Sympathy Versus Empathy

I can only speak from my own experience when it comes to grieving.  Empathy helped me.  Sympathy just irritated me down to my toenails.  I must chart some of that irritation as my general disagreeableness when I'm stressed.  So that's no one's issue but mine.

Sympathy, however (even from the nicest folks), does not help very much.  Why is that?  What is the difference between sympathy and empathy?  Let me take a whack at that.

"Sympathy" describes my emotional experience when I hear about your pain and loss.  Let me give you a recent example.

I briefly described my changes in marital status over the last two years the other day to someone.  I was in a conversation about certain financial matters, and that brief history was necessary to the conversation.  As I shared my description, the other person made the kind of face you'd make after biting into a very tart lemon.  It wasn't a helpful response, but it was honest.  The description of my painful experiences produced several moments of physical revulsion for the other person.

Then that person said, "That's awful."  Yes, indeed it was.  And, no, that response didn't do me any good.  That's sympathy.  The other person had an emotional response to the report of my pain and loss.  I've gotten a lot of that over the last few years.  I'm used to it now.  I note it, but it doesn't bother me (at least not nearly as much as it used to damage me).

"Empathy" describes how I use my emotional experience when I hear about your pain and loss.  I use my emotional experience to come to a deeper understanding of you and your situation.  That doesn't mean I "know how you feel."  I don't and I won't.  I know how I feel, and I use that as a tool and template to engage in deeper and more authentic compassion for you.

Sympathy leads at some point to separation from the sufferer.  Empathy leads to deeper connection with the sufferer.  Dacher Keltner writes about psychological studies of these differences in his book, Born to be Good. He writes, "These findings make a clarifying point: It is an active concern for others, and not a simple mirroring of others' suffering, that is the fount of compassion and that leads to altruistic ends."

Sympathy is the simple mirroring of other's suffering.  Empathy is the active concern of which Keltner writes.  These two states expresses themselves quite differently in physiological terms.  Empathy can be measured in the resting tone of the vagus nerve and the MRI activity of the left frontal lobe of the brain.  And empathy engages us not only in the pain process of the other but in the conscious desire to act selflessly for the good of the other.  Keltner writes,

"Compassion does not render people tearful idlers, moral weaklings, or passive onlookers, but individuals who will take on the pain of others, even when given the chance to skip out on such difficult action or in anonymous conditions."

We can judge the difference between sympathy and empathy by sheer directionality.  Sympathy will take me away from the sufferer sooner or later.  Empathy will draw me closer to the sufferer and deepen my compassion for and connection with both the sufferer and my own experiences of pain, vulnerability and hope.

So when you seek to give comfort, examine your real motives.  Examine your physical responses.  And examine the direction your heart is taking you.  Do your best to move toward the pain of others.  Life will be better for all of us.