I’d guess that most people who have a stronger-than-you empathy-begets-sympathy/kindness have also experienced more significant moments of receiving (real-feeling, non-cat-like) sympathy from others over issues that they are for whatever reason not (yet?) trying to fix. (Or, possibly, better imaginations for this sort of thing / more vicarious experience through a different history of fiction consumption.)
I also think that, as other commentors have noted, the “have empathy” action CAN be imagining one as having the same material circumstances as another and then propagating supposedly similar feelings from that, as you describe it in your post. But if that fails to generate anything that seems sympathetic, then it’s time to do the reverse. Condition on having the feelings, then propagate those back into a (as charitable as possible) model of values and motivations. And I think that even when those values/motivations are very different from your own, it is often (if not always) possible to find something that is sympathetic in there. (And then more fleshed out feelings can propagate back from that, etc.) For training this, I recommend finding a very good director and taking scene-study acting classes run by him/her :)
I’d guess that most people who have a stronger-than-you empathy-begets-sympathy/kindness have also experienced more significant moments of receiving (real-feeling, non-cat-like) sympathy from others over issues that they are for whatever reason not (yet?) trying to fix. (Or, possibly, better imaginations for this sort of thing / more vicarious experience through a different history of fiction consumption.)
I also think that, as other commentors have noted, the “have empathy” action CAN be imagining one as having the same material circumstances as another and then propagating supposedly similar feelings from that, as you describe it in your post. But if that fails to generate anything that seems sympathetic, then it’s time to do the reverse. Condition on having the feelings, then propagate those back into a (as charitable as possible) model of values and motivations. And I think that even when those values/motivations are very different from your own, it is often (if not always) possible to find something that is sympathetic in there. (And then more fleshed out feelings can propagate back from that, etc.) For training this, I recommend finding a very good director and taking scene-study acting classes run by him/her :)