When Empathy Loses Sight of the Victim

Empathy has become one of those qualities we rarely question.

To understand another person is usually seen as a sign of maturity. We become suspicious of quick judgement and more interested in what sits behind behaviour: the childhood, the fear, the shame, the losses, the things a person learned to do in order to survive.

There is something humane in that.

But I think empathy has a less comfortable side.

Sometimes, the more we understand the person who caused the harm, the less clearly we see the person who had to live with it.

It often begins innocently.

Someone behaves badly. They lie, control, humiliate, betray or frighten another person. At first, attention rests on what happened. Then context begins to arrive.

We learn about the difficult childhood. The abandonment. The addiction. The depression. The fear of being left. We begin to understand where the behaviour came from and why certain situations affect this person so strongly.

The explanation may be entirely true.

That is precisely what gives it power.

Once a behaviour has a history, it becomes easier to see the person behind it. They are no longer simply the person who lied or controlled or hurt someone. They become a frightened child, a neglected adolescent, an adult carrying injuries that were never properly repaired.

Their behaviour acquires depth.

And sometimes, without anyone deciding that this should happen, the person they hurt begins to lose theirs.

I have seen this happen in families. A parent behaves destructively for years, but everyone knows what that parent endured growing up. The history becomes part of every conversation about the present.

It happens in relationships too. A controlling partner is terrified of abandonment. Someone who repeatedly lies is deeply insecure. Someone who becomes cruel under pressure has themselves been treated cruelly before.

None of these explanations have to be wrong.

The problem begins when explanation changes what we expect from the person on the receiving end.

Now that you understand why they behave this way, perhaps you can be more patient.

Perhaps you can take it less personally.

Perhaps you can see how much pain they are in.

At some point, the person already carrying the consequences is also asked to carry the explanation.

That is where I become uneasy.

Understanding someone and excusing what they do are obviously not the same thing. Most people know this in principle. In practice, however, the distance between the two can become surprisingly small.

The more psychological context we give a behaviour, the easier it becomes to soften our response to it. We start discussing what the person meant, what they feared, what they were trying to protect, what wound was activated.

Meanwhile, something very different often happens to the person who was hurt.

We ask why they stayed.

Why they returned.

Why they did not see it sooner.

Why they tolerated so much.

Why they are still angry.

One person receives an explanation. The other receives an examination.

I think this asymmetry matters.

Not because the questions are always illegitimate. Sometimes they are important. But notice where curiosity goes.

We are often fascinated by the inner world of the person who acted and much less curious about the inner world of the person who absorbed the consequences.

And because this rarely looks openly cruel, it can be difficult to recognise.

Nobody has to say that the victim does not matter. Nobody has to deny what happened. The shift takes place through emphasis.

We simply spend more time understanding one person than listening to the other.

There is another reason this happens.

Pain is persuasive, especially when it is visible.

A person who is frightened, ashamed, crying or able to describe their suffering clearly draws attention towards them. The person they hurt may look very different by then. They may be exhausted. Angry. Detached. They may no longer be interested in telling the story gently enough for everyone else to remain comfortable.

Sometimes the person who caused the damage is the person crying in the room.

The person who has been living with the damage is the one who has become cold.

If we rely too heavily on what distress looks like, we can misunderstand where the greatest cost has been carried.

This is also where psychological sophistication can become its own trap.

There is a temptation to believe that the most mature response must be the one that understands everybody. We do not want to think in simple categories of good and bad. We know that people are complicated. We know that cruelty can come from fear, control from insecurity and emotional withdrawal from earlier experiences of rejection.

All of that may be true.

But complexity does not erase responsibility.

A person may have been neglected and still neglect someone else.

They may have been controlled and later become controlling.

They may be deeply frightened and still create fear in another person.

They may have been badly hurt and still cause serious harm.

These truths do not cancel each other out.

In fact, I think adulthood requires us to hold them together.

We do not need to turn people into monsters in order to take their behaviour seriously. But neither do we need to turn every harmful act into the final chapter of someone else’s childhood.

There are moments when an explanation helps us understand what happened.

And there are moments when it begins to distract us from what happened.

The person who was hurt does not need to be perfect for this distinction to matter. They may have stayed too long. They may have returned. They may have made poor decisions of their own. They may tell the story badly, contradict themselves, become bitter or respond in ways we do not particularly admire.

None of that requires us to move them out of the picture.

Empathy should enlarge what we are able to see.

If it makes one person more human while making another person less visible, something has gone wrong.

The task is not to feel less empathy.

It is to notice where it goes, and who disappears when it arrives.