Empathy is one of the most valued concepts in psychotherapy. Many people seek out a therapist precisely because they want to feel understood, heard, and accepted. Yet there are times when what appears to be empathy can unintentionally become a subtle form of avoidance.

At first glance, empathy seems simple: understanding and connecting with another person’s experience. Yet human experience is rarely straightforward. We are not shaped by a single set of emotions and motivations. Within each of us, conflicting feelings, opposing desires, vulnerable and defensive parts, conscious aspects, and processes that remain outside our awareness all coexist.

This raises an important question: Which part of the client is the therapist empathizing with?

In many situations, both in therapy and in everyday relationships, it is easier to connect with suffering. We can understand sadness, fear, feelings of abandonment, and the need for support or validation. These emotions evoke compassion and a desire to help.

Yet a person is more than their vulnerability.

Alongside pain, there may also be anger, envy, resentment, rivalry, a desire for revenge, or aggressive impulses. These experiences are as much a part of being human as the need for love and belonging. Yet they are often more difficult to face and acknowledge.

When the therapist connects only with the patient’s wounded side and avoids engaging with more uncomfortable emotions, there is a risk of pseudo-empathy. The patient feels understood, but only partially. One part of them is accepted, while other parts remain in the shadows. The implicit message may become: “It is acceptable to feel sad, afraid, or vulnerable, but not to feel angry, envious, or aggressive.”

Over time, these unaccepted aspects tend to be denied, minimized, or hidden—both from the therapist and from oneself. As a result, therapy may unintentionally reinforce an idealized self-image rather than facilitate genuine self-understanding.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, what cannot be acknowledged can be neither explored nor transformed. Rejected emotions do not disappear. They continue to shape our relationships, our choices, and the way we relate to ourselves—only from outside our conscious awareness.

Genuine empathy requires something more difficult than simply offering comfort. It involves the capacity to remain present with the patient’s entire experience: to understand both the wounded inner child and the anger they carry; both the need for closeness and the impulse to push others away; both the desire to be loved and the envy of those who seem to receive what they themselves were denied.

This form of empathy neither judges nor moralizes. It creates a space in which every aspect of the self can be brought to light and understood.

Paradoxically, genuine acceptance does not arise when only the “good” or vulnerable parts of the personality are validated. It emerges when a person discovers that they can also face the more difficult aspects of their inner world without being rejected.

Only then change becomes possible.

Because what is acknowledged can be gradually understood. And what is understood can be gradually transformed.