ELIF: What’s the difference between sympathy and empathy? Why does it sometimes feel bad to receive sympathy from another person?
In: Other
I think a lot of these answers are very much vague and contradictory, so I’ll attempt to explain:
Both words are rooted from the Greek word *páthos*, which means “to feel” or “to suffer”. More aptly, it applies to a feeling of pity or suffering.
**Sympathy** is a much older word, and uses the prefix “Sym”, which essentially means “together” or “with”. It is derived from the same Greek root as the prefix “syn”.
The word “sympathy” is more contemporarily used by people to convey a sense of understanding or acknowledgement of another’s suffering. It does not necessarily mean you share the same experience of feeling. For example, you can sympathize with a friend being in pain for an injury, despite not having an injury yourself.
This is a type of compassion but feeling pity sometimes implies a ‘superior-inferior’ relationship between people. This can be resented by the supposed ‘inferior’ (or the recipient of pity, in this case).
**Empathy** is a more recent word; the original psychological meaning is now obsolete. It is a much broader term, often used to describe a person’s ability to place themselves in the same shoes as another (even if that other person is fictional). Empathy is more of a capacity to evoke feelings and emotions.
For example, an actor is said to have empathy when they are able to perform the role of a parent who has lost a child, despite never having experienced that themselves. The ability to feel the full range of pain, anger, sadness and convey that emotion in a performance is what we might call empathy.
Sympathy is trying to help someone get out of their feeling because you care about them. Best used when someone wants to stop feeling an unpleasant feeling.
Empathy is joining them in that feeling because you care about them. It could help them feel validated, and is used when the person doesn’t need a solution, just a shoulder or an ear.
[check out this video. first is sympathy (which in this case didn’t work) and second empathy is used. ](https://youtu.be/QT6FdhKriB8)
Sympathy is feeling bad for someone else because you can understand that their current situation is not ideal.
Empathy is putting yourself in their shoes. You know what it is like to go through the situation they are going through.
I am a male so I can feel sympathy for a woman that is having menstrual cramps because I know that it is uncomfortable. However I cannot truly empathize with her bc as a male I can’t really know what it actually feels like.
Sympathy can feel bad bc your problems are making someone else sad and it also makes you feel less than the person showing you sympathy.
I have a friend who constantly loses his wallet. He gets wildly upset each time. I can empathize with his feelings, I understand how it would feel to lose my wallet. But because he does this so often, I no longer sympathize with him, I no longer feel sorry for him. He never learns, and never looks after his wallet. No sympathy from me.
Sympathy is feeling pity or sorrow for what someone else is going through and feeling what they are feeling; the other person likely doesn’t like being the subject of pity. Empathy is basically putting yourself in the other person’s shoes, understanding their feelings. However, with Sympathy you share in the feelings, but not necessarily in Empathy.
Sympathy is saying “I’m sorry you feel bad,” empathy is saying “I’m sorry your dad past away.”
They arent hugely different, but during very traumatic times in your life sympathy can feel trite or fake. Part of this is because when sometime really bad happens your arent sad that you feel bad, youre sad the bad thing happed. You dont want someone to say, I hope you feel better, because you dont want to feel better…you want to mourn your loss.
Sympathy at least implies superiority of the giver to the receiver. A person without grief expresses sympathy to a person experiencing grief; a smart person expresses sympathy to a dumb person. Examples, for good or ill.
Empathy is more of a sharing among equals. One can empathize with a person experiencing grief because one has experienced grief one’s self or has otherwise achieved an understanding of it. A smart person recognizes gaps and flaws in his own intellect and can relate to a person who, overall, has fewer intellectuals gifts.
Sympathy has broad definitions but typically when you sympathize you *”share”*. You actually feel the emotion of another, either due to a strong connection to that other person or because you have shared in the same or similar experience.
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Empathy on the other hand requires some *imagination*. Your capacity for empathy depends upon your ability to be able to relate to another persons emotions even though you yourself have never experienced the same situation.
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From Merriam:
Sympathy vs. Empathy
Sympathy and empathy are closely related words, bound by shared origins and the similar circumstances in which each is applicable, yet they are not synonymous. For one thing, sympathy is considerably older than empathy, having existed in our language for several hundred years before its cousin was introduced, and its greater age is reflected in a wider breadth of meaning. Sympathy may refer to “feelings of loyalty” or “unity or harmony in action or effect,” meanings not shared by empathy. In the contexts where the two words do overlap, sympathy implies sharing (or having the capacity to share) the feelings of another, while empathy tends to be used to mean imagining, or having the capacity to imagine, feelings that one does not actually have.
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