People have tried explaining it to me before and I never really understood the difference. I’m hoping a simple explanation will help.
In: 25
EDIT: My initial post was confusing so…
From Merriam-Webster:
The difference in meaning is usually explained with some variation of the following:
***Sympathy*** is when you *share the feelings of another*
***Empathy*** is when you *understand* the feelings of another but do not necessarily *share* them.
To make it easy to remember: S is for Sympathy; S is for sharing.
You share the feeling.
E is for Empathy; E for emotional understanding.
You imagine how they feel based on what you know about this person.
The sentiment behind empathy is often presented in the familiar idiom “to put (oneself) in another’s shoes.”
>Empathy has become a fad word for sympathy, though it was adopted expressly to mean something different from sympathy: ‘intellectual insight into another’s emotional state without sharing in it.’
—John H. Dirckx, The Language of Medicine (2nd Ed.), 1993
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