#sympathy

(I tried to keep the definitions short and simple)

Cognitive empathy: The ability to understand someone's feelings and reactions. Understanding why someone is sad, why they're angry, etc…

Affective/Emotional empathy: The ability to feel or mirror someone's feelings. Feeling sad when someone is sad, feeling happy when someone is happy, etc…

Compassionate empathy: Some kind of mix between the 2 types of empathy above and compassion. This one isn't important to know.

Sympathy: Feeling of concern for someone's misfortune. The difference with affective empathy is that the person isn't feeling nor mirroring someone's feelings, they are feeling in consequence of someone's situation and feelings. E.g. Feeling sad for someone's suffering, the suffering person doesn't have to be sad of their own suffering for it to happen. The difference with pity is that pity is generally adding a hierarchy between the people. E.g. Feeling sorry for someone's misery because they're below you.

Compassion: Feeling the need to help, support, comfort, etc, someone. If someone is crying you might want to comfort them, if someone is hurt you might want to help them, etc… This feeling is generally linked to empathy and/or sympathy since you need to first notice or feel that the person is in a situation that could need some support, comfort, etc. Therefore showing compassion is showing that you want and that you're possibly trying to help, support, comfort, etc…

Like rn I’m dealing with severe pain from recovering from wisdom teeth removal and it’s so exhausting planning my meals around when I’m going to take pain meds because I need to eat with them but also I can’t eat majority of my meal until after they take effect then having the side effects of the meds all day so even though I’m bored as heck recovering at home I can’t do shit and I dread going to sleep because I know the painkillers will wear off before I wake up and I’m going to wake up early when the pain gets too severe to ignore. And I already knew that chronic pain and constant painkillers was exhausting because I’ve heard my chronically pained friends talk about it, but this is different. I’m not gonna claim that I understand what it’s like to have chronic pain but I have slightly more of an idea of what it’s like.

And I’m lucky enough rn that my dentist automatically gave me good pain management and answered my call somewhat quickly when it wasn’t working properly and I’m not allergic to or have a tolerance to any of the pain meds. I know a lot of y’all with chronic pain don’t even have that.

Compassion without empathy

Empathy without kindness

Kindness without sympathy

Sympathy without compassion