Empathy Levels Visual Guide

As many of you know, my work often revolves around a central premise: that empathy is not a binary state but a spectrum of emotional, ethical, and spiritual maturity. We’re not simply “empathetic” or “not empathetic”; We live at a bandwidth shaped by our conditioning, neurobiology, psychological defenses, and evolving capacity for attunement.

Today, I’m sharing something that’s been a long time in the making: a comprehensive breakdown of the eight levels of empathy I introduced in The Narcissist in You and Everyone Else, now expanded and translated into a visual, downloadable guide that maps how each level of empathy shows up across four domains:

• Internal Emotional Experience

• Interpersonal Relationships

• Professional / Public Life

• Institutional or Political Engagement

This resource is meant to help you locate your patterns with greater compassion and precision and perhaps also to better understand the people around you. It’s not diagnostic, and it’s not a moral ranking system. People move between levels situationally, and everyone deserves context. But it can provide clarity, especially in a world that tends to confuse empathy with likability, reactivity, or approval-seeking.

We talk a lot about empathy in culture right now. But rarely do we stop to ask: What kind of empathy? With whom? And at what cost?

This handout is a way to start asking those deeper questions.

Download it below, reflect on where you live most often, and let me know if you’d like to see a workbook built around this framework. That may be what comes next.