Sympathy Empathy Compassion
These three get thrown around like they are interchangeable when in fact, they are three very different concepts. In a way, they build in depth as you go along from sympathy up to compassion- creating a different kind of empathy sandwich. Sometimes one is more appropriate than the other, but as a general rule when interacting with others we want to be able to strive for the deepest of all- compassion. But what exactly is compassion and how is it in fact different from sympathy and empathy? Let’s take a closer look at that.
Sympathy is an experience of feeling for someone or feeling for a person who an experience has happened to. It is a more surface-level feeling, meaning that it doesn’t provide us much in the way of connecting to others; it keeps us safely separate. It does mean that we can see that someone else is experiencing an emotion like sadness or anger and that we recognize that the other person’s emotion seems to fit what they are going through. A synonym for sympathy is pity. When we only experience sympathy or pity for someone, it does not deepen our understanding of what that other person is going through.
To gain an understanding of what someone else is going through and experiencing, you may have heard the expression of needing “to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.” This expression captures the meaning of empathy really well. Empathy for someone is not only a recognition that another person is experiencing an emotion, it also encompasses a sense of understanding for their experience. Where sympathy is the expression of feeling for someone, empathy is the expression and experience of feeling something with someone. This allows us to build awareness and understanding of what an experience of life is for another. This can help us be able to take another person’s perspective or to be able to see something differently. But to really connect with someone, to really help someone, we need to take things a step further.
Understanding is great, but it is not enough. To really make a difference to someone, we have to have compassion. Compassion is taking empathy a further step from just understanding to a desire to help. Compassion means I am taking action to ease a burden or taking a step to walk alongside someone else and what they are experiencing. It means I am joining up alongside of you, leaning into your experience and offering support to walk through it together. Compassion is the taking of action and the taking of action on an understanding is what leads to change. When we extend this act of kindness towards others, we truly show that we care because this is an action that puts us alongside each other.
To really make a difference, we have to be able to experience all three of these concepts and we have to be able to allow ourselves to let our feelings for someone build into feeling with that someone and understanding what they are going through, and then taking that next step to reach out and say “how can I help you with that?” Can you imagine a world where everyone felt compassionate towards everyone else? Where instead of thinking about how I can get ahead, we would all be spending time thinking about how to express kindness and how to be able to help other people? Yes, in reality that is a utopian view and may not be the most practical or realistic. But, what if we all spent just a little more time trying to move beyond feeling sorry to be able to gain understanding and then ultimately to make a connection by compassionately reaching out to help someone else? Small actions of many when put together become big movements.