When people talk about empathy, they almost always talk about feeling.
This makes intuitive sense. Our earliest lessons about empathy are often framed this way: imagine how they must feel; put yourself in their shoes; try to feel it from their side. When empathy works at all, it often feels like a kind of emotional closeness or resonance.
So if empathy so often goes wrong, a natural response is to assume that we haven’t felt enough, or haven’t felt accurately enough.
But there is a problem with this assumption—one that shows up as soon as we look closely at how emotional “feeling with” actually behaves in practice.
When feeling with works—and when it doesn’t
There are situations where emotional alignment does genuine good.
When someone is grieving, frightened, or overwhelmed, the sense that another person is emotionally present can be deeply stabilising. Feeling accompanied matters. Resonance matters. Silence shared in the right emotional register can be more helpful than any explanation.
But notice something important: these are situations where understanding is not the main demand.
What is needed is presence, not interpretation. Regulation, not orientation. Care, not clarity.
Now contrast this with situations where understanding is at stake:
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a disagreement about motives
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a conflict over responsibility
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a misunderstanding about what mattered or why
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a moral or political disagreement
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a moment where someone says, “You’re not hearing me”
In these situations, emotional alignment often fails—or even makes things worse.
At times, emotional alignment increases the sense that you understand, while leaving the other person feeling even more misread.
Emotional resonance is not directional
One reason for this is that emotion, on its own, is not very precise.
Emotions tell us that something matters, but not how it matters, to whom, or in what terms. Two people can feel intense anger together while disagreeing completely about its source, its justification, and its implications. They can share grief without sharing meaning. They can resonate emotionally while diverging interpretively.
Emotional resonance amplifies salience, but it does not specify orientation.
This is why feeling with someone can be genuinely moving and genuinely uninformative at the same time.
The problem of projection
There is a more serious risk lurking here.
When empathy is framed primarily as feeling what another feels, it becomes very easy to substitute my emotional responses for your perspective. I imagine how I would feel in your situation, and then treat that imagined feeling as insight into your experience.
This is not done maliciously. It is often done with the best intentions.
But the result is a quiet shift:
Your experience becomes intelligible only insofar as it matches my own emotional repertoire.
At that point, empathy stops being a way of reaching toward another and becomes a way of confirming oneself.
Sympathy, identification, and contagion
Part of the confusion around empathy comes from the fact that it is rarely distinguished from several neighbouring phenomena.
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Emotional contagion: catching another’s mood or affect
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Sympathy: feeling concern or care for someone
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Identification: seeing oneself in another’s situation
All of these can feel empathic. All of them can accompany empathy. None of them guarantees understanding.
The trouble begins when these experiences are treated as sufficient.
Why disagreement is so revealing
Disagreement is where the limits of feeling-based empathy become most visible.
In disagreement, emotional alignment is often impossible—or actively misleading. Feeling with the other person may require feeling something you reject, or rejecting something you feel strongly yourself. The emotional landscape becomes contested rather than shared.
And yet, disagreement is precisely where empathy is most needed.
If empathy were primarily a matter of shared feeling, then empathy would collapse the moment people diverged emotionally. But our moral intuitions tell us something else: that it is still possible—and still important—to understand someone you disagree with.
This tells us something crucial:
Empathy must be able to survive emotional divergence.
Which means it cannot be defined in emotional terms alone.
A first separation
At this point, we can begin to make a careful distinction—without denying the reality or importance of feeling.
But it cannot constitute it.
Feeling with someone is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding them. Sometimes it helps; sometimes it hinders; sometimes it gives us false confidence precisely when we most need caution.
If empathy is to be something we can rely on—especially in situations of tension, conflict, or difference—it must involve something more disciplined than emotional alignment.
What this opens up
Once we stop treating feeling as the core of empathy, a different set of questions comes into view:
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What does it actually mean to understand another?
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What must be in place for one perspective to be intelligible to another?
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How can understanding preserve difference rather than collapse it?
These are not emotional questions. They are questions about orientation, perspective, and meaning.
In the next post, we’ll begin to approach empathy from this angle—not by abandoning what people experience when they empathise, but by asking what must be going on for those experiences to count as understanding at all.
Empathy does not fail because we fail to feel.
It fails because feeling, on its own, is not enough.
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