If you start a conversation by saying, “I am committed to expanding empathy in the individual and community,” then some people think you are a pushover. Weak. Vulnerable to bullying. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hard empathy (sometimes also called “radical empathy”) is different than “empathy is hard.” A lack of attention to hard empathy is another reason that being empathic is harder than it needs to be. And this post explains why by distinguishing hard empathy from soft empathy.

Listen to this post as a podCast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2NA04JeYNJUlOS5EOKxZYF?si=b355bf82b05d4bc7

The innovation proposed here is to think of empathy, like so many things these days, as existing on a spectrum between empathy as “empathic listening” and empathy as “tough love.” A rigorous and critical empathy includes both options, which maps to the difference between “soft empathy” and “hard empathy,” and a sliding scale of possibilities in-between. 

Thus, the stereotype of standard empathy is described accurately as “soft empathy.” After giving the other person a good listening, one responds: “I get it, man, you are really dealing with some tough stuff there.” “I get you, man, it sounds like a lot of things are going wrong at once – that can’t be easy.” “No use sugar coating things or pretending things could be worse when they are already sooo bad.” One validates the other person’s struggle and effort, which in itself can trigger a shift in the other person’s experience and attitude. Never underestimate the power of empathy of any kind to shift the other person out of stuckness and into an emotional equilibrium that enables the person to take action on their own behalf to improve their situation. However, usually when one talks about “empathy,” one means a version of “soft empathy.” 

The short folk definition of empathy is used here. Empathy is taking a walk in the other person’s shoes (after having first taken off one’s own to avoid projection). Different aspects of empathy encompass having a vicarious experience of the other person’s experience; appreciating who the other person is as a possibility; taking the alternative point of view of the other person (the folk definition); and formulating an empathic response that communicates that the listener “gets” what the other person (the speaker) has told to the listener. Note that in an empathic response, the listener has become the speaker and is sharing in a form of words, communicating back to the other person what the listener has “gotten” in listening to the other person.  

The challenge is that soft empathy does not work in dealing with bullies, aggressors, psychopaths, antisocial personality disorder, corrupt politicians, gangsters selling fire insurance, and bad actors of diverse kinds too numerous to list here (and so this list is not complete). This has led anti-empathy proponents to assert that empathy is a kind of suicide. For example, in a famine, one gives away one’s last morsel of food to a hungry person, and both starve to death. In an overcrowded life boat, one keeps taking on survivors treading water in the shark infested area around the life boat until the boat is swamped and all end up perishing. 

Such thought experiments are useful in provoking debate and thinking about tough cases. However, in so far as such thought experiments set up a narrative that already robs the participants of agency, such stories are not so much about empathy as about moral dilemmas and tragic circumstances. Do not overlook that if you are in a life boat, it is because your ship sank. You do not need more empathy; you need rescue. If you are in a famine, do not forget that there is demonstrably enough food to feed everyone on the planet, but food is used as a weapon by bad actors pursuing problematic political agendas; and the breakdown in empathy occurs upstream in the interrupted supply chain, not in desperate sharing among starving survivors. (Regarding Suicidal Empathy see:  https://louagosta.com/2026/05/22/suicidal-empathy-is-in-the-news-what-you-need-to-know-to-debunk-the-anti-empathy-skeptics/)

Responding empathically leaves the empathizing individual vulnerable to the would-be bad actor’s manipulations, deceptions, and interrogations. This is so even if the listener sticks to mirroring responses, giving back the other person what one gets from them, and validation. Without employing a rigorous and critical empathy, one is not on the slippery slope of dancing with the devil, one is already going steady with him. 

In dealing with such tough cases and difficult individuals, one can indeed engage from a position of empathy, but the recommendation is to hit the pause button on the softer aspect of empathy, one may usefully temporarily dial down the aspects of empathy such as kindness, niceness, generosity, and so on, and establish boundaries, set limits, push back, and think like one’s opponent by using “top down,” cognitive empathy. In situations where conflict is occurring empathy includes “war gaming” different scenarios in such a way that risks, vulnerabilities, simulations, and alternative points of view are included.

