Sympathy -> Empathy -> Resiliency
Maturing Emotion
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays explore common topics from different perspectives and disciplines to uncover unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic is a collaboration with another great writer on Substack, focused on how sympathy is being labeled as empathy, then weaponized, and how we can mature our sympathetic responses into true empathy and, ultimately, emotional resilience.
Intro
Today I’m pleased to introduce Kyle Shepard from Resilient Mental State. He and I have been interacting for a while, wrangling with a challenging topic that pokes at the misunderstandings of Sympathy, Empathy, and Resiliency. Over to Kyle to kick us off on the mislabeling of sympathy and how we need to mature into true empathy.
An older man in ragged clothes sat next to a bucket as my father and I walked toward our destination in downtown Dayton, Ohio. As we passed, I locked eyes with him. His face was gentle, even though his features were rough. He said, softly, that he was hungry and then asked if we had any money to spare. I looked to my dad, who kept his awareness focused on our surroundings while continuing to walk as he held my hand on the crowded sidewalk. This man was clearly suffering, yet my dad and everyone else walked past him as if he didn’t exist.
I was troubled and confused. Asking questions about why we didn’t help, what homelessness means, and how one could get into such a situation only furthered my frustration. We didn’t make it much more than a block before I broke down and began crying. My dad stopped, hugged me, and then proceeded to walk me back to the man so I could give him ten dollars. I still remember the genuine appreciation in the man’s face and words before we parted ways.
This was the early 1990s when I was around six years old. If I had seen a homeless person prior, I didn’t realize it. Without an understanding of the complexities behind homelessness on a macro scale and not knowing all the charitable things my father was doing to help people less fortunate, I was fully absorbed in the moment and the overwhelming emotions that come from seeing another human hurting. I needed to help to ease his suffering.
Fast forward fifteen years, and I’m sitting in Counseling 101, a core requirement for a major in psychology at The Ohio State University. Rather than lecture on counseling methods, this class involved facilitated application in simulated sessions to progressively build techniques. On day one, we were told to reflect on past or current struggles that we were willing to share. Students were then assigned to be counselors and clients as aides observed the rotating twenty-minute rounds. Every one of the student counselors, including myself, attempted to be problem-solvers. Once we believed we understood the issue, we immediately began offering solutions such as reframing techniques, resources for support, and practical methods to overcome the adversity. Few questions, all answers.
At the end of each class, instructors would debrief observations from the day and then begin to progressively offer concepts, techniques, and considerations to encourage connection with those we desired to help. While I took away many lessons from this ten-week course, they all can be boiled down to learning the distinction between empathy and sympathy.
The American Psychological Association (APA) defines sympathy as feelings of concern or compassion resulting from an awareness of the suffering or sorrow of another. Empathy, as defined by the APA, is understanding a person from their frame of reference rather than one’s own.
Sympathy is getting another person’s head into yours. It’s absorbing another’s observed state based on assumptions. Empathy is getting out of your own head. It requires removing all of your own biases, opinions, assumptions, and even experiences so you can consider the perspective of the other person.
Sympathy is concern, whereas empathy is curiosity. Sympathy leads to action, while empathy leads to questions. These two terms are often used interchangeably by many, but the distinction matters.
Sympathy is the starting point. We must care.
Empathy is the enduring process of putting effective caring into productive action.
Back to Michael because here’s where it gets interesting. Sympathy, also known as emotional empathy, vs. the cognitive empathy we’ve been discussing, is useful but can get weaponized very quickly if we aren’t careful, as we explored in Toxic Empathy. There, we found that not getting out of your brain, or worse, letting another’s emotions flow through you, when coupled with fear, turns into something dangerous.
That’s because sympathy is easy. It doesn’t actually require you to do anything. You don’t even have to be aware of it, you just have to feeeeeeeel and as we can see in the raging online, there are a LOT of feels.
If you remember from Elephant Riding, we are an emotional elephant of low brain function, ready to stampede through the jungle long before our rational rider, our logical prefrontal cortex, even gets the signal to make sense of it.
You are naturally sympathetic, but will lose yourself if you can’t empathize. You end up feeling too much, losing control of your own body and mind. In fact, as Kyle reminded me, the appropriately named sympathetic nervous system is responsible for activating the stress responses most of us deal with daily.
We have to step through sympathy because chronic sympathy triggers the nervous system just like chronic stress, and that wears on the mind and body. Compassion fatigue, emotional exhaustion, distancing, sleep disturbances, unproductive attitude, and decreased performance are all signs of burnout resulting from mismanaged and/or unrecovered stress. This is an issue with overly sympathetic people and providers.
So much so that Paul Bloom makes a great case Against Empathy altogether and focuses on rational compassion with dozens of examples where sympathetic responses, like Kyle’s from earlier, can lead to worse outcomes. The uncomfortable truth is that the homeless man probably didn’t use the money for food. Food is easy for the homeless to get. Drugs, on the other hand, require cash. Kyle’s sympathy and his father’s money very likely made things worse.
In Bloom’s book, he discusses emotional empathy (i.e., sympathy) and argues that there are better terms to describe what you want, such as love, compassion, care, etc. He goes into great detail showing how, time and time again, sympathetic people, when caring about a specific person, will break rules, cut lines, and accept the literal deaths of many others for the sake of the one they sympathize with. A quick scan of the social landscape shows this in the debates about transgender issues, immigration, homelessness, racism, and more, where both sides’ sympathy is used as leverage. The result is torrents of stress flowing from every position.
