For me, learning empathy for "normal" people was not possible until I was able to get away from them. (For me, that happened when I went to college.) I believed in an abstract way that all people deserved empathy, but for an intense adolescent, it simply wasn't possible to actually feel that for the people who were making my life a living hell. I had to get into a situation where they weren't having such a direct impact on my life.
YES. I also had trouble understanding how anybody else thought, until I was surrounded by people more like myself; by the end of college I understood my classmates, then the broader world of the larger university where I went to grad school, and now I think I do okay with people in general. It's hard to be an adolescent in that clique-forming stage where no one around you is similar enough to form a clique with.
For my (younger) kids I try to give them talent search camps and the like so they have a chance to develop empathy that might transfer. Aside from that - It Gets Better.
