Keith highlights the difference between Sympathy and Empathy

Often at the end of therapy, it can cause a vacuum and some distress to the person who’s been through the therapy of knowing what to do with what the therapy has brought forward. And now it is just over a year since I completed a course of Compassion Focussed Therapy and I’m at a stage now where I think I need to revisit it and rethink about the lessons that I learnt during the course of that treatment. Part of that has been reading the book Mindful Compassion by Paul Gilbert and I want to share with you this morning something along the lines of differences between sympathy and empathy.
So here we go, first of all sympathy involves a heightened awareness of the suffering or needs of another person as something to be alleviated. The focus is on the other person’s wellbeing. Empathy involves a heightened focused awareness of the experience of another person, not necessarily suffering, as something to be understood, which can include thoughts around why they are suffering. The next difference, sympathy is relatively automatic and effortless, empathy is effortful and depends on abilities to imagine being the other, to walk in their shoes. Third difference, behaviour is an immediate action to alleviate, it may or may not be what is needed, that’s sympathy. In the case of empathy behaviour is on listening, engaging, finding out, knowing, conceptualising and understanding, the basis for thoughtful and skilled actions. The fourth difference, in sympathy the self is moved by the other, in empathy the self reaches out to the other. And lastly, in the case of sympathy, the other is other is the vehicle for understanding and some loss of identity can arise. In the case of empathy, the self is a vehicle for understanding and never loses its identity. Now although dementia isn’t mentioned in those differences, so many can be applied from those points that can easily be applied to the context of someone affected by dementia, i.e. living with it, or those living with us or befriending us, and / or caring for us, either as a family member or professional. I hope that was of use and interest for those listening to it, or reading the transcription. Thank you, Keith Oliver, good bye.