This is sometimes called “Red Teaming,” because the “home team” splits into sides – red and blue (plus a referee) – and simulates the problem and “games” different outcomes. Red Team is an entire fascinating study in itself and the interested reader may usefully consult Micah Zenko, 2015, Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy (New York: Basic Books). See also the blog post on Red Team: https://empathylessons.com/2022/02/27/empathy-in-time-of-war-red-team-red-team/

I hasten to add that it is highly improbable that anyone committed to empathy is going to become hard-hearted or cruel, but rather exercise expanded thoughtfulness in considering the consequences of gratitude and generosity, etc. Thus, the image of Lou Gossett Jr as Drill Sgt Emil Foley from the film An Officer and a Gentleman, which accompanies this post, should not be taken literally. This post prefers the description “tough love” to “boot camp,” but it must be acknowledged there is an aspect of boot camp to tough love.

Regarding empathy of all kinds in all kinds of situations, the fallacy is to try to force a choice between the softer aspects of empathy such as kindness, generosity, or gratitude and survival.  Sometimes kindness helps one to survive, sometimes not so much. Likewise, such is the case with empathy. 

What then is this “hard empathy” about which we have heard so little? “Hard empathy” is where a rigorous and critical empathy comes into its own. Hard empathy has its source in “Don’t hurt yourself! (Or anyone else.)” For example, consider the empathic response after listening to a person describe his or her unhealthy relationship with alcoholic beverages. This goes from “I get you, man, alcohol is a ‘solution’ that reduces stress after a hard day of work” to “Alcohol is a solution [and not a good one] – you need a better solution – can you think of better solution?” It’s up to the client to come up with one such as – go to the gym, call a friend (and meet for coffee), practice yoga, Tai Chi, or meditative breathing, and so on. That’s the tough love – if you keep drinking like this, you are going to hurt yourself or someone you love. That’s the hard empathy. 

Soft empathy does not work (or at least does not work well) with bullies or a short list of difficult individuals including psychopaths and the criminally insane. How does hard empathy apply? If a bully is attempting to bully you, the empathic response is “de-escalation.” That includes saying something like “This does not work for me” and leaving, departing, escaping. However, suppose the person is the boss or a romantic partner who is throwing a temper tantrum. The best response may still be de-escalation: “I declare a breakdown in communication and am taking a ten minute [or one hour or one day] time out.” Ultimately the solution may require updating one’s resume or finding a calmer partner, but we are talking here about dealing with the moment of crisis and upset.

Taking a step back, what if walking away is not workable? Making the thought experiment even more confrontational, suppose one cannot leave or escape. Then the empathic response consists in several further steps to de-escalate empathically. 

(1) Take steps to ensure one’s own safety. Key term: safety. Maintain physical, social distance. Reduce external stimuli such as loud background noises, TV, bright lights. If there is a kitchen, where there may be knives or sharp objects, stay or get out of it. 

(2) Focus on keeping yourself calm as best you can. Breathe in and out. 

(3) If the other person is verbally abusive or name-calling, do not respond in kind. Do not say anything to make a difficult, bad situation worse. You may consider responding in that way to provocative questions: “I am not going to say anything to make a difficult situation worse.” Then proceed to the next step.

(4) In fact, empathy shows that someone who is bullying and/or having a temper tantrum is in an altered state of consciousness. They have not been drinking alcohol or tripping, but it is almost as if they had been doing so. Whatever you say to them does not get through and sounds like “Blah, blah, blah!” You may have to repeat yourself: “Let’s talk when we are both calmer.” 

(5) In the follow up, be consistent, do not confess to something you did not do, do not walk on eggshells, and do not retaliate. These are all easier said than done, of course, but they must both be said and done. Note that “do not retaliate” does not  mean there is no cost and impact to the temper tantrum. If the bully smashes the key board in a fit of temper, the bully is liable to replace it. The cost and impact are a part of the consequences and may include criminal damage to property. 

