Sympathy vs. Empathy, Pt I, Grief

Empathy and sympathy are distinct. Empathy is more sophisticated and, therefore, highly rare. Sympathy is your ability to appreciate how someone might be feeling by remembering how you once felt in a similar situation. For example: You see someone crying over the loss of a good friend and you remember a similar loss and the grief you experience(d).

Some adults are sympathetic to the pleas of children because those adults remember what it was like to feel like a child. Nonetheless, while many adults may experience the same emotions of powerlessness, dependency, and related anger/sadness as they did when they were thwarted children, said adults don't see or understand the connection between their "justifiable" pain and the pain of "unreasonable" small children.

BTW, historically the "age of reason" begins when a child is seven. Before then, rationalizing with a child is, in my humble opinion, futile, and often stupid, given the obviously poor results.

One of the many, many problems with sympathy is that not everyone feels the same in similar situations. Sympathy may be disastrous in multicultural situations, and even within a family. Mistaken feelings are the stuff of diplomatic crisis (see: Middle East).

Take death and grieving. Each subculture mourns differently. Mourning varies also by socio-economic class. This may be obvious to you (but, alas, not even apparent to many), but...THE FOLLOWING CULTURES DO NOT EXIST: "Latino, Asian, European," "Black or White," and/or "American." There is not even a single "African-American" or, say, "Brazilian" culture; there is, perhaps, a Miami-Cuban subculture; a second-generation Jamaican-American subculture (distinct from subcultures found in Jamaica); a rural Michoacan Mexican subculture, which is centuries apart from, say, Urban-Jewish-South-American subculture(s), which share many features with, for example, Upper West Side/Riverdale subculture.

Getting back to grief: as with other volatile, primal, emotional states, results may vary. Some traditions/subcultures expect public grieving at funerals; a family might even pay a professional mourner.

In the Near East, as recorded in pre-historical biblical books, e.g., Genesis, and in Ancient Greece, as recorded in pre-classical writings, grief was ritualized. Sometimes public "grief," goes to extremes that violate the spirit of the custom. In many Latin traditions, for example, if you don't cry (women) or look broken up (men) at a relative's funeral, you "reveal" that you didn't "truly" love the deceased. My mother, btw, expresses this belief, but more on that some other time.

Now, let's examine some stereotypical grieving behavior, and start with funerals in the White Anglo Saxon Protestant tradition. If a woman were to break down & drape her crying body on the casket, many guests might react with horror. What might "horror" look like to an (this) outsider: eyes pop to their full circumference; eyebrows arch; backs stiffen; lips clench tight --sometimes disappearing into a fine line; face changes color (either becoming pallid or reddening), etc. A guest might be thinking: "For God's sake, woman! Keep it together. You're causing a scene! This, simply, will not do." As the British military motto goes: KEEP CALM, CARRY ON.

Irish wakes, on the other hand, are "notorious" laugh-fests where the music plays and booze flows freely. However, such licence for frivolity DOESN'T apply to the funeral home viewing or the funeral. And sometimes, such frivolity doesn't apply to the wake either. "Traditional" behavior varies by family, as in, "traditionally, in our family, we don't serve alcohol at wakes." This statement might be said through pursed lips, accompany a suppressed sniffle, and precede a phase such as "Excuse me, I have to attend to the...."

And, as you may have noticed, there are also different/double grief standards for women vs. men.

Sympathy doesn't integrate the above variations into a coherent emotional response. Sympathy refers only to how I felt in a similar, or the same situation...


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