Giving and Receiving Compassion

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In this module we will spend some time exploring compassion for you and the person you are caring for. Before we explore exactly what compassion is and what it isn’t we are going to start with a practice.

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The first practice in this module is called Giving and Receiving Compassion. It’s a practice you can use when you’re sitting with someone, a loved one or a friend, who is struggling and you’re finding it difficult to be with their pain and suffering and there seems to be so very little you can do to alleviate that suffering and their struggle.

Let’s look at Compassion, Empathy and Pity

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I think it might be helpful at this time to just remind ourselves of some key definitions. We can get confused between empathy, compassion and pity. 

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Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what someone else is experiencing. 

I was taught that empathy is the ability to stand in someone else shoes and feel what they are feeling.

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However, when we resonate with someone else who is in pain (i.e. we are physically and emotionally affected by the other persons’ pain), day in, day out, without taking care of ourselves, we can get overwhelmed and distressed.

When this happens, we may look for ways to avoid or reduce our own suffering by going into problem-solving mode (my tendency is to do this if I get too overwhelmed without taking care of myself sufficiently) or by tuning out the other person’s pain. (Of course there’s a place for problem solving when you’re a carer, it’s just that we can get too caught up in problem-solving and doing we can forget to ‘be’ with our loved one, to fully listen to them and validate their pain). 

More About Compassion and Pity

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Compassion is empathy that turns into love – a sense of tenderness and care that embraces the suffering of others rather than emotionally reacting to it. Compassion enables us to be with someone else’s pain without needing to push the pain away; with compassion we can care for the person who is experiencing the pain with gentleness and kindness.

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Take, for example, a young child who is poorly in hospital. Who will be more comforting and supportive to the child, the mother who can stay by the child’s side, holding their hand and reassuring them with kind words or the anxious mother overcome with empathic distress who can’t bear to see her child so ill and who is walking up and down the corridor beside herself with worry?

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But what about pity? Sometimes both compassion and empathy can be confused with pity. 

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Stephen Levine says pity is motivated by a sense of self-interest – you act to help someone because their suffering and discomfort makes you feel uncomfortable. 

In pity there’s a sense of separateness, (how lucky am I not to be suffering like this or poor them, that’s so awful). In pity you are potentially seeing the person as being “less than,” and you being “’more than” … there’s less awareness of the common humanity aspect of two human beings meeting…. And when we pity someone we can become over-protective and quasi-paternal (I know what’s best for you).