Feeling for and feeling with

Post Reply New Topic

For the purpose of this post I'm going to define the difference between sympathy and empathy as the difference between feeling for and feeling with. I have no trouble with sympathy, it's largely intellectual, I think. Empathy is a different matter. Sometimes I feel sympathy but no empathy. I feel incredibly detached. Other times my feelings of empathy are very powerful. I'm trying to figure out the differences between these experiences of no/intense empathy. If I see someone being humiliated-strong empathy. If someone tells me their parent (whom I don't know) died, I feel sympathy but no empathy and I have experienced the death of a parent. If I see an animal abused (even in photos) strong empathy. Is it different for anyone else?

I think I feel strong empathy if I can identify with the situation. If someone is being harassed in public or bullied, I feel strong empathy and sympathy. Most situations which involve a victim will receive empathy on my part. I can understand being victimized in some way. Other situations of loss, for example losing a love one, is much more difficult for me. When my grandparents died I really felt nothing because I could not identify with the loss. Other situations of burden, for example, having to work two jobs to make ends meet, again will receive sympathy but not empathy because of my lack of understanding. Also I think I have learnt over time which situations require my sympathy. So I know that I should feel sad or another person, but not because I can feel the others pain, but more so because I know the other is supposed to be in pain.

That's why I mentioned the losing a parent thing, I have experienced it but have difficulty feeling empathy for another in the same situation (although I do feel sympathy). Actually I felt detached when my father died too. I felt something strongly, but it wasn't ordinary grief. Perhaps because he died after a long and painful bout with cancer. Like you i_wanna_blue my empathy tends to be strongest when I see someone being victimized. I feel it physically.

I don't feel anything like that physically I just try to help people out due to a code of honor I use.

I find it easy to both feel for and to feel with a person who's in distress.

I can empathise in some issues, and I tend not to show sympathy so much. If someone's loved one died then I can show sympathy if they felt a deep emotion as a result of that. I would feel no empathy as my father died and I felt no grief when he died as I felt there was no love lost good riddance. If it was a person who I particularly liked who lost a relation then I can sympathise. If it is some experience then I can epathise with someone experiencing prejudice (such as aspiphobia), but now more often people expect me to empathise with other people's situation that I have never been in and have not experienced or as I have often been accused of attention seeking behaviour so I often choose not to empathise with certain people especially if at times I have experienced people who thought all I needed was a good kick up the arse so therfore I would treat them likewise and that can include me switching off sympathy. Empathy or putting yourself in anothers position. No one has done that to me but they have expected me to do so as though I have no point of view or position, and about experiences that are completely alien to me.

These questions about feelings are very complex, and I wonder if it is possible for me to sort them out. I don't think that I have ever felt reciprocal empathy the way an NT does, at least as it relates to sadness, grief, or distress. But then I am not sure that I have ever even felt personal sadness or grief.

I am AT TIMES capable of intense feelings as a result of someone else's injustice or distress, but I am unsure if the root emotion is some sort of anger at injustice, an instinctual impulse to protect others, the result of intellectual sympathy, or something else. Like you, Aimless, I often feel completely detached when confronted with someone else's emotional state, and am unsure as to the rhyme or reason behind it all.

Am I lacking empathy if I am struggling to understand how someone is feeling and why they are feeling that way?
If I do know how someone is feeling and understand why they are feeling that way but I cannot feel their feelings, am I still lacking empathy?
If I am just standing there watching someone in pain and I don't know what to do, am I still lacking empathy?
Me laughing at my husbands feet when he is in pain and him walking funny and going ow ow ow, is that lacking empathy? I bet the answer is yes. I am trying hard not to laugh. Ever since he told me how he really feels when they hurt and what his feet really feel like, I have been laughing ever since. It was better when I was just staring at him and acting like it wasn't happening.


I know I have empathy but I seemed to have it more for items. I think I do have empathy for abused children. I cannot watch the videos on youtube about it without finding it upsetting or even going into tears. It makes me mad and sad that people can be that cruel. I even cried when I read A Child Called It because the abuse was so bad and I even read A Brother's Journey by Richard Pelzer, David's brother aka Russell. It was intense when I read it but not as sad but the abuse was still pretty bad but it was more emotional. I hated the mother and didn't care about her illness. Since I felt something, I had empathy.
I also don't like animal abuse and I don't find it joyful to see pictures of them or else it makes me feel like a bad person.

How do you feel sympathy? I thought empathy is with when you feel what someone is feeling. So what does sympathy feel like? I thought sympathy is understanding how someone is feeling and knowing their pain but you can't feel their feelings. So I don't know how you can feel it.

I often get empathy and sympathy mixed up so what I am thinking might be sympathy than empathy even if I do feel something but it's due to my own feelings, not about how someone else is feeling. I guess I just answered my own question then about feeling sympathy, your own feelings about something such as people or animals. Am I right?

