The difference between empathy and compassion

 I was watching a video made by Nadine about the difference between empathy and compassion.

 

In Buddhist understanding, compassion is knowing we all suffer, and this bringing energy to actively trying to reduce or even eliminate the suffering of others. Inherent assumption other need to be helped.

 

Empathy in scientific research is the experience of neurons lighting up as a listener, being the same ones that light up in the other person, whether it’s pain or joy. I.e. feeling the feelings of the other person.

 

In NVC, empathy is simply being with, in the present moment with, and connecting with the life of the other person while focusing on feelings and needs, without an agenda to fix them or solve their issue. I enjoy and trust their own intelligence when I listen, when I share presence with them, to have things become clear and fall into place with them.

 

Her colleague Eva says: “Empathy is an intentional quality of attention which brings about a sense of compassion” I.e. our intention to connect with life. Then in NVC, sympathy is feeling the same as the other person.

What comes up for me is my experience with attention itself. Attention has an energy to it. When doing a meditation to turn the energy of my attention from going outward to myself, I can really feel the difference, as if a spotlight of energy was lighting up my entire body. It feels nourishing, almost replenishing. I find that a large portion of my day is spent with the energy of my attention leaving me to go to something or someone else, be it someone/thing in front of me, or even in thoughts about the future or the past. In those moments I don’t feel grounded in my body, and notice it’s more difficult to feel myself and fully inhabit my body - as if whatever my attention rests on is taking up all of my reality without any space for me to feel my own existence. My mind siphons my attention somewhere else, and this leaves me feeling depleted after a while.

 

This is why when I first started to learn NVC and read Marshall say that “Empathy requires us to focus full attention on the other person’s message,” (from “Nonviolent Communication : A Language of Life”) initially I thought it made sense, but there was an underlying trepidation that got more pronounced the more I learned. The question was, “What about me and my experience? Where am I in this? And what if I’m also in pain?” And the only answer I’ve received after almost a year of different courses was that perhaps in that moment I need empathy too and should find it somewhere else, rather than with the person in front of me who also needs empathy and is not at capacity to give empathy. And I am adding for myself, that they are not at capacity to fully witness me as a separate entity with her own needs, feelings, and experience. This is not a very satisfying answer for me because it’s so important to me that the way I choose to interact with the world also leaves space for myself to be.

 

I think this need comes from a child part of me that experienced enmeshment trauma with a mentally ill mother. I was not allowed to have my own beliefs or feelings about things, and if I did, then I would be punished or ostracized. I was the black sheep because of my need to express and fully feel myself. I think this is a normal thing for children growing up, so they can fully develop themselves and learn about who they are becoming. But if this process is blocked or associated with pain, then it can be difficult as an adult to assert oneself. Then comes the dilemma of having to choose between being my authentic self, or belonging. So when I seek NVC as a possible solution to find belonging with others, and I see a preference put on giving my attention and presence to someone else in order for the need to be met, then the other need for authenticity and presence with myself dies.

 

A more concrete example of how I experience presence: when I’m speaking to someone who is distracted and thinking of something else, I feel they are “not present.” Though their physical body is there, I don’t feel them there. Maybe their eyes are not on me and instead staring in the distance, or looking at their phone. And then there is a sense of disconnection and loneliness. Marshall said, “The key ingredient of empathy is presence: we are wholly present with the other party and what they are experiencing. This quality of presence distinguishes empathy from either mental understanding or sympathy.”

 

There is a conundrum here - I feel connection and belonging when I share my presence, but have not figured out how to share this presence equally with myself and the other. I imagine in some situations the presence can move to one side more than the other depending on what’s needed. And I fear the times when I feel that I must leave my own presence in favor of the other, as if I’m being coerced (either directly by the other or by an expectation or pressure I place on myself). Like I have to give something up or give something away in order to receive.

 

“People can only meet you as deeply as they’ve met themselves.” I saw this quote on Facebook, and I also turned it around for myself. “I can only meet others as deeply as I’ve met myself.” And I wonder if the root of the issue here is thinking that I need to receive this attention from outside, or belonging from outside. Is it even possible to give it to myself? I have gotten beautiful glimpses of what happens when I shed all agenda to be what I am not, to simply exist, and give myself that attention. But I can’t stay in this state for long, and if it’s possible then I haven’t practiced enough. Inevitably life happens, I must respond, and I begin to inhabit the inner characters again. On that point, I know that the idea is not to get rid of them entirely, but to have choice on how I want to interact or inhabit each one, rather than being driven reactively by them.

 

But I am still left with the question, how do I take up space for myself and also have space for the other? It seems the answer would be first to expand the capacity to feel safe in my own body, and develop skills that allow me to feel rooted, resilient and resourced enough that I’m able to offer my presence to others without becoming engulfed myself. Building the capacity includes the work I’ve already done to feel into my body, feel into emotions somatically as they come up without resisting them, and being the space in which all of these feelings express themselves.