You know when you have a friend who is going through something painful? You don’t always know what to say to them. It feels uncomfortable, right? Finding the proper words without making your person feel worse?
When we try to guess what our loved ones feel and gauge how to act in front of them, it steals our focus from their situation and puts our inner attention on ourselves. It is hard for our hearts to be empathic when we are busy feeling our own insecurities. We need to understand what true empathy is about. We need to put our own emotions away so we can feel someone else’s turmoil with them for a little while.
Most people offer sympathy when something bad happens, but we flounder when the deep emotions come out. Usually, we end up commiserating (sharing the misery together) when we want to offer kind and heartfelt words. When those words fall flat, we feel even worse for our person. And they feel the burden of having mentioned it at all because they think they have ruined our mood. Or worse, that they have asked for too much emotional support from us. In the end, our interaction has failed to change much for them, and healing makes no progress. Sometimes this causes our friendships to weaken. So, what is the remedy?
We need to have empathy, not sympathy… because those are very different things. Sympathy is us feeling sorry for someone from the outside. Projecting our emotions onto them… and then trying to feel what we imagine they are feeling through our own personal lenses.
“You poor thing. You must feel so terrible. Maybe if you just… it’s going to get better.”
Too often, sympathy can feel like empty words. Sympathy is not camaraderie. Sympathy puts people on uneven levels with each other with the unsaid idea that they are worse off than we are. This is not helpful. Our person already feels this. Knows it. Drawing attention to how much worse they have it has never made another feel better. In fact, they may rebel against the idea that they are downtrodden. This can force our loved one to downplay the validity of their own feelings, making them disconnect from their heart. In this way, sympathy can be a pushing away of the situation, rather than a healing trip through it.
Empathy is different. Empathy is not projection. Not telling people what to feel or how to fix something. Empathy is an opening of our hearts so that another person has a safe place to unload the weight of their true feelings. It’s not about offering surface platitudes. It’s a willingness to experience their deep pain… within ourselves also… so that our person is not alone in the trauma. Empathy is an investment of time, emotion, respect and compassion.
So, let’s talk a little about compassion. This is the aspect of empathy that we carry into action. Where quiet listening can promote surface calm, compassion happens when we come with passion. This is an intense and powerful kind of agreement. One we feel so greatly that our emotions burst out and seek to merge with our person’s heart. The unsaid idea here is that our person is not alone. And that they have so much value, we are willing to invest time and spend emotion on them. It says something big when we want go into the dark to find them… and when we want to put forth the effort to carry some of that heavy stuff back into the light together. This powerful idea comes through even unsaid because our choice to journey with our person through the pain speaks for itself.
So, what do we actually do to be empathic? Mostly empathy is about listening. In the darkness, our loved ones feel lost. Likely, they have been spinning possibilities in their minds for some time. They may feel stupid or crazy for the direction of their thoughts. Maybe they ask for our advice… but as much as we think we might know, we do not have their solutions. However, we can ask the questions only they can answer for themselves. When they can voice crazy things and still see acceptance and respect coming from us, it helps them find their inner GPS again. We might feel kind of powerless ourselves when we don’t offer words of advice. But when we become a sounding board so our person can find and implement their own custom-fit solutions, we have then helped them find true empowerment. This is the full aim of empathy and compassion.
Our friendships deserve the best. We don’t always know how to treat our people as they need, but that’s not always a fault of our hearts. Sometimes it’s just a little thing, like learning the difference between three or four words we thought were interchangeable.
If you really want to support someone you love, ask yourself if you are willing to invest time and emotion to feel with them. If you can walk away with a shrug or the shake of a head, that is sympathy. If you walk away with a heaviness in your own heart and a mind that can’t stop thinking about your person’s situation, this is empathy.
When the pain comes, invest some time in your person. Open yourself up. Put away your own feelings and clear some room in your heart to entertain their feelings. Better yet, make up the guest room and plan for their feelings to stay with you for a little while. Then the words will take care of themselves, and your person will treasure the love and support you always have for them. 🙂
~Rebekah Antkow~
Greater Than We Know 
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