(6) In instances where there are significant differences in power and the available means of force, for example, the boss is a bully, one is trapped in the life boat with the bully, consider placating, including pretending agreement where none may actually exist in order to escape from a violent outcome. I know an example in which lying with reckless abandon saved a person’s life from an attempt on it, and gave the survivor time to call law enforcement. These are extreme situations where soft empathy is useless and hard empathy can make a positive difference. Nor does this mean that empathy advocates are promoting lying. Any priest, rabbi, imam, or spiritual guide will tell one that one must considering lying in order to save a life when no other options are workable. 

Hard empathy includes the standard aspects of empathy such as the communication of feeling based on an active listening to the other; an understanding of the other person based on who the other is as the possibility of power, self-expression, and freedom; appreciating the point of view of the other based on their perspective, not the listener’s; and responsiveness that give back to the other person their own experience in a form of words that expresses what the other communicated to the listener. This empathic responsiveness is where hard empathy comes into its own by “speaking truth to power.” 

This expression was coined by Bayard Rustin (1912–1987; the principal organizer of the 1963 March on Washington at which Martin Luther King gave his celebrated “I have a dream” speech) to describ the non-violent but assertive behavior on the part of leaders such as Mahama Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and many more. The empathic aspect lives in the assumption that the authorities perpetrating the social injustice (or other problematic behavior) are human beings like oneself capable of reforming their ways. If this assumption is not valid – one is dealing with Nazis with machine guns – all bets are off. However, do not be too hasty in jumping to the misguided conclusion and self-fulfilling prophecy that anyone who disagrees with you is a Nazis with a machine gun. For example, when Terri Givens writes about “radical empathy” I assert that what this post is calling “hard empathy” is included. This is what is required to engage with “wicked” problems such as racial prejudice (e.g., see Terri E. Givens, 2021, Radical Empathy: Finding a Path to Bridging Racial Divides, Bristol, UK: Policy Press).  

This does not complete the conversation about hard empathy, but gets it off to a good start. A different aspect of hard empathy comes forth in the face of life circumstances with which it is hard to empathize. This includes the standard complaint about soft empathy in the helping professions. Regular exposure to other people’s trauma leaves the would-be empathizer experiencing burn out, compassion fatigue, and empathic distress. This is empathy the hard way, which is not so different from hard empathy. Hard empathy is committed to empathizing in the face of the breakdown of soft empathy due to the in-bound traumatic load being just too much to bear on the part of the would-be empathizer.

Extreme situations—that threaten death or grave injury to innocent people—call forth hard empathy. Standard (soft) empathy is challenged by extreme situations out of remote, hard-to-grasp experiences to become hard empathy.  Someone protests: “You can’t possibly know what I’ve been through!” Tue enough, but when you are hanging from the cliff above the abyss by a frayed line that is about to break, every rock face looks pretty much alike. 

The following is not the truth with a capital “T,” but consider the possibilities: Either one has lost a child or not lost a child; either one has survived a dreaded disease or not survived a dreaded disease; either one has given birth or not given birth; either one has been incarcerated in a concentration camp or one has not (e.g., Keen 2022: 43; Bettelheim 1943/1960). 

The word “empathy” is inscribed over the gate in the fence between self and Other. That is precisely one description of hard empathy—the gate does not open, but one is committed to getting over the fence in any case. One climbs over the fence or digs under it or straps on a hang glider or like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, one finds a ramp for one’s motor cycle and launches oneself Evel-Knievel style on a wing and a prayer into thin air.

Empathy is always empathy and hard empathy applies the same four aspects of relatedness—receptivity, understanding, interpretation, and responsiveness. Hard empathy emerges from standard, soft empathy, when standard empathy breaks down, misfires, and/or fails in the face of empathic distress (including “burn out” or “compassion fatigue”). 

