Compassion: it’s not what you think.
Compassion is not wimpy. It takes courage and strength.
There are 4 steps to compassion:
- To see and identify suffering.
- To feel distress or similar feeling as the person who is suffering. (empathy)
- To commit to decreasing or ending that suffering.
- To take action to end that suffering.
People often confuse empathy with compassion. It is important to distinguish between empathy and compassion because they have very different purposes and outcomes.
Let’s define empathy: feeling the feelings of another or feeling concern or distress when seeing someone suffering. Empathy is not the same as compassion, it is actually step 2 of our 4 steps of compassion.
Why is this distinction so important? Because if we get stuck in Step 2 of compassion (empathy) we risk going down with the ship. By this, I mean that if we are trying to help someone who is deeply sad, we will naturally feel sadness as we begin to listen and talk with them. But if we stay in this sadness and join this person for too long, we become over-identified with the emotions or overwhelmed by them. At this point, we are not helping anymore. We have complicated and added to the suffering. This is what I mean by being stuck in empathy.
If we become stuck in empathy, we can become burnt-out, depressed, and overly negative in our thinking. That is what I mean by going down with the ship. There are many practical techniques to catch ourselves when we are stuck in empathy and to shift ourselves into a compassionate state. Empathy and compassion have different neurological pathways. Compassion can be energizing and regenerative and uplifting. Some of that for me please!