Hopeful Thinking - Saturday, August 26, 2023 - Have a Little Sympathy

I admit it. When I stub my toe and my husband Jamie makes a big show of sympathy, I actually like it. It makes me feel better. 

I’m not sure why that is. I know that I’ve seen children fall, get back up, seemingly fine until they catch the eye of their mother. Then the waterworks start. Is that healthy? Am I being reasonable as a 5’10,” 200 lb, 54-year-old male who also wants a bit of a fuss when I even moderately injure myself? 

Probably. We need sympathy in our lives. We need to feel that we are not alone in our suffering and that someone cares enough to help us work toward a solution. Sometimes the bandage on our knee seems to heal our injury better when it’s placed there by someone else who is mirroring the concern on our faces with concerned faces of their own.

This is part of the soup of being a communal species. Empathy, sympathy, and compassion for one another tend to strengthen the bonds of a group or community because they are natural to us. And they are natural because, like all animal instincts, they benefit the species as a whole when allowed to flourish.

There is a difference between sympathy and empathy, to be clear. They both include the root “pathos” which indicates the experience of suffering or feeling. The prefix “sym-” comes from the Greek “syn” meaning “with and close to,” while “em-” comes from the Greek “en” meaning “in or within.” Therefore, sympathy is about observing and showing compassion and understanding, while empathy is about co-experiencing someone else’s emotional state. There is a bit of emotional objectivity to sympathy, possibly evincing a more balanced and level-headed approach to problem-solving.

Sympathy, perhaps because of this objectivity, tends to elicit greater creative responses to problems and concerns. This heightened creativity is evident in the conclusions of another study which found that medical professionals who were more sympathetic to their patients’ emotional needs were better able to correctly assess and treat them. Problem-solving in medicine is the essence of the art form of healing. Sympathy drives our creativity toward alleviating the problem that’s causing emotional distress in others with whom we feel sympathetic.

Sympathy can have a backlash when overutilized, however, especially in early childhood development. Kids whose moms over-smooched their boo-boos eventually tended to develop lower pain thresholds later in life. We do need to develop resilience as well, remember. The study did not describe what constituted oversmooching, unfortunately, so the threshold remains unclear. But sympathizing with someone’s discomfort is clearly not the same as over-coddling them. Therein may lie the difference between sympathy and the pitfalls of empathy.

We might consider other areas of our emotional life where a greater degree of sympathy could be useful. Namely, when concluding about the choices and behaviors of others, as I’ve written about recently. We should be careful not to fill in the blanks with fictions that don’t serve us.

Sympathy for the plight of others activates our innate creativity to solve problems, but it also employs that creative imagination toward being a little less judgemental when considering ways in which the problem might have been averted in the first place. This releases us from the negativity—and the resulting stress hormones—which typically accompany our judgment of others. Sympathy gives us a platform for remaining a peaceful agent in the problem-solving process, which brings about better solutions.

Not all people are comfortable knowingly being a recipient of our sympathy, however. Some people feel embarrassed at the attention or singled out by a perception of their “weakness.” But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t feel it. Take stock of how different people respond to your expressions of concern and temper them accordingly. Being simply understanding is a great exercise in moderated sympathy, and yields the same results.

Sympathy and empathy both are gifts of the human experience and effectively draw us closer together. They are what drive the social progress of our civilization. And the wider the net of our awareness grows as the world becomes smaller and smaller, as we become more and more aware of the plight of others, we inch ourselves closer to the peace among nations we ultimately seek. For who can turn away from the sorrows of our neighbor when we begin to perceive those sorrows as akin to our own?