Moving from Sympathy to Compassion

I’d like you to take a moment to ponder three words: sympathy, empathy, and compassion. They represent a continuum I’ve been thinking about in the context of our federal safety net programs.

• Sympathy: recognizing someone’s hardship and feeling sorry that they’re going through it.

• Empathy: a bridge between thought and emotion—the ability to understand another person’s experience from the inside.

• Compassion: what happens when empathy doesn’t stop at understanding, but creates an impulse to help reduce suffering.

For many of us, it can be hard to feel the impact of policy decisions on families experiencing poverty if we haven’t experienced poverty ourselves. We may feel sympathy for families struggling to stay stable, but still be unable to internalize what people are actually living through.

To better understand what budget cuts are doing to working families, I spent time with mBOLDen Change’s Safety Net Simulator. It let me take a seat at the kitchen table with families making impossible choices just to survive. I had to apply the cuts and make real tradeoffs.

It was eye-opening. It helped me understand the real-life impact of abstract policy —and it bridged the gap from sympathy, to empathy, to compassion.

I encourage you to try the Safety Net Simulator here. Policies that impact the safety net are much more than words. The simulator is one way to connect to what’s happening — but it isn’t the only way. I also hope you’ll seek out lived stories, listen to people navigating these tradeoffs, and keep finding ways to build understanding, empathy, and compassion.

With care,

Sue