I know a person, someone whose name I shall not mention, who becomes emotional in the extreme every time she sees a homeless person begging on the street. She wants to empty her wallet to help this individual who might be an innocent victim of our economy, a drug addict with emotional problems who fell victim to the government’s withdrawal of funding to programs to help such people, or a grifter who is taking advantage of the sympathy many people have for others.
Now, this is a laudable thing, this feeling sorry for the misfortunes of others, it is this individual’s attitude toward these same homeless people that leaves me cold. She will, unless someone dissuades her, give them money from her wallet, but she will not touch them, she will not engage in conversation with them, and when anyone brings them up when they’re not in her field of view, she refers to them as ‘people who ought to do something to improve their situation.’
In other words, when she sees them, she is overcome with sympathy, perhaps born out of guilt that she has what they do not, but feels absolutely no empathy, or a sense of what’s inside their mind, what really drives them.
As I follow the national and international political scene, I see a lot of this as well. Politicians who express ‘sympathy and distress’ over the latest mass shooting that has taken the lives of innocents, including children, but who then move on to the next political topic of the day without taking concrete steps to prevent these tragedies from happening.
Or the person who feels sorry for the people whose homes are destroyed (or who are in some cases killed) by the wild fires that rage in the western parts of our country, fires that are on the increase because of the impact of global climate change, but who resist taking the necessary measures to reduce carbon emissions because it would mean a slight decrease in their economic prosperity or would require them to make some sacrifices.
I have lectured occasionally on desired leadership traits, and one of the important traits I list is empathy. Many of the attendees at my lectures often confuse empathy with sympathy, and it takes some doing to set them straight.
The Meriam-Webster Dictionary defines empathy as ‘the action of understanding or trying to deeply understand what someone else is feeling or what it’s like to be in their situation.’ In other words, the ability to walk in someone else’s shoes. While sympathy shares a root word with empathy, ‘pathos’, which is Greek for feelings, and is defined as ‘mutual affection, feeling sorrow or anguish for someone else’s misfortune,’ and there are similarities, they’re not the same.
Sympathy is a kind of sharing, but empathy is understanding. When you feel sympathy for someone’s misfortune, you ‘share’ their feelings of sadness and misery, but you do not understand those feelings. You have no idea what really causes them to feel the way they do.
Unfortunately, in my observations, feelings of sympathy are just that, feelings unaccompanied by anything beyond words. Those who empathize, though, often act to mediate a situation.
Let me give you an example. When my youngest son was six, he fell while playing and broke his arm. His mother, shocked and dismayed, was totally sympathetic and began crying as she grabbed the broken limb to ‘comfort’ him. He, of course, reacted by screaming in pain.
I, on the other hand (and I’m not bragging here, just describing what happened), having broken a couple of bones myself in the past, had a pretty good idea how he was feeling. I pulled his mother away and careful to touch him on the side of his body opposite the broken arm, calmly informed him that I was taking him to the hospital. Whether it was my calm voice, or the fact that his mother was no longer gripping his broken arm, he stopped crying. I put him in the front seat of the car and talked quietly to him all the way to the emergency room. He had stopped crying and when the doctor, who also spoke to him in quiet, unemotional tones, saw him, he clamped his lips and did not cry while they x-rayed his arm and put a cast on it.
Afterwards, on the way home, I stopped at an ice cream shop and got us both cones. He didn’t cry once during this whole experience except for that brief moment when he was in his mother’s sympathetic, but agonizingly painful grip.
That, my friends, is the difference between empathy and sympathy. It’s nice to be sympathetic when someone’s in trouble, but me, I’ll take empathy any day. – NWI
