[teampractices] Empathy vs compassion, when helping others

Mon Feb 27 20:06:45 UTC 2017

I am really interested in compassion and empathy and tend to go to a lot of
workshops and trainings that touch on this general theme.  I've heard
definitions of compassion and empathy that are identical in many contexts,
and I've also heard them compared and contrasted with each other in
different contexts with flip-flopping meanings assigned to each term.  So I
have the sense that there isn't a lot of cultural consensus around these
words.

Practicing empathy (for one's self and for others) is one of the core
focuses of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), in which I've been training
intensively for the last year.  And there are a couple of things I've
learned that I find useful, so I thought I'd share here:

   - This is from Roxy Manning, who leads a Leadership Program in NVC (that
   I'm participating in this year, if anyone is interested!):
      - Compassion is about being with human suffering.  Often, people
      associate it with a quality of presence that leans toward
offering help to
      get free of suffering.  Empathy is about being with the full
range of human
      experience, in general, not just suffering--joy, sadness,
annoyance, humor,
      etc.  The quality of presence is focused, but intentionally
open-ended and
      non-interfering, and consequently explicitly not geared toward "helping"
      (though it may be helpful in its effect).  So, it makes sense to say you
      can offer empathy for someone's experience of celebration, since
it applies
      to any human emotion/need.  But you wouldn't typically say you
would offer
      compassion for someone's experience of celebration, since compassion is
      focused explicitly on suffering.
         - Since compassion is a central value of Buddhism, I thought it
         worth noting that I've heard a Buddhist teacher (Eugene Cash) say
         that--similar to Roxy's definition of empathy--true
compassion is about
         just "being with" suffering, not about helping, changing or
fixing another
         person's experience.  He pointed out that etymologically,
com-passion means
         "with suffering."

   - The term "empathy" has a specific, somewhat technical definition
   within the Nonviolent Communication context.  I thought I'd mention that
   within that context, saying "*I know what it’s like down here, and
   you’re not alone" *would not be considered empathy.  And actually, none
   of the statements on the engagement scale would be considered empathy
   either, by that definition.  This is not to say that there isn't a time and
   place for saying any of these things--just that it would fall outside the
   definition of empathy in the NVC context.  Instead, empathy within NVC
   seeks to attend to each individual's experience as uniquely their own and
   mattering for its own sake.  The goal of the person offering empathy is
   purely to support the other person in clarifying the feelings and needs
   alive within them.   So, we're trained to find another way to reflect a
   sense of companionship than by saying, "I know what it's like down here,"
   because another person may not feel that you _do_ know what it's like
   "down there," even if you've been through something very similar (and
   ultimately, neither of us can fully know the other's experience).  Also, by
   tacitly bringing up my own experience, there may be an unintended subtle
   shift away from permission/space for the other person to process their own
   experience for their own sake.  Likewise, if the person _feels_ alone, it
   may be interpreted as dismissive/invalidating if someone else tells them
   that they're *not* alone (I've had this experience myself).  Reflecting
   back, with kindness and without judgement, that you hear that they
   are feeling alone can sometimes create a much deeper felt sense of
   companionship, since you've given priority to being with _their_ individual
   in-the-moment experience.  In general, the goal in an NVC-style empathy
   practice is to avoid agreeing, advice-giving, me-too-ing, story-telling,
   distracting, reassuring, helping or anything other than reflective empathic
   presence.
      - Since I've been practicing NVC in a fairly diverse group of people
      in the training program I'm in, there is a lot of very honest feedback
      provided about how privilege and bias affect empathic exchanges.
I've now
      heard several people of color share that it is very triggering for them
      when they hear a white person say anything along the lines of
"I relate to
      what you shared" when they are expressing pain around racism.
I'm sharing
      this because it is such a good example of the unintended impact
of language
      intended to be supportive.  Feedback along these lines has very much
      motivated me to learn to offer a more non-interfering but still deeply
      engaged form of empathy.  It very often increases the sense of
safety in a
      way that I'm grateful for.
      - Another BayNVC teacher, Kathy Simon, says that over decades of
      practicing NVC, she has sometimes been moved to try to offer people help
      with their suffering instead of offering them empathy.  She said mostly
      what she has learned is that if she can offer sustained empathy, people
      generally don't need help because they come to an answer within
      themselves.  She says that when they do come to answer themselves, they
      carry it with a quality of depth and revelation that is simply not there
      had she tried to tell them the same thing.  So, she encouraged
us to pause
      and check in when we have the urge to attempt to relieve someone of their
      suffering and to consider whether it might be supportive to offer empathy
      instead (which she considers as a more, not less, engaged form
of response).

Food for thought!  I love to read the contributions to this thread!  :-)

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