You, Me, Compassion and Empathy

Root and Rock - near Fish Creek, June 2021

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Group Therapy
One of the local bars in the city where I grew up was called Group Therapy. The sign, a flashing pink martini glass with a neon green olive inside, is seared into my memory though I never stepped foot inside. When I think of people supporting one another, this silly sign comes to mind. Though the martini is not the path to healing (nor is that unlikely olive), demonstrating compassion for ourselves and other people helps us move forward in life. 

Compassion, Empathy and Sympathy
Support, whether one-on-one or in a group setting, involves compassion. And we humans are wired for compassion via our vagus nerve (study).  So compassion is literally something we are born with. 

A vital tool in practicing compassion is empathy. (I want to mention here that sympathy, feeling sorry for someone but not necessarily relating to their experience, is not a tool of compassion. In fact it often disconnects, as in “I feel so sorry for you, poor thing. Glad it’s not me.”)

In Brené Brown’s book  Atlas of the Heart, she explains that there are two types of empathy: cognitive, which is an understanding of someone’s feelings, and affective, which is feeling someone else’s feelings. 

Empathy: What Works, What Doesn’t
I’m grateful for Brown’s work because it has helped me understand that my affective empathy was not serving me - or anyone else. I used to be the person that would feel a person’s feelings for them, whether a family member, friend, or even a movie character (yes, truly over-the-top empath here). This might have helped the person feel understood, but it left both them and me in the mire of emotion, neither one of us moving forward. It also meant that I spent many of my days feeling emotionally overwhelmed, exhausted, and hopeless. This was not an effective support strategy.

Now that I know better, I practice understanding what someone may be feeling, but I see that my own experience is separate from that person. I can therefore effectively show up for them in a supportive role.

Here’s the analogy that helps me:
Your friend falls into a hole. You come to the edge of the hole and look down, saying, “oh, that looks terrible, I’m so sorry for you,” and you keep walking. That is sympathy. 
Next time, you decide to jump into the hole with your friend, feeling for them. Now you are both in the hole, with no way out. You are experiencing affective empathy.
Now, let’s say you grab a sturdy rope ladder, attach it to the side of the hole and climb down. You sit with your friend, comforting and understanding, then when the friend is ready you support them in climbing out of the hole. Bingo! Cognitive empathy.

Learn More
For more about empathy and Theresa Wiseman’s Four Attributes of Empathy, check out this article.

For more on compassion and how it includes the desire to help, check out this article and video on the evolutionary roots of compassion. 

Originally published June 2022