe in your nervous system.
The result? Your brain cuts the power to your ability to feel, also cutting off empathy.
Riddle me this: How are people just supposed to be more empathetic if their brain is telling them that feeling feelings is a matter of life or death?
The United States prides itself on having an eat or be eaten mentality. “If they wanted to, they would” is spewed more often than bibliophiles lament the burning of the Library of Alexandria and the belief that a person can “just do it” is so engrained that corporations have smacked it on sweat-wicking athletic gear. This grotesquely simple falsehood that a mindset shift and forced action will solve all the world problems is the foundation of the soap boxes thousands of wellness and mindset influencers with enormous followings stand upon.
If someone's nervous system treats emotion-processing like a life-or-death situation, chances of extending that capacity to others hover somewhere between microscopically slim to absolutely none.
No wonder America's empathy shortage has reached epidemic proportions.
The key is increasing the empathy quotient for Americans is feeling safe. That means that the American population really needs to start learning how to feel our own feelings and discern what is our and what is not so that we can hold space for others.
The solution to increasing emotional processing is teaching compassion.
Sympathy → Empathy → Compassion
It’s May of 2017, and I’m preparing to spend 3-months working as a Horseback Riding counselor for 12-14 year old girls at a wilderness summer camp nestled at the base of the Rocky Mountain National Park in Estes Park, Colorado. I’m perched on a well-loved wooden bench in the middle of staff training, furiously scribbling notes. A nationally acclaimed Child Psychologist is in the middle of preparing us to be the emotional support system for the impressionable campers we’ll be guiding and caring for next months, impressing upon us the importance of not approaching our campers with empathy but with compassion.
Why? Because compassion is empathy with boundaries.
He leads us through this metaphor that is now carved into my mind:
Sympathy is seeing someone stuck in a hole and acknowledging that their experience sucks and then going on your way.
Empathy is getting into the hole with someone to understand their experience—but then you’re both stuck and in crisis.
Compassion is asking what’s going on, how to help, then providing that help, and empowering them to use the help provide—that way you’re stay okay and the other person has a path to being okay again, too.
Mind. Blown.
If all of us 19 to 23 year old counselors approach campers in crisis with empathy, we will just make it about ourselves, not actually help at all, and potentially even cause harm.
True compassion is deep understanding and then moving into action. It’s not abandoning or slipping back into the pseudo-protective ease of sympathy that only causes more suffering. After all, life randomly throws unavoidable holes into your path and how is anyone going to help you if they’re also stuck in holes?
If just approaching with empathy, we’re all going to drown (and the human survival instinct just simply won’t allow for that).
The Six Steps to Building Self-Compassion.
To cultivate genuine compassion for others, you need to first develop rock-solid self-compassion. This journey looks a lot like falling in love with all parts of yourself—even the ones currently setting off your internal alarm systems. It’s about trusting your intuition and getting to know what makes you, you.
Step 1. Learn how to feel safe in your life and your body
Personal safety (physically, emotionally, mentally, and relationally) must come first. Otherwise, your brain will keep pulling the fire alarm and cutting you off from creating change to protect you.
Step 2. Learn how to feel safe spiritually as you face the unknown.
This requires getting to know your sense of spiritual safety, resourcing outside of the physical, and know that everything’s going to be alright even if it’s not right now.
Step 3. Learn how to care for your own needs and advocate for yourself
Connecting to and excavating when you were wounded in the past allows you to reframe the beliefs you learned from others that are preventing you caring for yourself. By deciding what’s yours and what you want to keep from what’s not and what you want to control-alt-delete, you can discover how you actually love yourself in that’s joyful and playful.
Step 4. Learn how to see yourself as the truly wonderful person you are.
True transformation happens when you give yourself evidence that you’re already succeeding. Humans (really all living creatures) create real and lasting change faster when it’s through positive encouragement rather than negative punishment. You’re way more magical and talented than you give yourself credit for. Change happens when you focus on what works just as much (if not slightly more) than what’s not working.
