Lack of Empathy

All narcissists lack empathy, which is how they are able to carry out their abusive and exploitative behaviours without guilt or remorse.

Narcissists are unable to step into another person’s shoes and actually feel their pain or joy, or any other emotion. They are therefore unable to really care about any other person, other than in the context of what that other person can do for them, or how that other person can contribute to their own inflated sense of superiority (by making them look good, by giving them adulation, or food, or shelter or sympathy etc).

However, narcissists can feign empathy, and often do, particularly in the early stages of a relationship, when they are seeking out to target another’s vulnerabilities. This is because life experience, and the careful study they have made of watching other people’s behaviour, has taught them under which circumstances they should appear to be sympathetic, and what they should do and say to convince others of their compassion. In other words, they have ‘cognitive empathy’ but not emotional empathy.

For example, if your best friend died, a narcissist would be aware that expressing sympathy would be the socially acceptable norm. However, they would not be able to really connect with how you were feeling, even if they had experienced bereavement themselves, and this might show itself fairly quickly. Perhaps straight after expressing their sympathy they might tell a funny anecdote or change the subject and talk about themselves. Some narcissists, in situations like these, miscalculate their responses in the opposite direction, and behave in an overly sympathetic manner, ringing people they barely know to offer their condolences and trying to be involved in helping with the funeral arrangements, completely unaware of how inappropriate this seems to others.

A big ‘tell’ of lack of empathy is that narcissists tend not to take care of others when they are ill or upset. I recall the words of a client who explained that if she ever cried her narcissistic husband ‘would just look at her as if she was a science experiment’. If they do step up they will expect something in return, even if it’s just recognition of how ‘nice’ they are. 

However, narcissists will often make a big effort to demonstrate how kind and compassionate they are to a new person in their life (a new ‘source of supply’) or to people who don’t know them all that well. Consider the narcissistic man who gave his kidney to a distant relative he barely knew, who was in urgent need of a transplant. His wife and family, used to his lack of empathy for them, were confused by this apparent contradiction - until they understood the extremes that he would go to gain narcissistic supply. This particular narcissist was hailed a hero by hundreds of people, and even made it into the newspapers.

Narcissists will often give away their lack of empathy by being cruelly inappropriate. They are careless and thoughtless unless they stand to benefit in narcissistic supply terms, and those who are the closest to them are the ones who pay the biggest price.