Empathy vs. sympathy: understanding key differences

• Having thoughts about what someone feels
• When in conversation, giving unasked advice
• Passing judgment
• Only noticing the surface level issue
• Understanding only from your perspective
• Ignoring or suppressing your own emotions.

Unlike empathy, practicing sympathy doesn’t mean you feel what someone else feels. Instead, you feel pity or sorry for someone else’s feelings.

You feel bad for someone, but you don’t understand how they feel.

A sympathetic approach only provides a surface-level understanding of someone else’s situation. This understanding is typically from your perspective, not theirs.