People have tried explaining it to me before and I never really understood the difference. I’m hoping a simple explanation will help.
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I can *empathize* with a mass murderer, because I can put myself into understanding what he felt within his frame of reference that made him make the choices he did.
But I can never *sympathize* with him, and feel sorry about him.
Sympathy = “sucks to be you”.
Empathy = “I feel your pain”.
Obviously over simplified, but ELI5 after all.
I simply put it that a feeling of sympathy has more focus on the “sympathetic” one. I think sympathy often it is just used a mechanism for someone to manipulate a false feeling to get what the desire. Yes, those feelings of compassion and sympathy for the person in distress are genuine, but I believe they are more directed inwards, often to comfort the sympathetic one.
I kinda compare empathy to method acting. I try to incorporate empathy as much as I can and that starts with understand the persons emotions. You never will understand them, but listening to a friend explain their emotions will ultimately make them feel better, in some way or another. That’s empathy. Literally thinking of yourself as that person. How would you feel? Try to look at it as unbiased as possible.
I think empathy is the most powerful force on the planet. I hate to say that we need much, much more of it.
This is just my understanding of it. There’s probably flaws or whatever, but it makes sense to me 🙂 hope it helped an be and empath (lmao)
Empathy if feeling another person’s emotions. If a friends mother dies, and you are in anguish over their loss, that is empathy.
Sympathy is supportive and understanding another person’s emotion without you actually sharing that feeling. Someone’s pet dies, you can sympathise with their loss and offer support, even though you yourself do not experience the loss.
Think of the Eagles and the Flyers. We give the Eagles sympathy because they’re trying and are not good enough yet. We have empathy towards the Flyers because we just don’t care.
Sympathy is when you feel bad for a person who is suffering. Empathy is when your are experiencing pain simultaneously as someone else who is going through something, that you too have dealt with, and now are suffering and experiencing it with them collectively/concurrently
Empathy is a term we use for the ability to understand other people’s feelings as if we were having them ourselves.
Empathy can also mean projecting our own feeling onto a work of art or another object.
Sympathy refers to the ability to take part in someone else’s feelings, mostly by feeling sorrowful about their misfortune.
Sympathy can also be used in relation to opinions and taste, like when you say that you have sympathy for a political cause.
People will try to give pedantic differences, but in common, everyday speech sympathy and empathy have essential the exact same meaning and are used interchangeably
There is a type of therapy called compassion focused therapy which is excellent. Based on attachment theory, interpersonal theory, and affective neuroscience it suggests that:
Sympathy is the felt sense in response to your or another’s pain
And
Empathy is the cognitive understanding of your or another’s pain.
NB, CFT is different than self-compassion (Neff) and mindfulness (kKabat-Zinn) and mindful self-compassion (Neff &Germer). Highly recommend you check it out if interested, I think it’s the cats pajamas
I’ve always understood it as;
Empathy; ‘oh you lost your father at a young age? As did I. I have a good understanding of how that must might have affected you.
Sympathy; I never lost my father, but you’re, clearly, hurting.
The difference being whether you can relate to their specific pain or relate with the fact that they’re in pain.
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