Empathy vs. Sympathy: The Most Misused Word in Veterinary Medicine

I’ve started flinching at a word, and it’s a word everyone seems to love. A candidate for a veterinary assistant position sat across from me in an interview not long ago and told me, more than once, how empathetic she was. She meant it as her best quality. What I heard was one of two things: either you don’t actually know what that word means, or you do, and you haven’t yet learned to protect your own mental health. Either way, this profession is going to find out which.

That sounds harsh. Stay with me.

The Difference, From the Dictionary

Sympathy: “the feeling that you care about and are sorry about someone else’s trouble, grief, misfortune, etc.”— Merriam-Webster

Empathy: “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another”— Merriam-Webster

What Empathy and Sympathy Actually Mean

Read those again. Sympathy is concern. Empathy is vicariously experiencing the other person’s feelings. You don’t just care that they’re hurting, you hurt too.

Sympathy is the old word. Empathy is the newcomer, a bit of psychology jargon that escaped into everyday speech last century. Somewhere between then and now, sympathy got demoted to the word on the card you send when someone dies, and empathy became the answer to every interview question, every leadership seminar, every LinkedIn post about workplace culture.

Here’s the thing, though. Some of the people reaching for the bigger word are not actually doing the bigger thing. They say empathy because it’s the word everyone reaches for now, but what they feel and what they do is plain sympathy. They’ve got the right instinct and just grabbed the wrong word for it.

So either I missed the day they were handing out the empathy gene, because I only seem to have gotten the sympathy one, or an awful lot of people are using the word wrong. I have a guess which. And for some of them, it doesn’t matter. They’ll be fine.

The Empathy Inflation Problem

I can fully understand what someone is going through and feel genuine concern for them. I don’t like seeing people or animals in pain. That is sympathy, and it is not a lesser emotion. But I do not hand out empathy for free, and I’ve checked: there is no gold-star program, nobody tallying these up for a prize at the end of the day.

Maybe it’s that we’ve been told to run on it. Just like Dunkin’ Donuts taught us America runs on coffee, have we taught veterinary professionals to run on empathy?

Here’s the math nobody at the leadership seminar wants to do. Empathy means actually sharing another person’s emotional experience. A veterinary professional walks into a dozen emotionally loaded rooms before lunch. Multiply that across a career and you get a person absorbing thousands of other people’s worst moments. That isn’t a virtue. It’s a recipe for becoming an emotional crispy crouton: hard and brittle on the outside, crumbles to dust under pressure.

And no, the absence of the empathy gene does not put me one step up from a serial killer. It means I feel concern without absorbing the wound.

But some people don’t mean the word loosely. They mean it literally. They really are trying to feel everyone’s feelings, every shift, all the way down. The rest of this is for them, because that is the version that ends careers.

What the Burnout Research Actually Says

This is where it stops being just my opinion. Neuroscientists Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki spent years studying this exact distinction, and they make a case that the thing we call compassion fatigue is more accurately named empathic distress. They ran brain scans on people while they watched others suffer, and found that empathizing fires up the same pain circuitry your brain uses to process your own injuries. Your nervous system does not really distinguish between their pain and yours. Compassion lit up an entirely different network, the one tied to warmth and reward, and people trained in it stayed engaged instead of depleted. Concern for someone, without taking on their pain, is what the brain can actually sustain. The sympathy gene, it turns out, is the survival gene.

And this is not a veterinary-only problem. It applies to any profession that deals in painful, uncomfortable, sad things on a daily basis. The ER nurse, the hospice worker, the social worker, the paramedic, the funeral director. The researchers themselves flag that intense sharing of another’s pain is especially hard on people whose work routinely puts suffering in front of them. If your workday includes other people’s worst days, empathy as a default setting is not noble. It’s dangerous.

In a profession where exhaustion is practically a job requirement, maybe the problem isn’t that we lack empathy. Maybe it’s that we’ve been taught to run on it.

A Day in the Hospital Is a Stress Test for This Theory

One appointment is a new puppy and a family taking pictures. The next room holds eighty-year-old Mrs. Johnson, saying goodbye to the fifteen-year-old Yorkie she’s had since it could fit in her palm. Before lunch you’ve seen a hit-by-car, a possible poisoning, and a euthanasia. If you genuinely feel each of those, vicariously and fully, you do not make it to lunch. You certainly do not make it twenty years.

Or take the team member who comes in already crying because her ex won’t help with childcare. The empathetic response, the literal one, is for everyone to stop and feel it with her. Now you have a hospital full of upset people and a childcare problem that still exists. The sympathetic response is to genuinely care that she’s struggling, hand her a tissue, and then help her think through coverage for Thursday. One of these is useful to her. It’s not the one with the better PR.

That’s what I was reacting to in that interview. It was never the candidate’s kindness I doubted, it was whether she could keep doing this for a whole career without it hollowing her out. I’ve watched the empathetic ones burn out and leave, and I’d rather hire someone who knows how to care without bleeding.

What Sympathy Actually Lets You Do

Here is the part the empathy crowd misses. Sympathy is not the watered-down version. It is the more useful one. The sympathetic person can stay in the room. They can keep their hands steady, their head clear, and their judgment intact while someone in front of them is falling apart. That is not coldness. That is the exact thing a person in crisis needs from a professional. Nobody drowning wants a lifeguard who jumps in and drowns alongside them out of solidarity.

When I sit with a client making the decision to euthanize, the most useful thing I can offer is not to fall apart with them. It is to be calm, certain, and kind while they cannot be. I care that this is the worst day of their year. I do not need to make it the worst day of mine to prove it. Sympathy is what lets me come back tomorrow and do it again for the next family, and the one after that.

In Defense of the Lesser Word

Somewhere along the way, sympathy got treated as the lesser of the two, the obligatory card you sign when you can’t think of anything to say. I’d like to formally object.

Maybe I do have a harder shell than most. I’ve decided that’s not a character flaw. It’s the reason I’m still standing in this profession after two decades, still able to be fully present for the Mrs. Johnsons, because I didn’t spend myself on every emotional moment between here and 2002. I pick and choose whose experience I’m willing to step into, and I do it deliberately, because that’s the only version of caring that survives contact with veterinary medicine.

If you need a second opinion, ask Hallmark. They’ve had a hundred years to read the room, and they still sell sympathy cards. Nobody’s buying empathy cards. Maybe the greeting card people figured out before the rest of us that concern is the thing you can actually give away.

— Dr. V
The Gray Oak Journal

Dr. V is a veterinarian with over twenty years of clinical and operational leadership experience. She has owned and operated several veterinary hospitals, weathered many shifts in the industry, and served on advisory councils. She writes The Gray Oak Journal at grayoakjournal.com.