sympathy, and pity

[chelidon]

I've found myself at times slipping from sympathy into pity, and am thinking this isn't a good thing. Sympathy is feeling with, but pity is feeling sorry for, or at someone. It strikes me that genuine sympathy is an act of openness, of increasing connection with the universe by identification with another person or situation. Pity, on the other hand, is an act of detachment and separation, objectifying a person or situation, perhaps because something about them is inherently disturbing or frightening.

With pity, I seek to put mental separation between who they are, and who I am. "How pitiful..." which leads to, "Gosh, I'm glad I could never be like that." Yeah, right. Nothing is beyond us, nothing. We are all capable of anything, good, bad, noble or tawdry, glorious or shameful, and to turn away from any of it is to give power to that which we do not look straight in the eye and examine directly -- to feed the shadows, give them power, and make them stronger.

Sympathy encourages seeing another person as more human, while I think pity encourages seeing them as less human. And we all, one and all, are nothing more, nothing less than completely human.

I am going to try to sympathize more, and pity less. Opening, opening, opening...

We are all diverse facets of the multiverse experiencing itself, tasting itself, arguing with itself, seeking truth, exploring mystery, living paradox and learning, ever learning, in each and every moment, becoming more fully who we are, and who we can be.

Comments

[miriams-well.livejournal.com]

This rings true for me. Thank you for writing it.

Pity was one of the side-threads I was thinking of yesterday when I was writing about demonizing others. I feel like there is a triple strand of pity, demonization and putting others on pedastals as three faces of objectifying others rather than seeing them.

And all three can be used to justify behaviors and interactions I want less of in my life - pity because I think I know better than the person I'm pitying, demonization because a demon can't be hurt (or deserves hurt), and putting on a pedastal because I believe the other is So Very Powerful I cannot impact them for well or ill.

But I hear you about the objectification piece, and I think that's what rings most true for me. Objectification and projection are the ways I interact with shards of myself and my issues (after all, that's what projection is) rather than a real, live human being having their own experience in and with the world. It's an understandable place to visit, but a lonely place to live.

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'd agree fully that pity, demonization and pedastal-placing (and knocking them right off again!) are three ways we see and interact with others as abstractions, objects, rather than as real, live human beings.

As to your last paragraph, which I agree with very much, two dynamics strike me as counter-productive, and both have to do with interacting with our abstractions, our models of the world, instead of the world itself, with working with our inner landscape and seeing it as mapping to the outer world, when it often (usually) does not, or at least not particularly well.

The first problem is the effect on others. Dealing with objects, instead of people, taking one's internal dramas and projecting them on unwilling people and situations (where they usually do not fit well, if at all), often results in harm to others. It's like a blind person in a crowd swinging a sword at random because they see demons everywhere. Regardless of the outcome of the shadow-drama inside one's head, really people will and do get hurt.

And the second problem is the impact on onself. If the "work" one is doing in strictly internal, that supposed "work," no matter how personally profound, is more akin to mental masturbation or navel-gazing than anything that will really help manifest a healthier existance in the world of form. There may be lessons which transfer across, but how much better simply to deal with what is, rather than one's projections and shadows of what is. It's like LARP or online role-playing games. Fun and all, and it could be argued that there are skills that transfer across to the "real world," but if you start putting LARP roles on people and treating them as if that was "real," it's not a productive way to interact with the world, not a great way to learn. And, more than likely, a clever way to avoid one's actual work in the here and now.

I love abstractions and models, and internal dramas and landscapes can be endlessly fascinating. But if that's where you live your life, real people do get hurt, and you don't actually go anywhere, but inside your own head, which, as you say, is, ultimately, a very lonely place to live.

[skygypsy.livejournal.com]

perhaps this is semantics, but maybe "empathize" is what you're looking for here, viewing yourself as the other person. pity does indeed come not only from separation but from comparison and judgement as well, but it is an opportunity for us to face our own fears and integrate the shadow of ourself we see projected onto another.

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

I'd originally titled this post "sympathy, empathy and pity" and decided against it. For me, I think in synch with your definition, I see sympathize as feeling with, and empathize as feeling "the same as." With sympathy, there is still a separation between self and other, even as there is some level of identification with that other. Sympathy is a connection between oneself and someone else and their experiences and circumstances, and empathy is feeling the same thing as another person. If someone is going through grief after the loss of a loved one, sympathy allows me to appreciate what they are going through, feel a connection to them, support them, and so on. Empathy, for me, means that I feel their grief (or alternately, depending on how you look at it, I feel a grief which resonates with theirs).

Personally, I see empathy as rather more hazardous than sympathy, with its own inherent pitfalls. Not that it's necessarily bad, but that, like pity, it can lead to problems, such as feeling improperly motivated to act for someone else, because of those empathatic feelings. In some cases, it actually leads to too *much* identification with someone else, inducing one to cross appropriate boundaries and so on.

I think that pity has its place, but I'm aware that it can also be a trap, a slippery slope into objectifying, just as empathy can be a slippery slope into overidentifying with another.

[skygypsy.livejournal.com]

ahhh excellent distinction!! thank you!

i'm always encountering situations which counter how i tend to think of a word or action, revealing and unraveling attachment to "good" or "bad" biases... generally, spiritual teachings (that i've been reading lately) focus on the awareness that we are all One and caution against identifying as separate, so i love how this also shows the value of cultivating the integrity of identification in the form of personal bounds.

reminds me of someone telling me that compassion is beautiful, but getting caught up in the pain of others doesn't serve either.

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

Yep. On a very real and cosmic level, we are all one, but in the here and now, on this planet and having to live and work in the world of form, we are also separate -- that paradox is at the heart of many, many mysteries. Boundaries are important -- the state of perfect boundarylessness is absolute entropy, and in that state, nothing can happen, ever. A cell without a membrane dies instantly.

