I’m no longer empathetic...
My dear friend Bruce, was a High School classmate and a church companion. I will say we loved each other like brothers.
We went to Vietnam at the same time but to separate units. By the grace of God, I came home relatively intact, Bruce did not; He suffered from catastrophic PTSD his entire life. God led me into the military chaplaincy and the devil pushed Bruce into a life of deep despair. He was a Christian but satan was battling for his soul.
Over the years, he would call me…weeping over the profoundly devastating memories he could not exorcise from his spirit. I listened to him…I prayed with him. I wept with him; he was my brother in Christ and my brother in the flesh. His pain wounded me deeply.
I recall one particular call; he was recalling, for the umpteenth time, the loss of his battle buddies and his own injuries. I suffered my own loss of friends in Vietnam so I attempted to comfort Bruce by saying “I know how you feel.”
He recoiled and said “Lee, you will never know how I feel.”
He was right; I didn’t have his temperament, or his emotional makeup and I wasn’t there in his rice paddy with him. I determined then, and there, that I was not empathetic; never would be…and the idea was nothing less than narcissistic.
Empathy is feeling with someone—trying to step into their perspective and understand their experience more directly. The Greek word ἐμπάθεια (empatheia) meant “passion” or “suffering,” from en (in) and pathos (feeling). This is the linguistic ancestor of “empathy,” but in antiquity it did not mean “stepping into another’s experience.”
Long before the word “empathy,” thinkers and traditions (philosophical, medical, and religious) spoke of sympathēia—mutual feeling or shared suffering—Sympathy is feeling for someone—recognizing their pain and caring about it from a bit of distance. That’s a fair and reasonable response to someone else’s pain and suffering.
In the late 1800s, German philosophers and psychologists developed “Einfühlung”(“in‑feeling”) to describe how viewers project their own feelings and bodily sensations into art and nature. Around 1908–1909, the British‑American psychologist Edward Titchener introduced “empathy” into English as a translation of Einfühlung, so he could distinguish projecting feeling into objects and people from the looser term “sympathy.”
At first, this “empathy” was more about aesthetic projection (feeling the motion of a line or the grandeur of a building) than about social‑emotional understanding. By the mid‑20th century, psychologists and psychotherapists expanded empathy into a social‑psychological and clinical concept. Clinicians like Carl Rogers treated empathy as a core therapeutic skill: seeing the world from the client’s frame of reference without losing your own perspective.
Around the same time, empathy became contrasted with sympathy as caring for someone, often from a distance, while empathy meant understanding and feeling with them. And, how do we do that? How could we say “I know…” Could there be any response more arrogant? Any response that could do more to minimize the sacred wounds that one is enduring?
I refuse to do it…
Once I say “I know,” I’ve made it about myself; implying I am the solution to their problem. It privileges me to diagnose and dictate solutions. A sufferer less wise than Bruce may believe me while I am busy with my malpractice.
I will never “know.”
But Christ will…Hebrews 4:14, 15 says “Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin.”
I can be sympathetic…and point a sufferer to Christ. It is sympathetic to say “I will never understand your pain but may I introduce you so someone who does?”
Empathetic is really just “pathetic.” It's the blind leading the blind; it explains how the modern-day gnostics have contributed to the dysfunction of entire societies. Please, don’t be one of them.
Live boldly out there today…
