Why Hypersensitive People Actually Lack Empathy

Empathy will render you resilient — not sensitive

Recently I wrote about why I believe most “empaths” are narcissists here:

I talked about why hypersensitive people are the way they are because they lack empathy. Many people disagreed, saying that just because someone is “sensitive” doesn’t mean they cannot empathise properly.

I will explain why I think being hypersensitive and empathic are completely opposite traits.

A lot of people are under the assumption that people with empathy are nice/good people, while people who lack empathy are bad/evil people.

In other words, they have a very simplistic view of human nature.

The reality is we are all born without prosocial emotions, including empathy. We develop these emotions through our relationship with our caregivers. If the primary caregiver is responsive to our needs, our brains will eventually learn to trust and relate to other people and form secure attachments. Those raised under any condition that doesn’t allow for healthy attachments miss out on a critical developmental stage of the brain.

Having dysfunctional parents can result in arrested development which is what personality disorders are. Having any personality disorder (including co-dependency/Dependent Personality Disorder) means you lack the full-fledged emotional experience of a healthy adult. In other words, if someone lacks empathy, this has nothing to do with their innate character. It simply means they have experienced childhood trauma, and their brains haven’t developed fully as a result.

One can learn to empathise without having the capacity to feel it emotionally. Hence, emotions are not a must to see things from someone else’s perspective or understand your own contribution to a problem. However, emotions are tools that will help you get there more quickly.

Most people who have experienced early childhood trauma struggle to form healthy relationships.

This is because they cannot relate to others properly due to deficiencies in prosocial emotions. Emotions promote understanding of one another and strengthen the chance of surviving by allowing the individual to get along with others around him. Not being able to do so causes isolation and renders survival difficult.

Emotions are crucial to surviving because they help us internalise and reduce black-and-white thinking (a primitive way of seeing the world). We see everything as either good or bad when we are born. When a baby is hungry and starts crying, but the primary caregiver isn’t responsive, this causes the baby to see the caregiver as “bad” at that particular moment. Once the primary caregiver is back and responsive, the baby may then see them as “good”. In other words, you are either good or bad for a baby — there is no in-between. Their brains are too underdeveloped to understand complexity.

Yet the world is complex, and so are humans. When the primary caregiver isn’t responding to the baby crying, this doesn’t necessarily mean they are “evil”. They could be in the middle of something, be depressed, have other mental health issues, or have other problems that prevented them from feeding the baby.

The ability to understand this complexity — that other people are humans with their own problems and nothing is personal — is achieved over time through the development of prosocial emotions. When a healthy and mature adult is disappointed by someone, they don’t automatically assume that this person is evil. They are not as sensitive to the daily struggles of a relationship as someone who lacks empathy.

Imagine your brain perceiving every situation as one extreme or the other by switching between the two.

Let’s say you started a job and everything is great, so you idealise it — it’s perfect. Then after your first week, you have a disagreement with a co-worker, and suddenly it starts to feel like the worst job in the world. This is because if you have black-and-white thinking, there is no room for perceiving the situation as something in the middle like “a good job with some difficulties”.

Our brains are plastic and prosocial emotions will actually make us less and less black and white over the course of our lives. When we can empathise, we can see the nuances in every situation; maybe the co-worker was rude to us because they misunderstood something we said and perceived it as an insult. This can allow us to either let it go or come up with a way to resolve it through communication. In other words, we can realise that human relationships are complex, and so is every situation. It’s not that the co-worker was “evil”, as human nature is not that simplistic.

The other issue with black-and-white thinking is that it renders someone highly insecure.

I have explained why this is the case here:

As I explained before, black-and-white thinking is caused by a lack of prosocial emotions such as empathy, guilt, shame and remorse. As a result, people who lack empathy are insecure, easily offended and take everything personally. This is not just because they can’t see things from other people’s perspectives but also because seeing everything as either good or bad means seeing themselves as either good or bad.

All-or-nothing thinking will inevitably result in perfectionism and low self-esteem as it means someone can be either “perfect” or “a failure” with nothing in between. Because of this, these people have an inability to tolerate mistakes and criticism because their primitive way of seeing the world renders them highly insecure. They lack a strong inner core.

Let us analyse someone with high levels of social anxiety as an example.

• Where does social anxiety come from? Why would someone be socially anxious?

It’s because they fear judgement and criticism. It basically means they fear other people.

• But why do they fear other people more than a healthy individual?

I believe this is because they have low self-esteem due to black-and-white thinking, which indicates they have a lowered capacity for understanding other people (empathy).

Empathy will, in fact, reduce fear and anxiety — because it means you can understand human nature and therefore people’s behaviours, judgements and criticisms don’t affect you as much.

Lack of empathy, on the other hand, will result in you demonising others and seeing them as “evil”, “predatory”, and “out to get you”.

In other words, if you lack empathy and have black-and-white thinking as a result, it means you don’t have a strong inner core to deal with other people. This will increase your levels of fear and anxiety because people can hurt you much more as you cannot self-soothe like someone who is not black and white can.

When you have the emotional and mental capacity to deal with disappointments, rejection, criticism and anything else, you will have less need to fear people. If someone with social anxiety fixes their core by working on their black-and-white thinking, their anxiety levels will be reduced.

Hypersensitivity is the biggest indicator that someone lacks empathy.

Many people find it offensive to suggest that someone who experienced childhood trauma may lack empathy because they see people who are unempathetic as bad or evil. Or when they hear the word “narcissist”, they imagine someone who is an evil predator, when, in reality, Narcissistic Personality Disorder is simply a shame-based disorder.

We all know that narcissists lack empathy. But they also struggle with high levels of abandonment anxiety (co-dependency), low self-esteem, perfectionism, fear of rejection, and criticism. They need constant attention to regulate their self-esteem as they cannot do this independently. One can easily argue that narcissists are very sensitive people and this is precisely because they lack empathy.

I can make the same argument for any other personality disorder. It is normal to feel sad if someone criticises you, but most people can deal with it and move on. However, if people can easily hurt you with their words and behaviours, and cause you to very quickly feel slighted, and become depressive, anxious, and/or aggressive, this indicates you lack empathy and have low self-esteem. If you could empathise and understand others, they wouldn’t affect you as strongly.

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