How To Appropriately Express Sympathy

As you saw from the examples in the previous article, sympathy, which allows us to feel another person’s pain, can be very beneficial for society because it motivates us into taking action to protect the people we care about.

However sometimes the sympathy we feel towards others can cause us to overreact, and help people who either don’t need our help, don’t want our help or are perfectly capable of helping themselves.

In cases such as this where we inappropriately respond to our feelings of sympathy, we can actually do more harm than good even though we started out with the best of intentions.

A good example of this can be found with overprotective parents, who out of love for their child try to prevent them from experiencing the bad things that happened to them when they were growing up.

Unfortunately, this can lead to the parent sheltering their child from the world or making them fearful of it, which consequently prevents them from experiencing the very things that would have enabled them to develop into a strong and healthy adult.

Inappropriately responding to sympathy may later cause the child to resent their parent, as they become more and more frustrated from constantly being told how they should or shouldn’t live their life.

What Causes People To Inappropriately Respond To Sympathy?

The reason why a person may inappropriately respond to their feelings of sympathy, is largely due to two reasons.

The first is that they feel an emotional resonance with that person. They love and care for that person, and so feel the invisible connection to them which we talked about in the first article.

The stronger the love for that person is, the more they will be motivated to help them and so the more they will risk inappropriately responding to their feelings of sympathy.

Should this interpersonal emotional resonance become combined with an emotional resonance with the past, the effect will be even greater and so will the risks of an inappropriate response.

The reason for this is that when we experience emotional resonance with the past, we see a younger version of ourselves in another person.

This can strongly motivate us to help that person by giving them the assistance we never had, or wished we had, when we were their age.

In many cases this can be beneficial, as it motivates the older generation to help and guide the younger generation thereby allowing people to succeed whereas otherwise they may have failed.

Unfortunately because this amalgamation of interpersonal and past emotional resonance results in such a strong motivation of human behaviour, it can sometimes cause people to become overprotective or controlling over the very people they care about and are trying to help.

How To Respond Appropriately To Sympathy

Use the following guidelines to help you identify sympathy and respond appropriately to it.

1 – Identify Sympathy

When you feel sympathy you feel connected to another person in some way, like there is a bond between you.

2 – Remember The Meaning Of Sympathy

Sympathy tells you that something good or bad is happening to a person you care about. If it is something bad, you should take action to protect them or end their pain.

3 – Determine Why You Are Feeling Sympathy

Sympathy can be generated by interpersonal emotional resonance, which occurs when you feel someone else’s pain.

Or, emotional resonance with your past, where you feel connected to someone because something similar happened to you in the past.

Sympathy can also be generated as a result of both of these in combination.

4 – Respond Appropriately To The Feeling Of Sympathy

The first step to take in responding to sympathy is to determine whether your perception of the situation is correct.

Ask yourself whether you really should take action on behalf of another person? If you decide it is appropriate for you to do so, then create a plan of action to help them.

Doing this step first is very important, because sometimes our desire to act is driven by emotional resonance with our past, and the other person does not actually need our help.

Note : The feeling of wanting to help the other person can sometimes be your body’s way of telling you that you need to help yourself by overcoming an unresolved issue from your past, or fulfilling a currently unfilfilled need.

Do They Really Need Your Help?

The next step is to question whether your perception of the other person’s pain is actually correct? Are they really in as much pain as you thought? Do they really need your assistance?

Sometimes people may appear to be suffering when infact they are not, and so helping them would be unnecessary.

Taking this step can help you from becoming overprotective over someone, and having them later resent you for providing them with assistance they did not need or want.

Provide Help If It Is Appropriate To Do So

If after all this you decide that the person is in real danger, or suffering from real pain, then respond appropriately to your feelings of sympathy by taking action to help them.

Summary

Sympathy can be a very beneficial feeling as it allows society to work together for a common good.

However sympathy tends to be restricted to people that are similar to ourselves, which can result in a lack of sympathy towards dissimilar people.

When we lack sympathy towards others, there is a very real chance that we may experience conflict with them in some way. Often, this conflict occurs as violence.

in addition to this, conflict may also occur when we inappropriately express sympathy, such as by helping someone when they don’t need or want our help.