Let’s start with some definitions: Compassion, empathy, and sympathy.
Empathy Maybe you’ve heard the word “empath.” An empath is someone who cries with you because they literally feel your pain.Sometimes this is a very good thing. At a funeral, for example, the friend who cries along with the mourners demonstrates how much they were connected to the deceased.
But to feel another person’s pain all the time is not at all healthy, not for the “feeler” and not for the person being felt.What it really means about the feeling person is that they have lost themselves. The degree to which an empath takes on the other person’s emotions crowds out their own.
Don’t get me wrong: It is lovely and beautiful to feel with another person; in fact, it is said that just getting a visit from a caring person who goes to comfort a mourner takes away 1/60 of the mourner’s pain.So that is definitely a good thing.
But if the visitor now can’t sleep and goes home crying – and this happens all too often – it goes beyond caring for someone to escaping from themselves. Sympathy At the other end of the spectrum is someone who doesn’t actually feel the pain of the other person but knows intellectually that the situation is painful.When you convey that knowing, you’re expressing sympathy.
Mixed with the sympathy may be a touch of relief that the suffering is not happening to you and maybe even wondering how you would feel in the same situation, wondering if you could handle it.Sympathy is a distance created by not feeling but by thinking instead.
It’s also a good thing, because we can’t get lost in feelings for all the tragedies of life.
Then again, too much intellectual distance from another person’s feelings leaves us cold. Hard.We certainly don’t want to be that person, either.
Where is the perfect middle ground?
Compassion Compassion is, indeed, feeling, but from a safe intellectual distance.How does this happen?
This is what meditators often practice. By just breathing – and relaxing your sympathetic nervous system – emotions can be put in their proper perspective.Meditators get a little bit of distance from their troubles.
Feelings of compassion flow from a place of wanting to connect in a giving and caring way, but always recognizing one Self as separate.It’s connecting with separateness.
With sympathy, there’s only the separateness because without emotion, there isn’t much connection.With empathy, there’s so much connection that the Self becomes lost.
So it starts to seem clear that compassion first requires a strong sense of who one is, one’s Self.Self grounds us when emotions can pull us in ways that suck us into them.
A beggar on the street reaches out his hand as we walk by. A sense of Self separates us into a me and a him. With that sense of Self, we can feel blessed that we have what we have in our lives as tough as they may be.We also feel his humiliation at being in the state he is in, and if we are attuned enough, we also realize that he may have covered up his shame, even to himself, long ago.
We may feel his desperation, his sadness, his hopelessness, and we may then give him a coin. Or as a client once told me, she gave him her lunch and bought herself another one.The compassion that we feel leads to compassionate acts, a giving from the heart.
It is that ability to be grounded in appreciating the good fortune we have along with the misfortune of that beggar, that two-ness of being a Self and yet feeling for the other, that is compassion.Now if you take this analogy and carry it over into your marriage, it becomes quite powerful.
Compassion In Marriage This group is called “Love Yourself” before we get to the “Love Your Marriage” for a reason.The first and most important person that you have to have compassion for is yourself. And that is much easier to do when you are in that state of separateness called Self.
(Please see other posts and live replays on this – refer to your Linktree list which is also in the Guides of this group).
Next, you are able to hold at one time your compassion for and understanding of yourself while also hearing and understanding your partner’s “side” with equal compassion.Notice that I never said you have to agree, only hear and understand with that feeling of connection and awareness of their pain. That’s compassion.
I cannot begin to tell you how healing that is for the marriage – for them and also for you.
First of all, the beginning of connection is to be understood. There is nothing like it. (That’s why when we rescue our “exiles” in the Immersion Experience part of my program, step one is just listening to them unburden themselves.)That’s what it means to “witness” someone else’s pain or experience.
Now, the listener also gets something out if it.
By witnessing, truly hearing – which you can only do from Self energy – you get the privilege of understanding your partner better.If they share from a place of vulnerability and honesty, then you will feel closer.
So they feel heard and felt, and you, interestingly, also feel closer.
Tell me if this makes sense. If you’re new to this group and the terms here are beyond you, PLEASE do go to the linktree list and start reading and watching.Then be sure to ask in the comments too.