I wonder about validation too. With trauma associated with abuse there is often a lot of forced denial and being told nothing ever happened and it's all in your head, and why are you reacting etc.... So saying yes, something bad did happen and it's normal to be upset can be pretty important.

My understanding of empathy is that it involves relating and sharing the feeling of the experience, where as sympathy is more uni-directional. In a place like this it seems that empathy would be the default as we've all been through something that would likely enable us to relate to the others.