Step 5. Learn how to work with the parts of you that are wrecking havoc on your life.
Yes, that includes the parts of you that are actively self-sabotaging, telling you awful things inside your head, and preventing you from success by keeping you trapped in old and destructive patterns in an attempt to protect you. It’s how you take accountability and find true compassion.
Step 6. Learn how to craft and implement habits that allow you to be your favorite version of yourself in your life.
Your brain needs evidence to seek new behaviors and trust that taking action and embracing a new way of living is worth it. As a human, you also need systems, habits, and structures to start and maintain habits that continue those behaviors to get you the outcomes you want. For example, visualizing the future you want as your very real lived reality.
In order to actually create a path forward for greater personal, communal, and collective well being, we humans need to learn to:
Process our own emotions without drowning in them
Advocate for our needs before reaching crisis point
Distinguish between our feelings and others'
Witness suffering without making it about us
Ask for and offering help within healthy boundaries
Take aligned action that serves everyone involved
Empower others while honoring our own limits
This is the process of intuitive self-discovery (aka on your own terms) and crafting your own relationship with and system for living your life in integrity (one that you design to work for you).
How we treat others mirrors our relationship with ourselves.
When you peek behind the curtain of America's supposed "empathy crisis," what you'll find isn't a generation of sociopaths scrolling TikTok. You'll find millions of people who learned to mute their feelings because their nervous systems treat emotions like a five-alarm fire. The person who ghosts you after three dates? They're probably not a narcissist—they're just someone who never learned how to say "I'm feeling overwhelmed" without their throat closing up.
It's like we're all walking around with emotional smoke detectors set to maximum sensitivity. The smallest whiff of feelings sets off a building-wide evacuation. And telling someone in fight-or-flight mode to "just be more empathetic" is about as helpful as telling someone having a panic attack to "just calm down."
Shaming people for their lack of empathy is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. When we point fingers and label everyone who's hurt us as a narcissist, we're not creating safety—we're reinforcing the very patterns that made emotional expression feel dangerous in the first place.
Real change starts with radical acceptance.
The path forward isn't through call-out posts about narcissistic exes or viral threads about how no one has empathy anymore. It's through creating spaces where people can safely reconnect with their own emotions without drowning in them. Where they can learn to say "I'm hurting" without being told they're too sensitive, and "I need help" without being seen as weak.
When we develop genuine self-compassion—the kind that lets us sit with our messiest feelings without reaching for our phones to numb out—we naturally extend that same grace to others. The person who's learned to comfort their inner critic with kindness instead of shame is the same person who can hold space for a friend's struggles without making it about themselves.
The path-forward is for everyone is through compassion.
Picture a world where emotional intelligence is as valued as intellectual prowess. One where taking a mental health day doesn't require an elaborate lie about food poisoning, and we recognize that taking the space to care for and falling in love with ourselves is not selfish—it's the foundation for liberating and coming home to our communities.
This isn't just a feel-good wishful thinking. It's a practical pathway that addresses everything from workplace burnout to political polarization. When we learn to navigate our own emotional landscapes with compassion, we develop the capacity to build bridges instead of walls with those that look, think, and act different from us. Not only does it ask everyone to grow and be better, but it also centers personal well-being right alongside collective well-being.
The solution isn't to shame people into being more empathetic. It's to create conditions where empathy can naturally flourish, like a plant finally getting the right amount of sunlight, water, and soil nutrients. And that starts with each of us doing the internal work to make emotional safety not just a buzzword, but a lived reality.
When we can meet ourselves with compassion—in all our messy, imperfect, still-figuring-it-out human glory—we create ripple effects that extend far beyond what our minds can currently imagine. We build the foundation for a society where compassion isn't a rarity touted in magazines, church halls, and Instagram posts, but it’s engrained into how we live and breathe.