Empathic distress is itself a function of physical trauma, moral trauma, double binds, soul murder, and tragic circumstances that act to destroy possibilities of human flourishing, strength, aliveness, energy, and/or vitality. As a matter of definition, “soul murder” is defined by Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman (1896), as destroying (through emotional or physical abuse) the possibility of love, but is generalized here to include destroying the possibility of generating new possibilities (Shengold 1989). 

Hard empathy is attained when standard empathy honors the commitment to empathize in the face of empathic distress. This is empathy the “hard way,” and it is rare. No other way exists of attaining hard empathy than through empathy pure-and-simple—“standard empathy”—and much of the work accomplished here engages with the break downs of standard empathy as emotional contagion, projection, pressure to conform, and communications getting “lost in translation.” The repairs of these misfirings—and, it must be acknowledged, failures—of standard empathy lead the way to radical empathy. 

A person is asked to make a decision that no one should have to make. Join the “revolution” or I will kill your family. Sophie’s choice. Fall on the hand grenade. It doesn’t go off. A person is asked to make a decision that no one is able to make—and yet the person makes the decision anyway, even if the person does nothing, because doing nothing is making a decision. A person is asked to make a decision that no one is entitled to make, which include most decisions about who should live or die (or be gravely injured). The result is moral trauma—the person is both a perpetrator and a survivor. Now empathize with that. No one said it would be easy. Many questions open up here about hard empathy and its relationship to soft empathy as standardly defined. For further reading see the blog post in which “radical empathy” covers most of what is discussed here as “hard empathy”:  A concise talk on trauma and radical empathy: https://empathylessons.com/2025/08/22/a-concise-talk-on-trauma-and-radical-empathy/↗

Whether or not to mention “empathy” and when to do so is now a question similar to whether or not to talk about politics or religion at the job or with the in-laws. It is risky. People have always wanted to hear other people agree with them. Who wants to encounter disagreement? However, the wide spread distribution of social media has made worse the “echo chamber” effect of encountering little else except agreement. Nuance and fine-grained distinctions are out. Conformity and uniformity are in. Indeed, conformity is on the short list of the ways that empathy (whether hard or soft) breaks down, including emotional contagion, projection, and communications “lost in translation” (to call out the name of a now classic movie about breakdowns in communication).

A final concern. The number of conversations about empathy that do not even mention an active, dedicated listening committed to responsiveness is really shocking. If the would-be critic of empathy as such does not first acknowledge the need to listen, then the critique is talking about something else (whether pity, compassion, kindness, etc.), not empathy. I hasten to add that since empathy is practiced by error-prone, fallible humans, empathy requires constant practice and improvement. The concise advice on how to do that – whether in hard or soft form – is to clean up the breakdowns of empathy. Clean up emotional contagion, projection, conformity, communications lost in translations and empathy naturally comes forth and expands. The vast majority of people want to be empathy, even if they do not get enough empathy, and will embrace the opportunity to relate empathically.

Thus, the final recommendation is don’t talk about “empathy,” rather make empathy the source of your talk and actions. Okay, please say more about that. Consider the possibility that whether or not one drops the word “empathy” into the conversation, it will be perfectly obvious after about two minutes of talking whether one or more of the participants are “coming from” empathy. Nine times out of ten, you don’t need to say it. As Bob Dylan famously noted in another context, people may try to relate to you and me in a lot of different ways: “block you up / Shock or knock or lock you up / Analyze you, categorize you / Finalize you or advertise you”.^[1] The lyrics go on like that for a while. If someone is trying to shock you, sell you something, inform you of their point of view, get you to do or not do something, enroll you in their program, “make you spin or do you in,” then you are in a different world than being appreciated you for who you are as a possibility and as a human being. As Dylan finally says, “All I really wanna do, baby, is be friends with you,” which is itself a statement that calls forth the growing cynicism of people presenting as your “friend.” Friends don’t spam one another. The same kind of thing can be said about a short-list of closely related attitudes, actions, and approaches to empathic human relations such as dignity, respect, kindness, generosity, gratitude, and, yes, friendship. 

