Facets of a Diamond - Blog

Empathy: to feel the suffering.
Sympathy: to take it on.

A healer must always be empathetic, but never sympathetic, for then he is as disempowered as the sufferer.

To empathize is to become one with the sufferer.
To sympathize is to become the sufferer.

A sympathetic surgeon who cries as he cuts the patient’s skin would be useless. On the other hand I think of the highly-skilled surgeon who would stand at the foot of the patient’s bed and loudly proclaim, “well you’ve got the cancer and your going to die.” He had no sympathy but he also had no empathy. Competent but cruel.