Little children are egocentric, they're the whole universe. They don't understand, for instance, that what they see, you can't necessarily see, because they can't comprehend that anything exists apart from them. Adults know separateness, know the limits of their own ego (or they do if their development hasn't been stunted, anyway). Oneness isn't going back to that child-like state, it's moving beyond the separateness to something more, not less. Or that's how I see it, anyway.

So to know Oneness, one has to strengthen ego, by expanding it, deeply identifying with more and more until one is the kosmos. If you try to do that work without a strong ego, you, as Ken Wilber puts it, become a psychotic, not a sage ;> There has to be a strong, coherent distinct "I" in order to sucessfully move beyond it. That definitely relates to sympathy and empathy for me.

[skygypsy.livejournal.com]

psychotic vs sage! love it :)

thanks for pointing me in a direction where I! can truly embrace the journey from my heart, not just the head "knowing" or "appreciating" "the process"

[kitten-goddess.livejournal.com]

Empathy, the few times I have felt it, has always been really useless. For example, when someone was telling a sad story, I promptly burst into tears and started crying loudly in the middle of the restaurant. The person sharing her pain had to comfort me instead of focusing on herself. Or the time I was in a circle of baby Wiccans (when I was one) and we all thought there was a demon in the circle. I was able to identify the demon's name and began to have a panic attack. The circle of fear went round and round....

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

Ah-yup. I know some good uses of empathy, but what you describe sounds like the slippery slope side of it, fer sure.

[anthologie.livejournal.com]

I've often thought of the difference as one of respect. You sympathize with someone you respect -- and pity someone you don't respect. It's harder to respect someone if you're objectifying them, so perhaps our views on this are not far off.

It's weird, but I never feel sorry (pity) for anyone. Well, except myself. I tend much toward the sympathy/empathy end of the spectrum.

[kitten-goddess.livejournal.com]

Where would you put the sentiment, "There for the grace of Gods go I," sympathy or pity?

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

ha, I had a glib answer all ready, then thought some more. Good question. I'd guess it comes down to underlying intent -- if what's meant is, "oh gods, look at that hopeless idiot -- guess their main purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others" (thank you WSB), it's pity. If what's meant is, "yikes, that really could have been me, if I'd made other choices/had different life experiences," that's sympathy. Or so it seems to me.

[kitten-goddess.livejournal.com]

My feelings tend to be the latter. "Yikes, that CAN be me, if I were unluckier."

Nothing is beyond us, nothing.

[storm-and-raven.livejournal.com]

How very well put my brother-at-arms. Here are some fun definitions from a google search.

In The Book of Urizen Pity begins when Los looks on the body of Urizen bound in chains (Urizen 13.50-51). However, Pity furthers the fall, "For pity divides the soul" (13.53), dividing Los and Enitharmon, who is named Pity at her birth. Pity defuses the power of righteous indignation and proper prophetic wrath that lead to action. Stevenson asserts: "Pity is a distraction; the soul is divided between it and the action a 'pitiable' state demands. ...


Sympathy comes from the Latin sympatha, from Greek sumpatheia, from sumpaths, affected by like feelings : sun-, syn- + pathos, emotion. Thus the essence of sympathy is that a person's feelings reflect or are like those of another.

Empathy - The imaginative projection into another's feelings, a state of total identification with another's situation, condition, and thoughts. The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without explicitly articulating these feelings.

Empathy is interpreted as the ability to take oneself out of oneself and put oneself into another person's world.

Empath - A person who can psychically tune in to the emotional experience of a person, place or animal.

Isn't Google great?

Anyway, I've had the double-edged sword of being an Empath my entire life. I have had to learn how to tune out some of the things that I can pick up. I know that it isn't mine a lot of the time, because sometimes the thoughts, feelings, desires, pain isn't the way I would feel it, imagine it.

For me, the words pity and sympathy have always been synonyms. I have always found pity to be an utterly useless emotion, either to feel for someone or to feel for myself. Sometimes we just cannot possibly imagine what someone else is living through. The loss seems too large for me to grasp. My heart breaks and opens for that person. My heart has to break, because it widens and expands to make room for the experience of watching someone go through something painful.

I can be sorry that someone I love is hurting. I can be sad that their life is so hard. But mainly, I just let my heart tell me the story. If I hurt over their plight, I cry. I try sometimes to actively imagine myself in their shoes. Often this makes me feel thankful not to be them. But it also opens my heart and forces me to widen and broaden who I am.

Pity is what someone untouched by the experience feels. "Isn't that too bad?" (said with a smile either inside or outside). Oh, that could never happen to me, I come from stock too fine to ever produce such a blemish. It is a comfortable lie, and allows us to kill "the enemy." After all, they really aren't fully human anyway, right?

Our hearts tell us to reach out when someone hurts. This isn't sympathy. It isn't pity, or even empathy. Instead, it is love. It is in the integration of the experience that the definitions come out.

Re: Nothing is beyond us, nothing.

[chelidon.livejournal.com]

You are an utter marvel, my sister. And I resonate with all of the truths that you speak here. I really, really look forward to the time when you are in a space in your life when you can write more, you have wonderful insights and a clear way of expressing them.

Re: Nothing is beyond us, nothing.

[skygypsy.livejournal.com]

Our hearts tell us to reach out when someone hurts. This isn't sympathy. It isn't pity, or even empathy. Instead, it is love. It is in the integration of the experience that the definitions come out.

i love this


thank you for reminding me that many of my empathic experiences do serve a purpose; they reunite me with one more drop of the ocean, expanding my heart with love