People with cancer ... They want encouragement to help them through their pain and the people helping them need to have empathy so not to drag the cancer patient down into misery
Firstly, I don't think you can speak for all people with cancer.
Secondly, this is my whole point about what sympathy is and isn't. Why do you think that sympathy doesn't include encouragement? Why think that anything other than empathy will drag the patient down into misery?
My sympathy for my friend with Hodgkin's disease included helping in practical ways, like picking up supplies for him, being there for time out when he wanted time out to forget about cancer for a while and just watch a movie, encouraging him through treatment and being there to hear and respect him when he talked about what sort of burial he wanted if it came to that.
Sympathy isn't the equal of pity or disempowerment. It's simply acknowledging that we haven't been in the other person's shoes. Empathy is when we have. Both can result in the same support and actions on our part - they might not, but my point is that empathy isn't "better" than sympathy. They are only about the source of an urge to support (f any), not about the quality or usefulness of it. The only inherent difference is when someone particularly wants the other person to personally know what it's like.
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Hashi , do you think the word relate and the word empathy are the same?
Not the same, because you can have empathy without consciously relating it to your own experience.
You can emphasise with the feeling but be unhelpful because your approach/response to it is different than the approach the other person wants to take. That's often evident here on the forum. I emphasise with how terrible a flashback is, but I might not help another person who has flashbacks with what I say to them.
In fact, you can empathise and still have lack of sympathy (feelings of kindness or support). I empathise with my mother's own psychological damage and difficulty managing herself or coping. I feel her pain, psychically. I don't have any sympathy or compassion for it though. I know how it feels, but I don't support her in feeling it. I'm doing the work to recover and stop damaging other people, she isn't.
So I have a very good understanding and shared experience, but no compassion. Empathy doesn't have to involve compassion, just knowing what the feeling is actually like. Sympathy - which people seem to be viewing so negatively here - does involve compassion because it's a chosen sharing of feelings.
Also, there is another aspect to empathy which is when you can (or often it's more that you can't help) tuning in to other people's energy. One example of this is what's called psychometry where you can pick up on a person's energy through an object that they own - which is how people with developed intuitive ability help police find missing persons. It's also possible to have this sort of energetic sense from being with the person.
However, I'm hesitant to suggest that's widespread because I think often (not always) when people talk about having an intuitive sense of someone else's feelings, it's not that but is in fact projection or even delusion. I see this in people around me a lot. Especially those who are co-dependent and/or have attachment issues. For example when people "know" how their therapist feels about them, or how their partner feels in themselves, but they are reading too much into things for various reasons.
The energetic understanding/empathy doesn't necessarily lead to kind or compassionate feelings either. I experienced this with someone I was in the same space with for some time during trauma. He was another target of my attackers, and I've spent a long time over the last year disentangling his energy from me because I absorbed and understood so much of his experience and feelings. However, that didn't exactly make me feel compassion for him, he was as terrifying to me as they were.
I think people tend to see empathy as helpful compassion, and sympathy as distant pity, and therefore tend to identify their feelings of caring with empathy. I think it's good to be clear about what empathy and sympathy really are. Without that, it's easy to say "I'm very empathic" and hard to see where sympathy, compassion, projection, co-dependency, attachment issues and plain lack of boundaries can come into things.
For me, awareness and knowledge are always power. If some projection is going on, then it's good to know it. If it's over-vulnerability to other people's energies, then it's good to know. And if it's a kind, caring nature with weak boundaries and an under-developed sense of self, then it's good to know that. It's just good to be clear what we're dealing with in ourselves, if we want to manage or address it.
But I expect I see it differently from other people.
