You are nice.

OK an idea. How aware is she of her own feelings? Ever? If she's weakly aware only, she could be taught to pay more attention to them and then imagine the other person having them too. This may need a lot of practice though. I don't know how helpful this idea is but I'm throwing it out there anyway.

Why I got interested in this... I also score low on that generic EQ test online where if you are below a score of 30 you could be asperger/autistic. I scored 22 just now. I do find I sometimes need to be reminded of other people's needs but I find it helps me if I see openly expressed emotions. I can then either viscerally take them up or make it a rule to not do a certain something again to a certain friend. That gets a bit more complicated when it also depends on specific circumstances. Overall I work more out of instinct than this rule based approach so I don't really view myself as truly on the autism scale, but the rule stuff does improve on my behaviour beyond part of the behaviour automatically taken care of by the instinctual emotional side.

So anyway if she doesn't like overt emotions - which could've been a good method but you are telling me they scare her - then maybe focusing on her own feelings is what would help her learn about other people. That's just a guess tho'. I do know a girl who's learned like this over time. She is also scared of too openly expressed emotions. So, instead, she focused on her feelings then asked others who were adept in the area of understanding personal feelings to confirm things and over time she got better. She was pretty bad before that with how to treat other people. So that's the visceral side of the learning (with some conscious effort at understanding the feelings) which can account for a lot of improvement already. Too bad your friend is not able to keep rules in mind like I do, though. Maybe she could with some practice, again?

But then she'd have to be committed to practicing all this. Motivation would be that she'd have better relationships, people would care more! This is what I experienced myself.

One more problem in that area is, if she's had many negative experiences and consistently enough, she'll probably have resistance against the entire idea of working on this to have better relationships. Somehow she'll have to "self start" the process. I don't know how that happened for the girl I know, for myself it happened by accidentally getting a positive experience when I was put in a receptive state (kinda a combination of trying to change my own attitude for a second, purely out of frustration, along with getting lucky really in receiving the positive response - but long story here).