Someone Talks, Someone Listens
Owen Pearn (Owen Parachute)
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Amount of sympathy you’ll get from me: Not much.
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Amount of empathy you’ll get from me: Basically unlimited.
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To enquire about personal, private help with anything, see if we’re a match.
Top photo via Nitish Kadam / Unsplash
Attention is akin to the capacity for empathy, the ability to suffer or celebrate with another as if in the other’s experience you know and find yourself. However, the idea of empathy, as it is popularly understood, underestimates the importance of knowing another without finding yourself in her… Attention lets difference emerge without searching for comforting commonalities, dwells upon the other, and lets otherness be….
Sara Ruddick (Maternal Thinking)
Sympathy: I feel for you.
Empathy: I feel with you.
Sympathy: I’m with you as you feel it.
Empathy: It’s in me as I feel it.
Sympathy: I’m so sorry those shoes are hurting your feet.
Empathy: Holy crap, my feet hurt.
Sympathy: Your experience takes you away from me.
Empathy: Your experience brings you closer to me.
Sympathy: I’m sorry and I don’t necessarily understand.
Empathy: I understand and I’m not necessarily sorry.
Sympathy: I care about feeling for you.
Empathy: I care about understanding you.
Sympathy: You are feeling it without me.
Empathy: I am feeling it, with or without you.
Sympathy: I’m not feeling what you’re feeling but if I did it would probably suck.
Empathy: I can feel what you’re feeling and I can feel my own feelings and I can switch between the two at will.
Sympathy: I haven’t had a similar experience but my assistant told me it must suck so I’m sorry for you.
Empathy: I haven’t had a similar experience but I can easily imagine your circumstances and feel them as if they were real.
Sympathy: I don’t want you to feel bad because feeling bad generally sucks.
Empathy: I don’t want you to feel bad because when I experience you feeling bad, I feel bad and that sucks.
Sympathy: We are two, permanently.
Empathy: We are one, temporarily.
Sympathy: You are less than me.
Empathy: I am the same as you.
Sympathy: I’m sure I understand.
Empathy: Oh God, I understand.
Sympathy: I will help you in Hell.
Empathy: I will join you in Hell.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
George Orwell (1984)
We witness things in the world and we make our feelings in response.
We do not feel other people’s feelings.
We feel our own, always.
This is OK.
My experience cannot directly become your experience. An event belonging to one stream of consciousness cannot be transferred as such into another stream of consciousness. Yet, nevertheless, something passes from me to you. Something is transferred from one sphere of life to another. This something is not the experience as experienced, but its meaning. Here is the miracle. The experience as experienced, as lived, remains private, but its sense, its meaning, becomes public. Communication in this way is the overcoming of the radical non-communicability of the lived experience as lived.
Paul Ricoeur (Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning)
