The difference between empathy and sympathy is significant. They don't feel the same and don't produce the same results.
Many sympathizers self-identify as being empathetic for some reason. Conversely, many empaths silently suffer by listening to the sympathizers' well-meaning but misguided attempts at kindness.
How do you actually distinguish the two? How do you feel the difference?
To be honest, it's not always easy. To truly feel the difference between the two, you may need to experience both to some extremes in your own life.
You need to meet a genuine sympathizer and a genuine empath on your path and sense the actual difference in your own conscious awareness and emotional body.
Once you know what real empathy is, you might become very allergic to sympathy. You've likely already experienced both, but you might still be confused about which is which and how they work.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.
Empathy is not about you. It has nothing to do with your personal emotions. Empathy is the ability to deeply connect with the inner world of another. It's about being fully present with them without trying to fix their situation or them.
It's not about projecting our own emotions onto them and it's not about internalizing the emotions of others in our own emotional body.
Empathy is the ability to leave your own emotional space for a moment and offer your awareness to be fully present with the other. You connect with your heart and soul, not with your mind, limiting beliefs, and personal judgments.
When someone shares something vulnerable or fragile with you and you feel true empathy, you know that your opinions or thoughts about their feelings are irrelevant for them at that moment.
If you start talking and reflecting on what it makes you think about or feel within your own system, you are either being sympathetic to them or you are just self-obsessed, but you are not empathetic.
Sympathy is about feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune.
Sympathy is about you. It's about how you feel within your own emotional body towards someone else or about their 'situation.' It's about being nice and trying to guess how the other might feel based on what you feel.
Sympathy is about trying to say or do something to change how the other feels. It's not about feeling them; it's about you being uncomfortable with how their feelings make you feel and wanting to escape or change it.
Sympathy is about your own emotional baggage and conditioning. It's about your personal fears, limiting beliefs, and self-judgments. It has nothing to do with the other or their lived reality.
When you feel 'sorry' for someone, you are not being empathetic; you are being sympathetic.
Nothing is wrong with being sympathetic and talking about how you personally feel about someone else's suffering. But understanding the difference between both and naming things correctly is still important.
Because we live in a world where many seem to be confused about what empathy even means, but somehow proclaim themselves as 'natural and hypersensitive empaths' for some reason.
Most real empaths will rarely tell you they are empaths because it's unnecessary. You will feel it or not, that's it. They don't need to self-advertise or put on a mask of a 'nice' person.
Also, many real empaths are actually not sympathetic or nice at all. They might be very blunt and even rude. Because they feel so much, they usually have very little tolerance for nonsense, emotional distortions, or mental confusion. They will not offer their empathy to those who just want to feed off others' energies.
An empath can put you in your place quickly and intensively with their inner power of 'empathy.' An empath doesn't care about being sympathetic with you because, for the empath, it's not about being nice or kind; it's about being fully present and aware of what is happening inside of you.
Sympathetic people play it 'safe' and advocate for social order and the concept of 'peace & love' (but only when it suits their own self-interests). They offer comforting words and distract you, but they don't genuinely feel or care how you actually feel.
They use your current situation as a context to show you how smart, clever, and skillful they could be with problems they don't have. They use your misfortune or challenging situation to increase their own self-esteem and value by trying too hard to help you with their unsolicited advice or unrequested opinions about something they know nothing about.
Both empaths and sympathizers have 'light' and 'shadow' aspects. Both are important and can be useful depending on the situation. I will not delve deeper into them right now, even though I believe it's an interesting self-inquiry to truly question the sympathy/empathy dynamic in our own lives and how we authentically use them with others.
You can be whatever you want, but you need to be honest with yourself about who you are, what role you play, and why.
You cannot act like a sympathizer but call yourself an empath at the same time. It confuses everyone and can be harmful or dangerous for some people in certain situations.
This brings me to the dangers of being a false empath.
Sometimes when a person shares something vulnerable and fragile with us, they might be touching on deep trauma in their own system. They might not even be aware of it themselves.
If what the person shares with us has a lot of 'unprocessed' traumatic content, the potential to experience all kinds of PTSD symptoms and the risk of retraumatization are high.
If they talk to you about real trauma, you need to be very careful with your sympathies at that moment. Every word you use unconsciously or mechanically can destabilize, confuse, and harm them in the deepest parts of their being. You can mess up someone's head and even break their heart if you try too hard to be 'sympathetic' while they deal with their inner trauma.
When a person experiences trauma (or PTSD), they need empathy from others, not sympathy.
If you can't offer them empathy with what they are going through, be honest and keep yourself away from them. Don't offer sympathy either; instead, help them identify resources where they can feel safe and welcomed in their integration process. But keep your pity and your 'sorries' to yourself.
Don't impose the resources you think might be right for them based on your own judgment or fears; help them find what would be comfortable and make sense to them as a coherent strategy to support their own unique journey. Not for you, for them!
Remember, empathy has nothing to do with you.
If your own nervous system becomes dysregulated when you are faced with another's trauma, it's likely because it has triggered something inside of you that you have not yet processed.
Their trauma has awakened your own trauma content, and the emotional journey you are now experiencing is not about empathy at all. It's now about your own trauma and the trauma bond with the other, and this can become very wild and very painful very fast.
The savior syndrome is an example of how a self-proclaimed empath with unprocessed trauma starts playing the role of a savior.
Being sympathetic is often a trauma response too. It's a mild form of 'stop talking about your pain because I don't want to face what it makes me feel inside myself.'
When you are empathetic and don't engage in trauma bonds with people, your nervous system will be perfectly fine feeling the emotions of the other without being uncomfortable or wanting to escape or change the subject. You will be okay with feeling them exactly as they are and simply listening with an open heart.
You wouldn't care to have a personal opinion about what they are going through because you would know that your capacity to be present with them and their feelings is much more important and impactful than your personal judgements, beliefs, or thoughts about it.
The empath offers their heart and unconditional presence, not their personal intelligence or inner wisdom.
Sympathizers offer their opinions and reflections of their own emotional landscape about the situation the other is going through.
Sympathizers are well-matched with false victims, those who usually don't look to heal but only talk about it endlessly. They fit well with sympathizers to continue their journey of complaining and blaming the world for their misery.
But real victims need more empaths in their lives to help them recover faster and safer. They need another human being to hold their hand and trust them while they struggle. They don't need stupid questions, useless 'sorries,' saviors, judgments, or opinions. They need your ability to feel them unconditionally and just be there.
Being an empath is about courage, not niceness.
Being nice is sympathetic; being responsible for your own self while being able to authentically feel the suffering of the other with inner peace and love in your own heart no matter what, is called being empathetic.
Sympathy reassures the mind and is mainly about you.
Empathy heals the heart, but it is not about you.
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