For years I thought I was tremendously empathetic. In reality, I was only being sympathetic. And the difference is enormous.
When a friend told me about a problem, my first reaction was to find the silver lining as quickly as possible. I would come out with phrases like “well, at least you…”, “I’m sure it’s not that bad” or “what you need to do is…”. I believed I was helping, and that offering these responses was a clear sign of how empathetic I was being. The reality was different: I wasn’t being empathetic, I was trying to fix their discomfort — perhaps to ease my own in the face of their pain. I wasn’t simply listening; I was listening in order to respond.
Sympathy as a defence mechanism
Psychology distinguishes between empathy and sympathy and, within empathy, between its cognitive dimension (understanding what the other person thinks) and its emotional dimension (feeling, to some extent, what the other person feels). Both dimensions share a trait that sympathy lacks: neither needs to solve anything to be effective. And this is key, because being empathetic is not about trying to resolve or provide solutions to anything.
Sympathy, by contrast, is fundamentally uncomfortable with someone else’s suffering, and it is precisely that discomfort that pushes us toward the quick fix, the unsolicited advice, the “look on the bright side”. The one that keeps us on the surface, in the intellectual, and makes us rush to hand out textbook prescriptions. Ironically, being sympathetic disconnects us even further from the person who is suffering, because it minimises what they are feeling.
Empathy is another story. It is a conscious choice that takes effort: listening to understand, without judging and without trying to fix anyone. It is sitting with the other person in their discomfort, in the mud, and saying “I understand how you feel; I don’t have a magic solution, but I am here with you”. It doesn’t seek approval or claim to give the right answer. It simply accompanies.
A mechanism I also see in my practice
This isn’t a phenomenon confined to after-dinner conversation. I have spent more than twenty-five years advising business owners and partners in conflict, and I recognise exactly the same mechanism at the negotiating table: the partner who arrives at my office furious is not looking, in that first meeting, for me to solve the legal problem. They are looking for someone to understand why they are furious before being told what they “should do”. When the lawyer (or the mediator, or the board member) skips that step and goes straight to the technical solution, it isn’t that the solution is wrong. It is that it reaches a client who does not yet feel heard — and a correct solution offered to the wrong ear is almost never accepted with the same willingness.
The invitation
The next time someone comes to you with a problem, I invite you to try an experiment. Bite your tongue before offering unsolicited advice or desperately searching for the bright side of their tragedy. Sometimes people don’t need us to repair their lives; they just need to feel that someone is truly listening.