Imaginif

A young mother heard out the story of a beaten and sexually abused six year old that has already had three foster care placement breakdowns that have further reinforced trauma and attachment issues. Tears running the young mother’s face, she stood up in the lecture theatre and said,

“I have great sympathy for all the hurt children and I will do anything to save the children. I am that little girl in your story Megan. The only difference is that I got good foster carers. I stayed with them until I aged out of care. Now I want to be a foster carer. I want to look after that little girl because I have sympathy for her and I know I can make her life better, more normal like.”

The young mother’s application to foster care was rejected. Why? Despite three months of training, the young mother could not move past her own pain and see and feel the pain of others in an objective way. Her own pain tainted both the picture she saw and her understanding of another person’s story. Through her pain, her sympathy for an abusive situation took over and she became codependent and wanted to rescue every child away from bad situations. To give them a life like she had ended up with.

 The difference between empathy and sympathy:

Both empathy and sympathy are feelings concerning other people. Sympathy is literally ‘feeling with’ - compassion for or commiseration with another person. Empathy, by contrast, is literally ‘feeling into’ - the ability to project one’s personality into another person and more fully understand that person. Sympathy derives from Latin and Greek words meaning ‘having a fellow feeling’. The term empathy originated in psychology (translation of a German term, c. 1903) and has now come to mean the ability to imagine or project oneself into another person’s position and experience all the sensations involved in that position. You feel empathy when you’ve “been there”, and sympathy when you haven’t. Examples: We felt sympathy for the team members who tried hard but were not appreciated. / We felt empathy for children with asthma because their parents won’t remove pets from the household.  Dictionary.com

Empathy is the ability to sit in another person’s skin (experiencing and understanding what it is like for them) and walk with them while they reach the end of their journey. It is an act of recognising, feeling the other’s pain rather than feeling your own pain and doing something constructive, helpful and within the means of the hurting individual achieving what they have set out to achieve rather than what you think they should achieve.

Sympathy is the state of knowing that you would hate to be in that person’s skin because it is too painful so “what can I do to help them get out of it asap without me having to watch this any longer?” Can I perhaps give them a quick hug, a smile, a gentle touch so that they know I care? I’ve been to that place of pain before and it is terrible. I need to get them away from there.

Sympathy says, “Oh you poor thing.” Empathy is the older cousin of sympathy and has more sophistication in their vocabulary, emotional development and cognitive process. Empathy says, “That is terrible and I am genuinely sorry. I think I can feel your pain. What can I do to help you get through this?”

Empathy is the business of emotionally grown up people who want to help change things for the better (not just for themselves). It is a longer term process that involves complex patterns of imagination, emotion and thought. Sympathy is the business of people who become emotionally overwhelmed with a situation and cannot sustain being around that pain for too long (a bit like me when I watch some TV commercials). They feel sad for the other person and their sadness stops them from being helpful. That is why the applicant foster carer was rejected. Her heart was certainly in the right place. She loved children and wanted to protect them.  However, being sympathetic may have turned to burn out and placement breakdown rather than a placement where therapeutic and re intuitive parenting could assist a hurt child to attach, grow and prosper.

 Imagine a situation where you are seeing a child belittled and hit by the carer. What do you think and feel? Do you want to rescue that child and growl at the carer (that’s about your wants and needs - sympathy) or do you want to imagine how life must be for that one little girl and what could you do immediately to help her and others in similar situations (that’s about the child’s needs and wants - empathy)?

Save the children. Empathy gets things done. Sympathy weighs heavy in our heart and throats and prevents us from acting. Save the children for our collective future, don’t just rescue them to make yourself feel better.

Article by Megan Bayliss

Imaginif Proudly Supports the Abused Child Trust

For further learning on the difference between sympathy and empathy:

Empathic intelligence in pedagogy
Comparison of Sympathy with Empathy
Empathic Intelligence: The Phenomenon of Intersubjective Engagement