Slow Swimmer & Fried Eggs - Sympathy VS Empathy

I’ve been thinking about my last post regarding “silver linings,” and I realized yesterday while in a meeting that I missed a big one. In that meeting, someone said “I sympathize with you, I’ve been there myself.”

 

While I am far from a professional grammarian, I stopped and thought to myself, “did they use that correctly?” I believe that both as a matter of proper definitions and as part of our shared human experience, these two emotions, and the distinction between them is important, if for no other reason than, as the title says, going through the experience of infertility has made me a better friend.

 

For clarity, let’s start with the distinction between them. There are varying versions of the definitions available, but I would summarize my understanding this way:
 

• Sympathy is a feeling of care and understanding for the suffering of others.

• Empathy is the ability to mutually experience the thoughts, emotions, and experience of others based on shared or personal experience.

 

Put another way, sympathy is “I feel bad for that person because something bad happened to them.” Empathy is “I feel bad for that person because I’ve been through the same kind of thing, and I KNOW how bad it sucks.” What does any of this have to do with infertility or my becoming a better friend? Well, here’s the thing. Life is full of trials and tribulations for all of us, personally, professionally and medically. That last one is in some ways the most scary because, as they say, if you haven’t got your health, the other stuff gets a lot less important. So health challenges for people we know, or their loved ones, are something that most of us can sympathize with.

 

“Oh, your grandfather has cancer? Oh, that’s terrible. I’m so sorry. I hope he pulls through alright.” That’s sympathy. If, and here’s the thing, we actually mean it. We know these things happen, we know they happen to us all sooner or later, but there is a difference between genuine sympathy and socially required platitudes. It’s not that we don’t mean it per se. It’s just… well… sometimes if we don’t actually share or understand what someone else is going through, then sometimes we have to work hard to truly sympathize. It’s an emotional effort to walk the proverbial mile in someone else’s emotional shoes, and from the outside, they won’t really know whether we deeply care, or are just “saying the right things.”

 

It’s not that we don’t care for our friends, or that we aren’t sorry for what they’re going through. It’s just that if we can’t “relate,” then until we ourselves or a loved one deals with some challenge – divorce, bankruptcy, illness, grief, or whatever – sympathy is an emotion that, I think, sometimes takes hard work to muster. Empathy is, I think, the much more powerful of these emotional cousins. If I lost my own beloved grandfather to cancer, than that situation resonates with me on a completely different level. No surprise there. Empathy I think is something that can happen almost without thought if you’ve been there before yourself – you feel someone’s pain because you can relate to it. Sympathy often requires work. (BOTH are human skills than anyone can work on however in their daily life, and get better at with practice.)