Finally, these admittedly sometimes rambling reflections point to a further type of empathy that may need to be rolled up into basic empathy, cognitive empathy, affective empathy and sustained empathy, namely, hard empathy (sometimes also called “radical empathy”). Hard empathy is precisely that which the trauma survivors are implicitly and indirectly discussing when they assert that having survived and worked through the trauma (whether in therapy, mediation, yoga, or other intervention) has enhanced their empathic ability. Hard empathy is the commitment to empathy in the face of compassion fatigue, burnout, and empathic distress, which are the risks to empathy (causing empathy’s breakdown) that come forth in the face of trauma. For example, hard empathy is what is required to engage with “wicked” problems such as racial prejudice (e.g., see Terri E. Givens, 2021, Radical Empathy: Finding a Path to Bridging Racial Divides, Bristol, UK: Policy Press.  

Admittedly there are not a lot of publications on empathy and trauma, much less radical empathy and trauma, which is precisely why this discussion (and debate) is so important. There has been significant progress in the uses and definitions of empathy since Davis published his work in 1980 (and David Hume his, in 1736 when it was still called “sympathy”). For a short overview of radical empathy and trauma see Lou Agosta, 2025, A short “Ted Talk” trauma and radical empathy, in Radical Empathy in the Context of Literature, New York: Palgrave Macmillan: pp. 203 – 211 (admirably concise!).  Just as sustained empathy builds on basic empathy, affective empathy and cognitive empathy, so too does “hard empathy” build on all the former as an emergent function that makes possible non-incremental results in recovery from trauma and related life challenges. Regardless of how one designates the distinction of non-standard empathy, one is not going to get far in engaging with trauma without a radical form of hard empathy. 

References 

Lou Agosta. 2025. A short “Ted Talk” trauma and radical empathy, in Radical Empathy in the Context of Literature, New York: Palgrave Macmillan: pp. 203 – 211.

Lou Agosta. (2018). Empathy Lessons, 2n Edition. Chicago: Two Pears Press.

Bruno Bettelheim. (1943). Individual and mass behavior in extreme situations. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 38: 416-452. Anthologized in various collections including, Bettelheim. (1960). The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age. New York: Free Press. 

Mark H. Davis. (1980). A Mulitdimensional Approach to Individual Differences in Empathy. JSAS [Journal Supplement Abstract Service] Catalog of Selected Documents in Psychology, 10, 85–100.

Bob Dylan. 1964. All I really want do song lyrics]. Bob Dylan: The Lyrics: 1961–2012. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004: p. 113.

Terri E. Givens, 2021, Radical Empathy: Finding a Path to Bridging Racial Divides, Bristol, UK: Policy Press.

David Hume. 1736. A Treatise of Human Nature. Indianapolis: Bobby-Merrill Press.

Henrik Ibsen. (1896). John Gabriel Borkman, tr W. Archer (tr.). New York: Project Gutenburg e-Book, 2006.

Suzanne Keen. (2022). Reading and Empathy. London: Routledge.

Bayard Rustin. (1912–1987). Biographical report on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayard_Rustin

Leonard Shengold. (1999). Soul murder revisited. [URL checked  on 2023/11/11] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/shengold-soul.html.

Micah Zenko. (2015). Red Team: How to Succeed by Thinking Like the Enemy. New York: Basic Books.

Image Credit: Lou Gossett Jr as Drill Sargent Emil Foley, with acknowledgement to Paramount Pictures and Screen Daley

No generative AI was used in the preparation of this post. None. 

© Lou Agosta, PhD and the Chicago Empathy Project

^[1] Bob Dylan, 1964, “All I really want do,” Bob Dylan: The Lyrics: 1961–2012. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004: p. 113.