On a weird side note, the first thing that popped into my head in class when we were talking about the creepy side of sympathy was sympathy pregnancies. This is “a condition in which the husband or partner of an expectant mother experiences some of the same symptoms and behavior as the mother.”
I’ve always teased my dad about having a prolonged sympathy pregnancy, but I was thinking about the term and why it and actual cases of male pregnancy are looked upon with such curiosity. Obviously we associate pregnancy with women – men simply don’t have the anatomy – but there’s something almost uncanny about the idea that a man’s body could start to mirror a woman’s.
If empathy is seeing yourself in someone and their circumstances and thus feeling for them, the reverse of that would be feeling for them (sympathetically) such that you actually become them.
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