Empathy vs. Sympathy

Wind your clock back--far back.  To the year 1998.  In my ninth grade Honors English class, all of us are complaining about the assigned reading we had completed the night before: "The Lottery," we have decided, is twisted and creepy and just a few steps short of just plain evil.  I mean--sacrificing a woman so your crops go?  Come on.  Did people ever do anything like that?  Our teacher comes in, bearing a box full of slips of paper.

 

"Our lesson today," she says, "is on empathy.  And here's the deal--someone is going to get stoned so they understand what the protagonist of the story felt like.  I'm going to divide you into families, and then each family will get a scrap of paper.  The family who gets the paper with a black dot will have to draw papers again.  And whoever gets the black dot will, at that point, be stoned."

 

I've always had abominable luck.  I got stoned that day.  (Ha, that statement is even more funny taken completely out of context)  Anyway, I felt horribly ashamed.  And that is when my teacher started discussing the difference between sympathy and empathy.  "All of you, when you read the story, felt sympathy," she told us.  "But Katie feels empathy.  She knows how the protagonist felt.  How do you feel, Katie?"

 

My response, I believe, was something along the lines of "Hmm mumble grumble."  Interpretation: I feel humiliated, obviously.  At that point, my fourteen-year-old self decided something: she did not want to feel empathy.  Being able to be empathetic was no fun at all, because empathy seemed to be decidedly involved with intimately knowing how bad other people felt.

 

Fast forward a few years.  Okay, nine years.  As an HR professional, I deal with a lot of cranky people in the course of the week.  They are frustrated with the company, with the insurance vendors, and with the situations they are in.  I try to maintain a nice demeanor on the phone (so much easier, by the way, than maintaining a nice demeanor in person), even when I think that they have pitifully small concerns.

 

Well, fate has seen fit to teach me again what it means to have empathy.  I now get to jump through some insurance hoops of my own, and I am beginning to understand why people are often anxious, agitated, whiny, and just plain stressed by the time thye talk to me.  Some of these issues can be a pain, and many of the people on the other end of the customer service line have next to no clue about what they're talking about.  (Also, many have them have no personality and no sense of humor, but that's beside the point)

 

I have a new resolve: though they cannot hear me after I hang up the phone, I will not laugh at the (metaphoric) stones being cast at them.  After all, I should know: stoning hurts.