I cannot stand very negative people, I do not want them talking to me about how bad their lives are and them telling me they want to commit suicide. With my own online friends it's worse and it's too much. I don't like to be put in these situations. I shut down and I'd rather stay away from very negative people and people who say they are going to kill themselves. I do not want friends who are in pain and then it makes me all worried about losing them when they say they are going to kill themselves or they want to and I don't want to go through all that. So I run.
When my online friends do sometimes talk about their horrible lives, I don't know what support to offer but if I have any advice, I give it to them as support. If I don't know what to say about it, the only support I can give is to listen.
My ex thought I was uncaring even though I would try and give him support by telling him who cares what he has, I don't care about income or where he lives or what car he has or what things he has but he was still unhappy about what he had. He was very negative but he didn't talk about how bad his life is often. I would even tell him who cares what people think of him, they would never see him again so don't worry what they are going to think. He thought I was self centered for that because I didn't care what people thought. I think that was sympathy I had for him. I don't know if I had empathy for him. I just wouldn't want to be in his shoes and have an ex who is trying to lie to the judge about you and you can't even see your kid a lot. If I had a kid with him, I would never do what his ex did, even if my ex pissed me off I still wouldn't act like her. I don't go that far because I would not want it done to me. I think that be empathy.

sympathy is ok. i can empathize esp. with physical things. emotions are another issue entirely. every so often i feel what it is like to be, say, a bear. or a tree. or perhaps a business professional. it's a more physical thing, though, and not intellectualized. it's a fun exercise, really. but, when occasional spurts of emotional empathy come along, my brain "blue screens," windows style.

I think you've made an important distinction there that I didn't realize. When I see someone suffer, what I feel is not empathy so much as rage at injustice.

There seems to be so much difference of opinion in exactly the difference between sympathy and empathy I wonder if that part of the description of autism is open to interpretation. An article I read recently stated that social isolation and lack of empathy were considered the critical aspects of autism and the sensory issues and stims and routines were secondary. This is an article on mirror neurons in Scientific American that another WP member posted a link to. It's really a good article. I'll repost the link. They are speculating whether the lack of empathy is a result of a lack of mirror neurons in that part of the brain. I'm wondering how that fits in with the Intense World Theory. If there is some kind of imbalance or wacky wiring in the brain I suppose it could go either way.

Wedge posted this link on another thread- ( http://cbc.ucsd.edu/pdf/brokenmirrors_asd.pdf )
It's a very interesting article

Last edited by Aimless on 13 Jan 2010, 5:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

This is a subject I was planning to post about myself. A couple of weeks ago I felt someone sympathize with me for the first time.

I'm seeing a therapist, who happens to be dyslexic. I'd been talking about feelings of frustration and (before diagnosis) serious self-hatred about my inability to communicate. He said he found it hard to understand why I felt like that until he was confronted with his own disability - when he can't spell check a letter for example - then he would start to feel the same way.

This was a big deal for me. It's the difference between being like other people and being nothing like other people isn't it?

Victim/Abuser provokes empathy...that is very very true of me. It hurts my brain to try to figure out the difference between sympathy and empathy. I have more trust for empathy and get sympathy confused with pity and outward shows of emotion that seem fake. Empathy is more about feeling, I think I think of it like you do. If someone gets sympathetic with me sometimes I want to smack them. I know it is important to people who define characteristics for us, the difference between the two, and I kind of wonder why.

I have sympathy for most things, and empathy with animals.

I can identify with what it feels like to be a car more than how it feels to be a person, so yes, I would definitely agree with the "feel for people" rather than "feel with people" aspect.

Thanks so much for reposting the article. I hadn't seen it and it is indeed very interesting.



This Broken Mirror Theory is similiar to the Intense World Theory in that both focus on neural connections rather than the anatomy of the brain, which is the subject of much research. I found the Intense World Theory intriguing, but it really hasn't been fleshed out to any extent. It attributes autism to EXCESSIVE neural processing, whereas the Broken Mirror Theory suggests FAULTY neural activity specific to MIRROR NEURONS.

The authors of the Intense World Theory attempt to explain autism from the cognitive viewpoint, suggesting excessive neural processing leads to hyper-perception, hyper-attention, and hyper-memory. It might be a bit weak in its explanation of social deficits. The Broken Mirror authors attempt to explain autism from a social deficit standpoint and appear to successfully link mirror neuron deficiencies to social deficits, but the theory makes no effort to explain cognitive issues such as hyper-attention. Perhaps autism consists of generally different-functioning neural connections, including both excessive processing and inactive mirror neurons.

when my mother died, my dad was completely devastated, and cried like crazy. I wound up having to be the strong one; the only reason I started crying at her funeral was cause I felt a bit for my dad.

Most family deaths just don't bother me...I just don't feel close enough to them for it to impact me in that way.

It's like I just feel, on the inside, like I'm always gonna wind up being the "strong one", and looking at it all thru an intellectual and logical perspective rather than an emotional one.

And no...I'm not bothered by that or anything.