9 Phrases People Who Lack Empathy Use Without Realizing How Mean They’re Being
They’re not trying to be cruel. That’s what makes it complicated. People who lack empathy often don’t register the impact of their words because they genuinely can’t feel what the other person is feeling. To them, they’re stating facts, offering advice, or moving the conversation along. To you, it lands like a dismissal of your entire emotional experience.
The phrases don’t sound obviously mean. They’re not insults or attacks. They’re something subtler—responses that make you feel unseen, unheard, or like your feelings are a problem to be solved rather than an experience to be witnessed.
Psychologists distinguish between cognitive empathy (understanding what someone feels intellectually) and affective empathy (actually feeling it with them). People who lack the affective piece can know you’re upset without being moved by it. Their responses reflect that gap.
1. At least it’s not as bad as…
You share something painful and they immediately compare it to something worse. At least you still have a job. At least it wasn’t cancer. At least your kids are healthy. The implication: your pain doesn’t qualify because bigger pain exists somewhere.
This isn’t comfort. It’s dismissal with a thin veneer of perspective. The person saying it usually thinks they’re helping you see the bright side. What they’re actually communicating is that your feelings aren’t proportionate and should be adjusted downward.
Research on toxic positivity shows that comparative minimization makes people feel worse, not better. But the person saying it often has no idea—they’re just trying to fix a problem they don’t feel.
2. You’re overreacting
A direct invalidation of your emotional response. They’ve assessed the situation, determined the appropriate reaction level, and concluded you’ve exceeded it. Your feelings are now wrong—not just different from theirs, but objectively incorrect.
People who lack empathy say this because they genuinely can’t understand why you’d feel so strongly about something that wouldn’t affect them the same way. They’re using themselves as the measure of normal, and anything outside that range looks like malfunction.
3. I don’t see what the big deal is
They really don’t. That’s the point. The big deal isn’t visible to them because feeling the weight of someone else’s experience isn’t something they do automatically. So they announce their confusion as if it’s evidence that you’re making too much of something.
The phrase frames their lack of emotional understanding as rational assessment. They can’t see the big deal, so there must not be one. Your job now is apparently to explain your feelings until they make logical sense—which isn’t how feelings work.
4. Everything happens for a reason
Said to someone in pain, this phrase is a trapdoor out of actually sitting with them in that pain. It converts suffering into a lesson, a plan, a purposeful event—which means there’s nothing to grieve, nothing to be angry about, nothing that requires actual emotional presence.
Grief researchers note that platitudes like this are usually more about the speaker’s discomfort than the listener’s comfort. People who lack empathy reach for these phrases because staying in the uncomfortable space of someone else’s pain is genuinely difficult for them.
5. You should just…
Immediate problem-solving before any acknowledgment that a problem exists or that the person might be struggling. You’re venting, processing, or just trying to feel heard, and they’ve jumped straight to solutions you didn’t ask for.
The “just” is particularly telling. It implies simplicity—that the answer is obvious and your failure to implement it is the real issue. People with empathy ask questions first. People without it start fixing before they’ve finished listening.
6. I would never let that bother me
Cool. You’re not the one it’s bothering. This response centers their hypothetical emotional reaction over your actual one. It suggests their way of processing is correct and yours is a personal failure.
What’s missing is any curiosity about why you might feel differently. People with empathy recognize that others have different sensitivities, histories, and thresholds. People without empathy assume their own responses are the default setting everyone should share.
7. But what did you expect?
This reframes your pain as a logical consequence you should have anticipated. The relationship ended badly? You should have seen it coming. The project failed? What did you think would happen? The hurt you’re feeling becomes evidence of poor judgment rather than something worthy of compassion.
Psychologists recognize this as a form of retrospective blame—using hindsight to make the person feel responsible for their own suffering. It sidesteps empathy entirely in favor of analysis.
8. Let me tell you what happened to me
You’ve barely finished your sentence and they’ve redirected the conversation to their own experience. They’re not connecting through shared experience. They’re hijacking the floor because your story triggered their story and theirs feels more pressing.
Sometimes sharing similar experiences builds connection. But when it happens instantly, before any acknowledgment of what you’ve shared, it reveals that your experience was just a prompt for theirs. You weren’t witnessed. You were a trigger.
9. I’m sure they didn’t mean it that way
You’ve shared that someone hurt you, and their immediate response is to defend the person who did it. Maybe they’re right—maybe the intent wasn’t malicious. But leading with that defense tells you where their empathy is flowing, and it’s not toward you.
People who lack empathy often side with intent over impact. If someone didn’t mean to hurt you, the hurt becomes illegitimate in their framework. What they’re missing is that impact matters regardless of intent, and empathy would acknowledge the impact first.
The people saying these things often aren’t villains. They’re not trying to be cold. They’re working with a limited emotional toolkit and genuinely don’t realize that their responses land as dismissive or hurtful.
That doesn’t mean you have to accept it. Recognizing these patterns helps you understand why certain conversations leave you feeling worse instead of better. It’s not your fault for wanting empathy from people who can’t easily give it.
Some relationships can be adjusted—you stop bringing emotional material to people who can’t hold it. Others might need more serious boundaries. Either way, the first step is seeing the pattern clearly: these phrases aren’t neutral. They’re tells. And what they’re telling you is important.
