Why Self-Awareness Is Key to Empathy: Neuroscience Insights from a Therapist

I’ve been feeling this for years, seeing it play out over and over with my clients. If a person can’t hold space for their own feelings—can’t slow down to truly notice and name what they’re experiencing—they won’t have the capacity to really do it for anyone else. Lately, I’m taking a neuroscience and mindfulness course that speaks to this very thing, and every time I learn something new, a real-life example of the teaching appears in my work. 

For instance, there’s a couple I’ve been working with for about 10 weeks now, and they’re a challenging pair. They’ve spent years withdrawing from each other, growing more and more disconnected after countless unresolved conflicts. Like so many others, they were never taught the skills of truly listening or how to repair after the inevitable hurts of a relationship. Some people grow up in families where adults model these skills; many of us don’t. 

In this couple, the male partner grew up in a family where space for his own feelings was practically nonexistent. His mother battled cancer for years, so the unspoken family rule was to contain your emotions, don’t upset Mom. Every teenage swing of emotion, the angst, the pain, the confusion—had to be bottled up because there wasn’t space for his emotions when his mother’s suffering was always in the foreground.  His father was stoic to an extreme. There was no place for grief, no room for vulnerability, and his father actually took pride in saying none of his children cried at their mother’s funeral.

So my client learned to shove his feelings down. He learned they weren’t safe, that they didn’t belong. And that unprocessed pain didn’t go away; it just got packed deeper. Even now, when I ask him how he feels, he often defaults to thoughts rather than emotions. I’ll ask him to locate his feelings in his body, and he’ll struggle. He simply wasn’t allowed to feel, let alone have those feelings held by another person. The result? He can’t intuitively understand his partner’s emotional experience because his own emotional space has always been so restricted.

This lack of access to his own inner experience makes it difficult for him to empathize with his partner. Neuroscience now helps explain what I’ve long observed: without the ability to tune into your own emotional state, it’s almost impossible to deeply feel another person’s. There’s a region in the brain called the insula that’s essential to this process. The insula connects to our capacity for interoception—our awareness of internal bodily sensations like heartbeat, hunger, or tension—and processes them as emotions. Think of interoception as a bridge that links our bodily experiences to our emotional awareness.

When we’re able to feel sadness or anxiety in our own bodies, we understand these emotions better in others. They’re familiar. But when we don’t have this “practice,” the insula can’t effectively mirror or interpret others’ feelings. Empathy requires us to be somewhat “fluent” in our own emotions. Research backs this up: people with higher interoceptive awareness generally have more active insula responses and tend to score higher on empathy. They’re attuned to the nuanced signals that help us intuitively read what someone else might be feeling.

For my client, this gap in his own emotional awareness has been devastating to his relationship. He feels pain from his partner’s anger and disappointment—attacks she throws out to get any response she can from him. But because he’s missing the foundational ability to tune into his own pain, he struggles to connect with hers. It’s not that he doesn’t care; it’s that he simply hasn’t had the space to practice recognizing his own feelings. And without that, empathy becomes much harder to access.

Are you looking for help with your relationship? Do you feel that a relationship coach could help you working on your couples skills? Is communication an issue? Have you ever considered couples therapy or counseling? As a psychotherapist and relationship coach, I am uniquely positioned to help you through these moments of disconnect and conflict.

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