“Compassion is an empathic understanding of a person’s feelings, accompanied by altruism, or a desire to act on that person’s behalf.”
But is understanding necessary for compassion? I don’t think so. Similar to how we can respect others based on only conditional correctness, we can have compassion for people we only partially understand/can’t empathize with.
Compassion vs empathy
Too much empathy can immobilize us. Learn to hold another’s pain without drowning in it.
When it becomes too much, detach and respond with compassion instead of empathy. Feel, but rise above the feelings. We need to create a healthy emotional distance before we can help.
From Adam Grant:
a growing body of evidence suggests that compassion is healthier for you and kinder to others than empathy: When you see others in pain, instead of causing you to get overloaded and retreat, compassion motivates you to reach out and help.
The most basic form of compassion is not assuaging distress but acknowledging it. When we can’t make people feel better, we can still make a difference by making them feel seen. And in my research, I’ve found that being helpful has a secondary benefit: It’s an antidote to feeling helpless.
Are empathy and concern psychologically distinct?
- concern for others is a uniquely positive predictor of prosocial action
- empathy is either not predictive or negatively predictive of prosocial actions.
From a paper on the neuroscience of empathy vs compassion:
While shared happiness certainly is a very pleasant state, the sharing of suffering can at times be difficult, especially when the self–other distinction becomes blurred. Such a form of shared distress can be especially challenging for persons working in helping professions, such as doctors, therapists, and nurses. In order to prevent an excessive sharing of suffering that may turn into distress, one may respond to the suffering of others with compassion.
In contrast to empathy, compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other: rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other’s wellbeing. Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other.
From The Perils of Empathy:
we compared people’s scores on two different scales, one measuring emotional empathy and another measuring compassion. As predicted, we found that the scales tap different aspects of our nature: You can be high in one and low in the other. We found as well that compassion predicts charitable donations, but empathy does not.
Empathy training led to increased activation in the insula and cingulate cortex, the same parts of the brain that would be active if you were empathizing with the pain of someone you care about. Compassion training led to activation in other parts of the brain, such as the ventral striatum, which is involved in, among other things, reward and motivation.
Empathy was difficult and unpleasant—it wore people out. This is consistent with other findings suggesting that vicarious suffering not only leads to bad decision-making but also causes burnout and withdrawal. Compassion training, by contrast, led to better feelings on the part of the meditator and kinder behavior toward others. It has all the benefits of empathy and few of the costs.
meditation “reduces activation of the brain networks associated with simulating the feelings of people in distress, in favor of networks associated with feelings of social affiliation.” Limiting the impact of empathy actually made it easier to be kind.
It is often irresistible to try to feel the world as others feel it, to vicariously experience their suffering, to listen to our hearts. It really does seem like a gift, one that enhances the life of the giver. The alternative—careful reasoning mixed with a more distant compassion—seems cold and unfeeling. The main thing to be said in its favor is that it makes the world a better place.
Turn empathy into compassion
When I tried to take on their grief, I was overwhelmed. However, when I shifted my focus to feel love and kindness toward the characters, with a wish that their suffering would be alleviated, my distress for them was replaced with a feeling of inspiration.
While empathy is susceptible to in-group bias, compassion meditation seeks to expand one’s in-group.