This Is Why Your Partner Has No Empathy & Acts So Cold

As humans, it's in our nature to empathize.

Let me give you an example from my decades of working with couples in distress. Amy tells me that her husband John has no empathy: "He's clueless," she says, "and I'm beginning to give up.”

But maybe rather than assuming that John is a Neanderthal, it's better to get curious about what is getting in the way of his natural empathic response. I ask, "What is blocking John's ability to tune into you and be moved by your distress?"

At one moment, Amy begins to cry, saying that she is lonely and has lost the John she loved. John sits and stares at the floor. So I ask him if he sees her tears. He looks up, glances at her and says he does. What does he feel?

"Not much," he replies.

I ask him again. "Can you let yourself feel what you see on her face? Your brain has something called mirror neurons that usually set you up to kind of try on the expressions you see on her face and then sense those feelings in your own body. It's your brain's way of predicting other people's behavior. But something is interfering here. What do you feel in your body as you look at her face?"

He leans forward and stares at me. "Tense," he says. "Kind of waiting."

"Something bad is coming?" I suggest, and he nods.

"She is upset, but what I get is that she is mad at me," John says. "I am not the person she wants me to be. I don't know what she wants from me...I can't seem to deliver here."

What John is telling me is that a tidal wave of threat and potential loss bears down on him, and he is so busy coping with the roar that he can't even register his partner's pain, let alone tune into it and figure out how to comfort her. To say that John is too distracted with his own emotional turmoil to give his wife the empathic response she needs is an understatement.

The other block to empathy is that the message is unclear and just hard to hear. Amy coats her message about being lonely and needing John in criticism and anger. Because of this, he doesn't hear her vulnerability. The irony is that the more he loves her, the more he will focus on the anger of her message and miss her fear and pain.

But as John expresses his fears of letting her down and as she opens up about how much she needs closeness with him, they do find their natural sympathy and understanding for each other.