Empathy, cognitive empathy, on the other hand, endures. It’s a skill that allows for connection and guidance without necessarily causing stress.
Undergraduate Kyle, in Counseling 101, applied sympathy during his simulated sessions. He needed to help them solve their problems as soon as possible. Deep care and concern for others are powerful. It’s also taxing and unsustainable. We often can’t solve most other people’s problems.
This is why empathy is extremely beneficial for providers, caregivers, leaders, parents, coaches, spouses, teammates, and friends. Encouraging agency in others to solve their own problems requires connection, understanding, and guided conversation to allow them to reach their own conclusions. Kyle describes it further:
Empathy is curious. Sympathy is concern.
Empathy is understanding. Sympathy is emoting.
Emotions are what make us human - they are different colors of the stress response that drive our functioning. Emotions, however, suppress the ability to be rational. Emotions require management and recovery in order to sustain performance and prevent burnout. Empathy, on the other hand, is simply a skill for connection.
Lest you think this is easy, remember what Robert Heinlein says: “Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal.” Knowing this and the difference between sympathy and empathy, we can begin to mature toward resiliency.
Resilient Empathy
We need to mature from sympathy (low brain) into empathy (high brain) so that we can build resiliency and not be the targets of manipulation designed to trigger our actions to the desires of others. Resiliency is the ability to function with, recover from, and grow because of stress.
That stress we talked about earlier, from sympathy, can be harnessed by empathy and grown into resiliency, just like we build our muscles, memory, and immune systems by exposing them to stress. Let’s look at how to mature from fragile emotional empathy, that sympathetic response, into something more resilient. To do that, Kyle and I realized we are back at the core of Polymathic Thinking:
Insatiable Curiosity - Going beyond the simple story that’s provided and exploring deeper. This will allow you to get into the life of the person you are engaging with and will also allow you to get deeper into the truth of larger issues. You’ll find common themes that contextualize the situation and tone down your sympathetic reaction, letting it turn into a proactive contemplation.
Humility - Kyle’s action to the homeless man was, fundamentally, selfish. He didn’t know the whole story, yet his reaction gave a big reward of dopamine. So much so, that memory is core to him, and he admits, “my memory makes me think he looked clean in that way [drugs]. All his teeth in order, eyes pure, just old and hungry. Who knows, though.” Humility recognizes the rose colored risks of dopamine and tempers the hero complex.
Intentional Reframing - Are there other, and likely better ways to achieve your goals? Goodwill donations killed the African textile industry. NGOs have no incentive to fix systemic issues. Even organizations like World Vision end up creating perverse incentives that perpetuate the very poverty they aim to end. Ironically, “greedy” free markets have done more to end poverty than any sympathetic charity donation.
Tying these together with my own homeless story. Back in the day, I took the charter from the bible of caring for the poor seriously and always carried cash on hand for the panhandlers. However, I got curious when I started to see more and more of them on the street corners and realized there was a lot more going on. When I forced through the emotion and started looking in their eyes, I saw how low these folks were, while their bags were typically stuffed with food. It was humbling to realize my actions were selfish when I reacted to the superficial, and the dopamine evaporated in the face of the truth.
I started to reframe and realized that I could donate to the addiction centers, advocate for enforcement of encampment laws, and volunteer at the homeless shelters. I converted my sympathetic response, and the easy dopamine hit of handing out cash, into empathy, and my town is finally starting to take action to actually help the homeless, vs. enabling their lifestyle through sympathy. As a result, the entire community is becoming more resilient.
Resiliency also isn’t love and rainbows. It requires enforcing standards, helping the homeless regain their own agency, and holding accountability to sobriety to begin that healing. It’s no irony that sympathy and drugs both have dopamine in common, and resiliency heals through challenge, not dopamine.
And this is a healthy progression because Kyle argues that the most important attribute one can possess is giving a shit. If you don’t care, you won’t act. The second most important attribute, he says, is not giving too much of a shit. Caring has limits. If you care about every potential source of concern, you’re going to burn out.
However, when you empathize, you allow yourself to view each moment, problem, and person uniquely, without taking on its emotional weight yourself. Problems always look manageable on the outside. It’s easier to perceive adversity rationally when you aren’t the one reacting to it emotionally.
This is why we have to transition from sympathy to empathy. As we do so, we’ll become more resilient in our lives and create more resilient response systems that actually solve the problems we care about. Sympathy -> Empathy -> Resiliency.
If you liked this topic, I recommend you subscribe to Resilient Mental State, where Kyle explores these topics along with functional fitness and other resilient mindsets.
Did you enjoy this post? If so, please hit the ❤️ button above or below. This will help more people discover Substacks like this one, which is great. Also, please share here or in your network to help us grow.
Polymathic Being is a reader-supported publication. Becoming a paid member keeps these essays open for everyone. Hurry and grab 20% off an annual subscription. That’s $24 a year or $2 a month. It’s just 50¢ an essay and makes a big difference.
Further Reading from Authors I Appreciate
I highly recommend the following Substacks for their great content and complementary explorations of topics that Polymathic Being shares.
Goatfury Writes All-around great daily essays
Resilient Mental State Insightful Life Tips and Tricks
Cyborgs Writing Highly useful insights into using AI for writing
Educating AI Integrating AI into education
Socratic State of Mind Powerful insights into the philosophy of agency
 | A guest post by
|