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Similarly, you can remember that empathy is more personal and requires you to put yourself in that person’s shoes. You can remember that sympathy deals with sorrows and feeling sorry for someone because it starts with an “ S.” Here are two tricks to remember which of these words is which: To give another example, I may sympathize with the person whose house was just burglarized because I can understand how vulnerable it must make one feel, but I cannot have empathy because my house has never been robbed.
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It is much more personal and specific than sympathy. You can share or even understand the pain someone is going through without going through it yourself.Įmpathy, and by extension empathize, is the power of projecting one’s personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation. This doesn’t mean, however, that you cannot use sympathy or sympathize to describe “sharing or understanding the feelings of another.” The word sympathize is 300 years empathy’s senior with this meaning. In the example above, the boss, having been late to work himself, had empathy for and understood why the employee was late for work.
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sympathy, showcase their uses in a sentence, and give you some tips to keep track of them. Today I want to illustrate the differences between empathy vs. So in order to keep our writing precise, we should be careful not to mix either of them up. They are usually used in similar contexts, a death in the family, a job loss, a robbery, etc., but they aren’t the same and have different meanings. Writers oftentimes confuse the two words empathy and sympathy.
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