Standing Close Enough

Why empathy requires distance

Recently, I was reminded of something a professor said in a psychology graduate class decades ago. At the time, it sounded like a practical teaching point for those in training to be psychotherapists – useful, reasonable, and easy to accept without much thought. Lately, though, it’s been returning to me.

He said something like this:

“Empathy is important in counseling, and in helping others more generally. But if you feel exactly what the other person is feeling – if you are carrying the same intensity of emotion or pain as them – then you no longer have empathy. You now have two people in distress, with neither in a position to help the other.”

He wasn’t advocating detachment. Quite the opposite. What he was pointing to was something more precise, and harder to hold. Empathy, as he described it, lives in a particular space – close enough to understand, yet steady enough to be helpful.

At the time, I understood this mostly as technique. A guideline for doing the work professionally. I don’t think I fully appreciated what he was really pointing to.

I think I’m beginning to understand differently now.

Over the past few years, I’ve found myself returning to questions about empathy – not in an abstract way, but through the lens of life. I’ve begun to wonder whether, somewhere along the way, I started to confuse understanding suffering with needing to share it fully in order to have legitimate concern.

What was once taught as the capacity to understand another person while remaining grounded now too often seems to be understood as needing to feel the same weight, the same pain, the same emotional impact – as though sharing the suffering itself has become the measure of concern.

My training in therapy emphasized empathy as one of the most essential human capacities. Carl Rogers placed it at the center of healing, alongside authenticity and unconditional positive regard. But empathy, in that tradition, was never defined as emotional fusion. It was accurate understanding – entering another person’s inner world as they experience it, while still remaining separately and uniquely oneself.

That distinction matters.

Empathy, as I was taught, does not require self-erasure. It does not ask us to abandon our footing. In fact, it depends on that footing. Without it, understanding loses its capacity to help.

And yet, I’ve found myself wondering whether I sometimes drift away from that original meaning. Whether empathy can quietly slide from attunement into absorption. From presence into paralysis.

If I am exactly where you are, I cannot help you move.

If I refuse to go near where you are, I cannot understand you.

Empathy lives in the space between those two truths.

It asks something nuanced of us. It asks us to come close – to listen carefully, to take another person’s pain seriously, to feel its emotional reality. And at the same time, it asks us to remain resourced and stable enough to respond rather than collapse.

I’ve begun to think that the deepest usefulness of empathy lies right there.

We don’t need to have cancer to understand the fear of someone who does.

We don’t need to be drowning to recognize another person’s terror of the water.

In fact, it’s often our steadiness that makes helping another person possible at all.

It’s about allowing ourselves to remain capable, present, and emotionally available – so that when we encounter suffering, we can meet it with clarity rather than being undone by it.

I used to hear my professor’s words as guidance about professional boundaries. About not getting lost in someone else’s emotions.

Now I hear them differently.

I hear them as a reminder that all compassion needs solid ground. That empathy, to do what it is meant to do, must be anchored somewhere stable. And that staying grounded isn’t a failure of caring – it’s often what allows care to take shape at all.

That feels like something worth remembering.

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For more insights on living with clarity, explore my two books: The Self-Awareness Advantage and 52 Seeds.