Getting Discomfortable with Compassion

This week’s episode is inspired by an ongoing debate amongst self-help gurus, social scientists, and psychologists about the relative merits of empathy vs compassion. To be honest, for the longest time I had no idea what compassion even was. I assumed it was just a fancy synonym for empathy. But after taking that 2-day self-compassion workshop with Kristin Neff and Chris Germer in April (as mentioned in my episode on Scarcity), I discovered that there is much more to compassion than I realized!

One of the most common definitions of compassion is empathy + action. You feel what someone is going through and you endeavour to help them. The problem that some helping professionals have with compassion in this definition is that more often than not, on a person to person basis, most people just want empathy. This has definitely been my experience. When I go to someone and express some struggle, frustration, or pain that I’m going through, more than anything else I just want them to listen and acknowledge that what I’m going through is relatable and normal. I’ve found the same is true when people come to me with their issues as well, unless they specifically ask me for advice.

While well-meaning, when someone immediately jumps into advice-giving, problem-solving, or trying to “make me feel better”, it usually feels like I haven’t been fully seen or understood and I’m left feeling a little unsatisfied and disconnected. What’s more, I think this kind of “action” or “help” is unintentionally condescending, creating the sensation that this person is holding themselves a few steps above me on the fictional hierarchy of human value. 

To me, what people really crave in these situations is the feeling of connection and equality that comes from pure empathy. They just want to be seen, understood, and accepted in their times of struggle, with enough space to solve their own problems (which is ultimately the healthiest and most empowering way to learn and grow). After they have received this much-needed empathy, if they want advice or help, they can then request it explicitly.

However, a lot of researchers warn that the downside to empathy is that it is very possible to experience emotional burnout if you are constantly empathizing with a lot of pain and suffering (which is easy to do in our global village where we are constantly exposed to the suffering of millions of people around the world). Our brain and body treat empathetic pain the same as firsthand pain, so it’s possible to get so overloaded by the pain of others that we trigger our instinctual freeze response or dissociate. 

Fortunately, I think there’s a sort of happy medium. This episode explores a different definition of compassion as empathy + warmth, which essentially retains all of the benefits of empathy while reducing the danger of emotional burnout and avoiding the pitfalls of condescending “action”.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Matthieu Ricard:

Tania put me in an fMRI scanner and said, “Do your usual meditation,” which in my case was compassion meditation. After ten minutes she asked, “What are you doing? This is not what we normally see in the brain when people are experiencing empathy.” I explained that compassion is quite different from empathy, so she said, “Well, could you do just empathy now?”

 

I’d been in an area of Tibet that had experienced a major earthquake, and I’d recently seen a documentary about Romanian orphans. For an hour, I tried to resonate again and again with these terrible images. It was complete burnout.

 

When Tania asked me if I would like to return to my compassion meditation, I said, “Please! I can’t stand this feeling anymore.” The altruistic love and compassion meditation I then did was so different. I felt a stream of love going out to those children, embracing them. The fMRI showed that the effect on the brain was very different, too.