Real Compassion
Compassion means to feel along with others
There may be a reason why we see less real compassion in the world than we’d like to see. Though it’s a word we hear often enough, just exactly what it seems to be largely misunderstood.
Compassion means to feel along with others. When you feel compassion toward someone, you’re putting yourself in their shoes, making an effort to feel what they may be going through. This is the element of compassion that’s widely understood.
Somewhere along the way, another quality became linked with compassion, to the point where this quality is routinely mistaken for compassion itself.
The quality I’m hinting at here is suffering. Through compassion does mean to feel along with, it doesn’t mean to suffer along with. This confusion is so well-established that it’s probably fair to say that, unless we take on the suffering of the person we’re trying to feel compassionate toward, we believe we’re not really doing our job.
Suffering is to suffer along with them.
The misplaced assumption here is that the best we can do for someone who is suffering is to suffer along with them. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
The impulse to suffer along with is well-meaning, but it doesn’t help anybody. When you chose to suffer along with someone who is suffering, you’ve neutralized any ability to help them.
If you found a person who had fallen into a well and saw that they felt like they were going to be trapped in the well forever, how much sense would it make for you to jump down into the well along with them?
At that point, all you’d have would be two people stuck in a well, unable to get out, and neither able to do anything for the other.
When a person is suffering (I’m talking specifically about mental suffering) what it means is that they’ve lost perspective, so they’re not able to see their situation with any clarity. Does it make sense that, in an attempt to help them, we throw away our own perspective?
Neutrality ensures that you see situations from a bigger-picture perspective.
As a transformative coach, I’ve come to understand that my neutrality is among the most valuable tools I can bring to the situation. It’s neutrality that ensures I come with a bigger-picture perspective. In other words, when I’m standing above the well looking down into it, I can still see what’s around me; I can still see the bigger picture, so I’m able to point that out to the person in the well. That’s what might help them.
And if I jump down into the well in a well-meaning attempt to help? Then I have the same perspective my friend in the well has, which is to say, no perspective at all. How can that possibly help either one of us?
Seeing the difference of compassion and suffering is the very best thing you can do for someone who is suffering. Your suffering won’t help them, any more than their suffering will help you. Want to help someone who’s suffering? Just feel along with them. Don’t try to suffer with them.
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