Is empathy possible for someone like me?

@camethrough I don't know much really about NPD, but if you ask me-- I do think empathy is possible simply because you're human. Have you ever felt genuinely happy when you see something good happens to someone? Have you ever shared in their excitement? Have you ever felt this sadness or hurt when someone you know and care for is hurting? Ever wish you could just take their pain away so they don't have to hurt? Or how about when you see a cute stray doggy outside on a hot day with nothing? Do you want to give that doggy water and food and all kinds of love? If there's a part of you that can say yes, then that's empathy. 🥰 I wanted to let you know I appreciate your willingness to try and develop empathy. ❤️ Hope you are well and I hope you have a good day! 

@camethrough

Hi there, welcome to 7 Cups 💜

Something that might be helpful is that there are different types of empathy. Emotional empathy involves feeling what other people are feeling, while cognitive empathy involves understanding another person's overall perspective.
https://www.verywellmind.com/cognitive-and-emotional-empathy-4582389

They activate different parts of the brain, and some people find it much easier to experience one type of empathy than the other. Just throwing it out there that maybe when you do experience empathy, it might not look exactly the same for you as it does for other people.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3427869/

***

If vulnerability does become something that you're willing to try at some point, that might be something that helps unlock both emotional empathy and non-transactional relationships:

1) If you're connected to your own emotions, your connection to other people's emotions probably increases. (It's kind of like seeing a new color; you don't just sensitize to it in yourself but you also become sensitive to it in other people.)

2) If you're vulnerable with someone else (and things go well), then there's a kind of emotional reward from that and there's less of a need to keep track of who owes what. You kind of don't care whether it's perfectly 50-50 or if it's 70-30 because you feel good either way.

Having said that, I don't like forcing/pressuring people into vulnerability/authenticity. People usually have very good/valid reasons for feeling unsafe/uncomfortable with vulnerability or being disconnected from emotions. I won't pretend that it's something simple/easy to trust other people.

***

For me right now, empathy feels like trying to understand another person's inner logic and predict their reactions to things that I'm doing.

For example, I noticed that in your post you said "I need to know what empathy feels like". I'm thinking "if I don't respond to that in my post, you might feel frustration".

The logic behind that might be "you're writing a lot of words, but you're not giving me what I want! I feel impatient, ignored, and misunderstood. Why are you writing so much and saying so little that is actually relevant? You're wasting my time. I hate it. Go away."

The emotional component for me is I feel a slight jolt of anxiety at imagining that scenario. I find it distressing when people are upset at me. I also have some attachment to the identity/image of being someone helpful, I want people to like what I write, etc. (The counterbalance is that other people have a right to feel what they feel, and I can't perfectly control other people's feelings.)

I'm still heavily in touch with my self-interest, and the things I do are often just self-protection or doing things that make me feel good. The 'empathy' component is that I'm predicting someone else's reactions to my actions and considering/caring about that information. My emotional reactions usually happen to lead to behaviors that minimize harm to other people.

I think the origin of cognitive empathy for me is kind of similar to that for emotional empathy...  connecting to my own perspective, understanding the logic of it, taking it seriously, and doing that across many different versions of myself (different thoughts, different feelings). The more non-judgmentality I have toward myself, the easier it is to look at someone else's perspective and say "that makes sense because I have something that looks similar to that". Importantly, this attitude embraces judgments as well. If I feel judgmental, that's just another piece of information to try to understand, make sense of, and be able to say "it makes sense that you feel that way".

@camethrough

That must have been a very shocking to hear about. I understand that it must be difficult, and I am sorry that it has been. Remember, there are many forms of empathy and it’s okay to take a moment to pause, take a breath as well as look at what form of empathy you wish to work on.