Empathy is Not the Same as Sympathy
The world needs more empathy, not more sympathy.
I write a lot about how kindness, compassion, and empathy are desired by everyone, everywhere. In fact, there is not a person on the entire planet who doesn’t desire these.
It occurred to me that people often mistake empathy and sympathy. This is a hugely important distinction to make because empathy serves to make connection where sympathy creates disparity.
The difference is simple. Empathy involves recognizing, connecting, sharing, and striving for understanding. Whether this is thought, feeling, experience, situation, or what have you – the idea is that to empathize is to relate, to find and/or create understanding and a sense of being as if you can be in that other person’s shoes.
Sympathy, on the other hand, involves recognizing what the other person is thinking, feeling, or experiencing, but it’s unconnected. You aren’t making any effort to share, understand, or gain a sense of being in the other person’s shoes. It’s just to sympathize and make them feel seen. No connection is made. Frankly, this is superficial.
That’s why empathy empowers and sympathy doesn’t. Yet because these are mistaken and conflated as often as they are, I want to dive deeper into recognizing and understanding this and why that matters to and for you and me.
Why does empowerment matter?
One of the biggest issues in society today is how much happens to create disempowerment. The entire playbook of too many politicians, business leaders, and the like is disempowerment.
What does that even mean? It means they want you hopeless, helpless, and/or incapable. These so-called leaders want you to be a cog in the machine, accepting any shit sandwich they feed you and then thanking them for it and asking for seconds.
Don’t believe me? Explain health insurance in the United States to me? You must be insured but they can deny your claims and then send you into bankruptcy still sick and broken. You are not even empowered to take care of your health on any level.
Empowerment is your ability to take control over your life experience. Admittedly, there are a very limited number of things that you can and do control, but they are incredibly important. Why? Because you alone live in your head, heart, and soul.
The only person who can think, feel, intend, choose approach, and act for you is you. Others can guide you, suggest paths for you, offer assistance, or make threats or promises to get you to choose this, that, or the other thing. In the end, however, the choice is and can only be made by you.
Disempowerment is action that intends to make you feel like you have few to no choices, like there is only One True Way, and that you are the Universe’s plaything. If you accept this to be true, then it tends to be. However, you’re empowered to make most choices and decisions for your life.
Where does empathy come into this?
Empathy is sharing understanding as if it’s your own
Sympathy is usually given with no connection and no understanding. That person over there is clearly suffering and you feel badly for them – that’s sympathy. That’s all sympathy is.
Empathy goes deeper. That person over there is clearly suffering and you ask why. Rather than just feel bad for them you, seek to understand what is causing their predicament. Then, when you can think and feel it with an eye for what it must be like for them, you can empathize.
How is that empowering? Because understanding on any level is always empowering. The more empowered you are the more capable you become of flexing your choice and decision muscles to choose and decide more things for your life experience.
These aren’t necessarily big things. They might seem small and insignificant, but that doesn’t mean they are. For example, if the increasingly distressing matters coming out of Meta are troubling you, you can choose to reduce how much time you spend there – or leave entirely.
For example, after Elon Musk bought Twitter and allowed Trump and his hate back onto it, I left it behind. And I don’t miss it in the least. That might look like a small choice, but it’s done wonders for my mental and emotional health.
Empathy helps you conceptualize what someone else is thinking and feeling. This creates understanding and connection. That opens you to not just better understanding others but making more connections to you own thoughts and feelings.
Knowing what you are thinking and feeling
One of the biggest issues the ongoing work to disempower the masses causes is a lack of self-knowledge. There is no place where anyone teaches you how to know yourself unless you land in therapy or seek it out on your own.
School teaches you how to learn, then how to be a cog in the machine. Parents teach you how to be a contributing part of society and not be a dick (hopefully). Jobs teach you how to work as a cog in the machine. Nowhere in any social situation does anyone teach you active conscious awareness, mindfulness, and how to know what you’re thinking and what and how you’re feeling,
Abstractly, you know. Everyone does. But right here, right now, at this moment, unless you inquire you either vaguely half-know or don’t know. Yet the key to self-sufficiency and self-awareness is, ultimately, mindfulness.
Mindfulness begins with knowing your own thoughts and feelings. From there, you can also become consciously aware of greater abstracts like your intentions, and if your approach to any given matter is from a place of positivity or negativity. All of these, combined, open you to choices and decisions for informed, intentional actions.
Intentional actions are empowering. That’s because they’re conscious choices to do things with and for your life.
Sympathy doesn’t empower by not making any useful connection. What’s more, it doesn’t do anything for the person you give it to or to you. Empathy, however, connects on multiple levels. Giving empathy also draws more to you, which then connects you inside and outside with more kindness and compassion, too.
Recognizing how sympathy and empathy differ isn’t hard
It’s all about practicing mindfulness of your thoughts, feelings, intentions, and approach to direct your actions.
When you recognize and acknowledge that sympathy makes no connections and empowers nobody, you can consider if it’s worth your time and energy to give it. Knowing that empathy makes connections and empowers, you can use it – in combination with kindness and compassion – to make better connections both within and without.
This empowers you, and your empowerment can empower others around you.
Consciously choosing your approach to life towards positivity or negativity – from the vast cylinder that exists between them – shifts life in a way that opens greater dialogue. From that broader dialogue, you can recognize, explore, and share where you are between the extremes and how that impacts you here and now.
Choosing thoughts, feelings, actions, and intentions for yourself employs an approach and attitude of positivity for realizing amazing potential and possibilities for your life.
The better aware you are of yourself here and now, the better you can choose and decide what, how, and why your life experiences will be. When you empower yourself, it can spread to those around you for their empowerment.
Thank you for coming along on this journey.
This is the five-hundred-and-seventieth (570) entry of my Positivity series. I hope that these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog, and spread the positivity.
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