Meet Sympathy - This is where you are feeling the feelings of others as if they were your own. We may even unintentionally think “how I’d feel if I was in this person’s place.” The byproduct of sympathy is a full emotional reaction of your own, you are entering into their feelings, and because the emotion is borrowed, it may trigger you to deal with moldy emotions from the past, or simply add on to your own emotional processing so you have “more to deal with.”

Meet Empathy - Doesn’t require that you identify with and imagine how you would feel. But it does mean feeling mixed with understanding. It’s a way of seeing the implications of someone’s experience and imagining all of the feelings (or consequences) that that person may be going through. 

Meet Compassion - Here at Wild + Brave, we like to say that compassion has its boots on. Compassion is an emotion (in fact it’s one of the powerful positive emotions that has been studied to have massive physiological benefits, impacting your heart and gut health, through stress, depression, and anxiety-reduction effects)... and like all emotions it comes pre-packaged with a particular kind of energy.

Compassion sees, feels, understands, and ACTS. Compassion exists to help us take action to alleviate suffering in a sustainable way. 

It may seem like we’ve given sympathy and empathy a hard time here, treating them (at best) like immature emotions that you want to help grow up to become compassion. The key is to see them as a chain reaction. To move THROUGH the feeling, to find understanding, and seek a healthy action that can be taken to alleviate the pain. Even though you don’t want to stay trapped with just sympathy or just empathy, they are productive pieces of the solution that can help you in these emotionally draining relationships.

Let’s look at what that means. 

Compassion in Impossible Circumstances

One of the thinkers instrumental in developing compassion research was an oncologist. Like many doctors who spend much of their time giving patients terrible news, this doctor can’t “fix” people’s cancer. He can’t tell them they have a different prognosis simply because he doesn’t want them to have to feel the pain of it.

Sympathy would have debilitated him, and empathy would have provided a long dark tunnel filled with thoughts like “this means he’ll never meet his granddaughter” or “she’s so young and she won’t make it to 25. She’ll probably never get to do all that she’s capable of.” 

But he found that in 45 seconds of compassion he could drastically change people’s experience. It even had a profound effect on their responsiveness to cancer treatments.

He simply started his consultations by looking them in the eye, breathing, sometimes taking a hand or touching a shoulder, and saying “we have some difficult things to discuss today, and some of the news is not very good. But I am going to be here with you through it, and I will stay and answer all of your questions. I will make sure you have all the best information we have and I won’t leave until you are ready for me to.

Then at the end of the consult, he would repeat the process, acknowledging “we faced some tough information today, and I know the treatment isn’t what we hoped it would be. But I will be here, and you can reach out to me anytime. This is going to be hard, but we will do it together.”

45 seconds.

He didn’t make them not have cancer.

He didn’t stay up all night researching extra options.

He didn’t try to cheer them up or minimize what they were going through.

He exercised compassion.

Most of the people in our lives who are sharing their difficult emotions with us aren’t our patients. Most of them don’t even have a terminal diagnosis. 

But if we were brave enough to practice 45 seconds worth of compassion, we could change our energy output. Instead of an energy drain (which empathy and sympathy both are), we get energy increase (because compassion is a positive emotion). 

But think back to that oncologist’s approach. Do you see the fingerprints of sympathy and empathy on the compassionate statement he gives? Sympathy wants to say “I’m here with you, you are not alone.” and Empathy works to understand what it means to deal with this difficult reality. It says “I see what this means for you.”

But compassion has its boots on, and can tell you what to do about it. Often, it’s taking the valuable information that sympathy and empathy bring you that gives compassion a place to start. Verbalizing your willingness to be with them, and exercising the bravery to speak the true implications of what they’re dealing with, are sometimes the most compassionate actions you can take. 

Today's Challenge:

Put your boots on and ask Compassion "what can I actually do to alleviate this person's pain." Do something small, and see your compassion fill back in the deficit you've been developing. You'll gain back your energy and strength before you know it.