[teampractices] Empathy vs compassion, when helping others

Tue Feb 28 00:27:05 UTC 2017

This is such a wonderful thread.

I've heard some Buddhist teachers (Thich Nhat Hanh, Sharon Salzburg,
others) talk about compassion not necessarily as a mere desire or intention
to relieve the suffering of others but the ability to do so. In fact,
sometimes it seems (and bear with me because my interest is nascent) that
compassion for others is talked about as a natural consequence of
compassion for oneself, because examining one's own suffering (or
'discontent' or 'pain' which are other close translations of 'dukkha') and
achieving a degree of understanding and equanimity around it puts you in a
better place to relieve the same in others and inspires the desire to
relieve others as well.

Terminology aside, it seems to me like this is what the original article is
saying, that you need both a sufficient degree of understanding and a level
of equanimity to be effectively compassionate towards others. In other
words, if you are currently embroiled in your own suffering (or even
freshly triggered by someone else's pain) you may not be able to
effectively help them in that moment, but if you're approaching them from a
place of peace and composure you could be more effective.

In my own personal experience with grief, I've often appreciated a simple
acknowledgement of its shittiness over some attempt at relating if the
person hasn't suffered tremendous loss themselves, not because I don't
value the experiences of others but because the latter can go horribly
wrong ("oh, that's how she died? that's just like my cat."), even from
mental health professionals because some knowledge simply can't be
intellectually acquired it seems. Anyway, this is just me underlining
"understanding" in whatever definition of compassion I end up looking at.

On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 12:37 PM, Max Binder <mbinder at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> Wow, Marti! Thanks for your perspective. :)
>
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 12:06 PM, Marti Johnson <mjohnson at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
>> 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!  :-)
>>
>>
>> *Marti JohnsonProgram Officer*
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