(Continued)

It's true that for a long time, while I could say the appropriate thing, I could not relate to their struggles. Still, I took satisfaction in the fact that my relationships were improving. Then a year after starting therapy, I began feeling something intensely when comforting friends: terror.

This turned out to be a signal, Lachmann says, that I was actually feeling empathy. I didn't recognize it because I'd always run from emotional discomfort—and, at least in the beginning, I found trying to be empathetic profoundly uncomfortable. Most of the time I managed to avoid the impulse to blurt out unhelpful suggestions to my friends—Happy hour, anyone? Or, Here's the number for a credit consolidator!—and instead say the appropriate thing. But for years and years, I could stand genuine empathy only five minutes at a time.

For those five minutes, though, I was not alone. And once I had experienced the wonder of that, I was willing to stumble out of my comfort zone to try to be not alone again.

Virtually everything I have ever tried to improve about myself—my weight, my sleep habits, my housecleaning—has resulted in an endless seesaw of improvement. But empathy, I've learned, is not like dieting. (Or, at least, how I diet, which involves ending up back at square one.) Cultivating empathy has its own rewards: The more you do it, the better your relationships are and the more you want to continue.

Feeling understood in that therapist's office taught me that human beings are not doomed to be alone—and empathy is life's connective tissue. If you have a romantic partner, he or she will someday believe that you are entirely wrong about something, and if you can see the problem from your partner's point of view, you'll be able to get through that conflict without smoldering in the corner or splitting up. If you work with someone you despise (and who despises you back), and you try to understand why that person dislikes you, then you stand a chance of not hating every minute with her at the office. If you live in a world that you would like to see less divided by ethnic, economic, and religious strife, you'll find that attempting to comprehend the needs of your sworn enemies is a prerequisite to any meaningful action you can take.

Empathy will also require you to get past rationalizations and admit wrongdoing. For about a decade after I started working to be more empathetic, I told myself that I hadn't hurt Lisa too badly, because she never told me I had. But Lachmann points out that the final insult of being treated with a lack of empathy is that the hurt person usually can't complain. "If you say, 'That was such an unempathetic thing to say,' it can easily be heard as, 'Feel sorry for me.' And no one wants to be pathetic." So most people don't say anything, Lachmann says, and relationships "are often ruptured and ruined."

Lisa and I are no longer close. We live on opposite coasts. We have very different lives. But still, I couldn't bear the idea of us being "ruptured and ruined." I recently called her and said I was sorry for being selfish when she lost her job. I said I had eventually learned that it must have been a terrible time for her and that I had made it worse by leaving her so alone with all her confusion. Lisa was gracious ("You did your best"), forgiving ("Really, you were a wonderful friend to me overall"), and honest ("It was 15 years ago, and I'm over it now"). She changed the subject, and we caught up on our summer plans.

Her family—along with the cocker spaniel, Maya, who was still alive and giving reproachful looks—was planning a camping trip. Packing up, Lisa realized none of her jeans fit. Her pregnancies had stripped every curve from her body. She was skinny as a post. I began to wail,

"Oh my God, you lucky rat! I gained 10 pounds…"

But then I stopped myself. "Um. So how does it feel to have to buy new jeans?" I asked.

There was a silence on the line. Then Lisa started laughing. "Wonderful," she said. "Absolutely wonderful."

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