To say my own life is a bit of a train wreck is underselling things a bit. Yet I’m secure in the knowledge that probably 90% of us feel that way at any given moment.
However, there are times when things get even worse for all of us. A traumatic event, an accident, an argument, a crisis. Some sort of personal happenstance that jumps to the top of your own catastrophic list. Oftentimes, someone will notice your struggle.
And they react sympathetically. They might offer words of support, a hug, or a shoulder. They’ll wish that they could do more, but they have their own things.
It’s where the world of misfortune concern reactions come into play, the Holy Trinity of emotional support: Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion.
We all can feel sympathy for someone who’s struggling. We can treat them with compassion.
In fact, of all of them, compassion is the most tangible and easiest to manifest. It’s active. You can see it in action. Feeding the hungry, donating warm clothing to a coat drive, knowing how to react “the right way.”
Sympathy is how something you see makes you feel. It’s sending a card to tell them how bad you feel for them. It’s lending an ear. It’s an emotional observation deck.
Empathy is harder.
What Empathy Isn’t
It’s not sympathy. It’s not judging. It’s not solving, nor fixing, nor mollifying. It’s simply understanding, on an emotional level, how the other person feels without actually leaving your own skin.
Sympathy creates a filter. You “feel bad for” someone, using your perspective to watch it from behind an invisible partition. In essence, it’s empathy with guardrails.
Sympathy is a one-way valve. It’s reactive. You “can’t imagine what you’re going through…”
Sympathy keeps you safe. Empathy makes you vulnerable. And that’s why true empathy is a skill that doesn’t come easily.
Empathy removes the filter.
It’s putting your own thoughts and experiences in a sealed box for a moment. It’s listening without purifying it through your own preconceptions. It’s not getting hung up on a word that might trigger us to open that box and empty it onto the other person’s issues.
It’s letting their feelings become part of you for a moment. To mentally wear their lives, not as yourself, but through their eyes.
Empathy is patience. It’s in being there in the moment, setting aside the weights and measures of your world and totally inhabiting theirs.
Empathy isn't a solution response. It's an understanding exercise that moves your own ego and reactions not just to the back burner, but into an isolation tank. And it’s certainly not a rush to get them through to your other side.
For some people, this takes work. For others, it’s just how they function naturally.
And it’s OK if you don’t know how to explain it. I certainly don’t have all the answers.
What I do know is that it works.
I was recently reminded of something I’d forgotten.
Several months ago, I randomly had an interaction with a woman at a store. Somehow we’d gotten into a conversation because I sensed that she was struggling with something. It turns out that she was struggling. She was in the early stages of pregnancy and she was having a hard time with it, physically and emotionally. She hadn’t gone into great detail, but this particular day had been uniquely hard for her.
As she was about to leave, I gave her some flowers that I picked up before she left. It was all I could do to show her that she was seen and understood.
About a week ago, I saw a woman at the same store. She was very pregnant. It was the same woman - yet I didn’t realize it. She came up to me and said, “I remember you. I was here and was having a bad day. I was just pregnant. You gave me flowers. I’ll never forget that.”
The flowers were the compassionate act that resonated. Yet without empathy, they may never have been given. And I never even realized that I was being empathetic. I just had to do something that pulled her emotions back into something hopeful. Something that went right today. For her, for her baby, because doing nothing wasn’t going to be enough.
I never had to go through pregnancy personally to understand her struggle. It probably helped that my wife had, so I knew how much of an emotional rollercoaster she was riding.
But what I could do was remove myself from the equation and feel her distress.
So what if you could remove the filter for yourself? Turn your empathy inward?
That, my friends, leads to thankfulness.
We’re all a train wreck at various points of our life. We’re bouncing from crisis to crisis, usually invisibly to the outside world. We’ll compartmentalize, put up a public veil, show a brave face.
But inside we’re reeling.
Thankfulness is the ability to recognize that you’re worth more than your struggles. It’s not some self-help mindset that will provide an instant fix. It’s knowing that an amalgam of problems isn’t the sum total of who you are. Those are transitional circumstances. Even the worst problems eventually become memories that have been resolved.
Inner empathy is the grace to know when someone needs flowers, and the courage to give them.
Thankfulness is the ability to recognize that you’re worth more than your struggles.