The Problem with Empathy

I have a problem with the word ‘empathy’ because we commonly tend to conflate empathy with sympathy. Search online images of empathy and you will only find gentle people putting their hand on someone’s shoulder, or hugging a suffering person.

Yet there is a clear distinction between empathy and sympathy. Empathy expert, Brene Brown, puts it better than I ever could. She says that sympathy is feeling for someone separate from yourself while empathy is feeling with them. This is of course the crux of my focus on somatic empathy as opposed to empathy per se.

Empathy is loosely defined as “understanding and sharing of someone else’s feelings”. This ‘sharing’ part is the somatic part. It differs from cognitive empathy when we work out how someone must feel by analogy with ourselves.

In life, of course cognitive and somatic empathy are so closely intertwined that we do not notice their difference. Mind and body exchange information so quickly that it is hard to tell what is what. Scientists however have teased these processes apart and found that our embodied reaction to others happens FIRST and only then do we think about the person’s situation but this chain of cognition is measured in microseconds.

So it is after sharing how someone feels that we progress to sympathy…or not. There are times when we share how someone else feels (somatic empathy) but then do not feel sympathy for them. Imagine feeling somatic empathy with someone who intends to harm you. There are times when we feel somatic empathy with someone but this progresses to other emotions (sexual arousal for example). So-called Dark Empaths are people who are good at sharing how you feel but then use that comprehension of you in ways that do not align with your well-being.

Empathy is a complex, sophisticated experience and its outward expression is not uniform.