Sympathy

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the negative emotions of another person that have arisen in the face of life’s difficulties.

Compassion has two sides. On the one hand, with your sympathy, you tell a person that you are not indifferent to him, thereby giving him support; on the other hand, you reinforce his frustration, his negative emotions, in fact, accustom him to problematic behavior.

Unfortunately, the denial of sympathy is often regarded as conflictogenic, and an upset person, having not received sympathy, feels the moral right to make counter accusations of indifference.

Empathy is different.

• I can, together with a person, in unison with him, whine about how bad everything is and this will end the matter (more precisely, this is called compassion).
• I can provide support, give warmth, care and help with this too.

Sympathy is right and sympathy is not at the right time

Sympathy is needed when a person is not in a resource, is very upset, something hurts him somewhere. But not all sympathy is helpful. Like any other action, sympathy can have two directions: because a person felt bad or in order to make him feel good.

If I want to grow a strong person next to me, someday I can sympathize with him, share his experiences between us in order to give him the strength to cope with his difficulty. If this happens rarely, this is normal: it is hard and painful for everyone. If a person abuses sympathy and instead of adding strength, he moves even more into the position of a victim, spreading his paws and expecting that I will definitely do everything for him, because I sympathize — such sympathy is inappropriate and out of time.

Sympathy must be smart: compassion without intelligence often leads to irresponsible help: see illustrations of irresponsible help.

Sympathy at the wrong time is not help, but a provocation to the position of the Victim. A confident lack of sympathy for erroneous behavior is one of the ways a person switches to a new, more adequate behavior. Perhaps they will be angry with you for your hardness of heart, but you can really help a person. See →

Empathy and Compassion

Compassionate Victims (and Victims). They resonate with someone else’s «I feel bad» and suffer together. But empathy is something else. Sympathy is sometimes also manifested in leaving a person alone with his experiences.

For reflection

From Jean Ledloff. How to raise a happy child.

Yekuana parents do not make pitying noises when a child gets hurt. They’re waiting for him to get up and catch up with them, if that’s all it takes. In the event of a serious illness or injury, they do everything in their power to help him recover: they give medicines or resort to the services of a shaman, sometimes they sing day and night, referring to the evil spirits that have entered the body of the patient, but do not express any compassion for him. . The patient, to the best of his ability, tries to survive the disease and not disturb anyone unnecessarily.

Once a twenty-year-old man was brought to me, who had gangrene on his big toe. By the light of a flashlight, I tried to stop her. The pain must have been tremendous. He did not resist my actions (I scraped the wound with a hunting knife) and cried uncontrollably in his wife’s lap. Like the boy’s mother, she was completely relaxed and did not empathize with her husband at all. She was simply with him, and he would bury his face in her stomach when the pain was especially unbearable, or turn his head from side to side in her lap, crying. At the same time, half the village was present, which, it seems to me, did not bother him at all, and he did not try to dramatize what was happening or hide his feelings.

From an article by trainers O. and D. Tarasov «Unconscious reinforcement in the maintenance and education of dogs»

Once, while walking, your young dog heard a gunshot or any other loud sound. Naturally, she instinctively twitched and flattened her ears. Your actions? Of course, quickly calm down, explain that everything is in order. What does a dog learn? First — most likely, something really terrible happened, since you paid attention to it. Second — if you want to be caressed once again — pretend to be frightened as much as possible! Of course, the dog does not reason in this way, but nevertheless, the attitude “to be afraid of loud noises” is successfully fixed in behavior. How will an experienced and reasonable owner behave? He will not pay the slightest attention to the fear of the dog, and in the case of a particularly diligent demonstration of horror, he will also “give up” — so as not to encourage cowardice! Say — no, it’s too cruel, it will spoil the psyche of the dog … Not at all! A dog brought up so harshly, not meeting sympathy for his fright, grows up confident in his abilities and in the power of his master. The psyche of the dog will suffer if every time you hear a loud sound or encounter any other situation in which the dog can “rescue”, you will behave unpredictably for the dog. For example, one day you will sympathize with her, and another time you will get angry at your own formed timid behavior. Not knowing what to expect from you next time, the dog will start to be afraid of you. Observing dogs and their owners, we noticed that, as a rule, dogs of owners who are rather kind and attentive to the dog, but tend to behave unpredictably from time to time, turn out to be cowardly. The conclusion suggests itself — the owners almost always form undesirable behavior in the dog by their own efforts! ↑