A manager sits on the sofa after a fourteen-hour day. Exhausted. Head buzzing, something tightening in the stomach. But when asked how she is doing, she answers: "All good." A scene that plays out millions of times over. People sense something inside themselves but cannot place it, name it, or take it seriously. They function on the outside while the chaos inside keeps growing.
Empathy turned inward is a skill almost nobody talks about. Yet it could be the key to psychological stability. While research has spent decades examining how people recognise and share the feelings of others, one crucial question went unanswered: how well do we actually understand ourselves?
The Missing Half of Empathy
Stefanie Neubrand, a psychologist at the University of Basel, noticed this gap. In her doctoral dissertation, completed in 2021, she introduced a term that had been absent from psychology until then: impathy. The concept describes the ability to empathise with one's own feelings, to share them and to understand them. Introversive empathy, in a sense. A turn inward rather than outward.
"Impathy is the ability to perceive and understand one's own emotional states without being overwhelmed by them" is the central thesis. The concept encompasses four dimensions: perceiving one's own thoughts and bodily sensations, being able to adopt a meta-position, developing an accepting attitude, and finally bringing genuine understanding to one's own psychological processes.
"Those who cannot sense what is happening inside themselves cannot regulate what is weighing on them."
That sounds obvious. It is not. Many people live for years without truly understanding what is going on inside them. They register stress but not where it comes from. They feel sadness but cannot place it. They react with anger without knowing what lies behind it.
What the Research Shows
Neubrand, together with her colleague Jens Gaab, developed the Impathy Inventory, a twenty-item questionnaire that measures how well people can perceive themselves emotionally. The initial data are remarkable. People with high impathy show significantly less anxiety and negative affect. At the same time, they report greater life satisfaction and more positive mood (Neubrand & Gaab, 2022, Frontiers in Psychology).
Particularly notable: impathy can be trained. In therapeutic settings, people learn systematically to observe their inner processes without immediately judging or suppressing them. Therapeutic approaches such as the two-chair technique have been drawing on this principle for years; the concept simply lacked a precise definition until now.
When the Connection to Yourself Is Missing
People with personality disorders show markedly reduced impathy in studies. They can recognise emotions in other people's faces, but their own inner states remain foreign to them. The dimensions most affected are meta-position, accepting attitude, and understanding. Perception often still functions, but classification and acceptance are missing.
The consequences are serious. Those who cannot empathise with themselves experience psychological destabilisation. Suppressed or dissociated experiences remain unprocessed. Trauma becomes entrenched. The person stays locked in a reactive mode instead of acting with intention.
More Than Self-Compassion
Impathy is not the same as self-compassion or emotional intelligence. These concepts overlap, but impathy goes deeper. It is not about thinking kind thoughts about yourself or managing feelings. It is about the fundamental process of understanding what is happening inside you in the first place.
An example: self-compassion might mean comforting yourself after making a mistake. Impathy would come earlier. It would help you recognise: there is shame. There is fear of rejection. There is also anger at yourself. And then, without fusing with those feelings, adopting the meta-position. Understanding where that reaction comes from.
A Skill with a Future
Impathy research is still in its early stages. There are first validated measurement tools, first correlations with mental health. But clinical application has not yet been standardised. Therapists work with it intuitively, yet systematic training methods are largely absent.
What does this mean in everyday life? Those who take their inner signals seriously have better prospects for psychological stability. Those who learn to distinguish between observing feelings and merging with them gain room to act. And those who understand what is happening inside them can make better decisions about how to respond.
The exhausted manager on the sofa could learn: to notice that exhaustion is present. To adopt a meta-position, meaning not "I am exhausted and useless" but "there is exhaustion in me right now". To accept that this state is allowed to exist. And to understand where it comes from and what it needs.
Impathy is no miracle cure. But it could be a fundamental prerequisite for everything that follows. Self-care, resilience, mental health.
Only when we understand ourselves can we help ourselves. And sometimes healing begins precisely there: in the quiet moment when we finally listen to what speaks inside us.
