[teampractices] Empathy vs compassion, when helping others

Tue Feb 28 00:53:16 UTC 2017

Thanks to everyone for continuing this thread. I have some disconnected
thoughts:

We haven't said much about pity. The earlier image said pity meant "I
acknowledge your suffering", which itself sounds like a good thing. But
that doesn't match my understanding of pity, which is that pity has
connotations of superiority or detachment. Maybe it shouldn't, but I think
it does. So giving someone pity (by that definition) is rarely helpful.

We haven't talked very much about sympathy, so I don't have many thoughts
on that yet.

Empathy seems to be internalizing someone else's feelings. As a TPGer,
that's probably not what we want to be doing. Part of the value we provide
is in remaining somewhat neutral, objective, and/or detached from the
situation. Becoming sad, or angry, ourselves, probably won't help us
provide the best counsel.

In my personal life, I tend to be highly empathetic. I actively try to
avoid that at work, which might sometimes result in appearing unemotional,
cold, aloof, etc. It can be difficult to remain unemotional myself, while
still connecting with people emotionally.

I read the original article that Max mentioned but didn't link to, which
described ways that empathy can be unproductive. The one that resonated
with me was that empathy is primarily a 1:1 experience, or 1-to-few at
most. Focusing on one individual can lead to ignoring similar or more
important problems with a larger group. Experiencing an emotion yourself
can also lead to being driven by emotions, which can (depending on the
situation) be counter-productive.

The way the four words are presented in that image (pity -> sympathy ->
empathy -> compassion) seem to imply that we should work our way up the
chain. That each is more valuable or noble then the ones that preceded it.
With that lens, it seems odd that we should consciously avoid empathy, on
our way to compassion. It might just indicate that the visualization in
that graph doesn't fit our context, or perhaps that layout is more
generally flawed. (Maybe the words belong in a circle, or starburst, or
some other shape.)

I was struggling with some of the definitions of compassion that have been
used here, because to me, having compassion is not tied to action.
Compassion, as I understand it so far, is a feeling of basic human
connection. I might not know what you are going through, and I might not
feel it myself, and I might not know what if anything I could do to
help...but I honor your feelings, and want the best for you.

Looking back at the definition in Max's original post, I now see that it
did not call for action. It described compassion as “feeling concern for
another’s suffering and desiring to enhance that individual’s welfare.” As
long it is clear that a desire to enhance someone's welfare won't
necessarily translate into action, that definition makes sense to me now.

Kevin Smith
Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation

On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 4:27 PM, Dan Duvall <dduvall at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> This is such a wonderful thread.
>
> I've heard some Buddhist teachers (Thich Nhat Hanh, Sharon Salzburg,
> others) talk about compassion not necessarily as a mere desire or intention
> to relieve the suffering of others but the ability to do so. In fact,
> sometimes it seems (and bear with me because my interest is nascent) that
> compassion for others is talked about as a natural consequence of
> compassion for oneself, because examining one's own suffering (or
> 'discontent' or 'pain' which are other close translations of 'dukkha') and
> achieving a degree of understanding and equanimity around it puts you in a
> better place to relieve the same in others and inspires the desire to
> relieve others as well.
>
> Terminology aside, it seems to me like this is what the original article
> is saying, that you need both a sufficient degree of understanding and a
> level of equanimity to be effectively compassionate towards others. In
> other words, if you are currently embroiled in your own suffering (or even
> freshly triggered by someone else's pain) you may not be able to
> effectively help them in that moment, but if you're approaching them from a
> place of peace and composure you could be more effective.
>
> In my own personal experience with grief, I've often appreciated a simple
> acknowledgement of its shittiness over some attempt at relating if the
> person hasn't suffered tremendous loss themselves, not because I don't
> value the experiences of others but because the latter can go horribly
> wrong ("oh, that's how she died? that's just like my cat."), even from
> mental health professionals because some knowledge simply can't be
> intellectually acquired it seems. Anyway, this is just me underlining
> "understanding" in whatever definition of compassion I end up looking at.
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 12:37 PM, Max Binder <mbinder at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Wow, Marti! Thanks for your perspective. :)
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 12:06 PM, Marti Johnson <mjohnson at wikimedia.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I am really interested in compassion and empathy and tend to go to a lot
>>> of workshops and trainings that touch on this general theme.  I've heard
>>> definitions of compassion and empathy that are identical in many contexts,
>>> and I've also heard them compared and contrasted with each other in
>>> different contexts with flip-flopping meanings assigned to each term.  So I
>>> have the sense that there isn't a lot of cultural consensus around these
>>> words.
>>>
>>> Practicing empathy (for one's self and for others) is one of the core
>>> focuses of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), in which I've been training
>>> intensively for the last year.  And there are a couple of things I've
>>> learned that I find useful, so I thought I'd share here:
>>>
>>>    - This is from Roxy Manning, who leads a Leadership Program in NVC
>>>    (that I'm participating in this year, if anyone is interested!):
>>>       - Compassion is about being with human suffering.  Often, people
>>>       associate it with a quality of presence that leans toward offering help to
>>>       get free of suffering.  Empathy is about being with the full range of human
>>>       experience, in general, not just suffering--joy, sadness, annoyance, humor,
>>>       etc.  The quality of presence is focused, but intentionally open-ended and
>>>       non-interfering, and consequently explicitly not geared toward "helping"
>>>       (though it may be helpful in its effect).  So, it makes sense to say you
>>>       can offer empathy for someone's experience of celebration, since it applies
>>>       to any human emotion/need.  But you wouldn't typically say you would offer
>>>       compassion for someone's experience of celebration, since compassion is
>>>       focused explicitly on suffering.
>>>          - Since compassion is a central value of Buddhism, I thought
>>>          it worth noting that I've heard a Buddhist teacher (Eugene Cash) say
>>>          that--similar to Roxy's definition of empathy--true compassion is about
>>>          just "being with" suffering, not about helping, changing or fixing another
>>>          person's experience.  He pointed out that etymologically, com-passion means
>>>          "with suffering."
>>>
>>>
>>>    - The term "empathy" has a specific, somewhat technical definition
>>>    within the Nonviolent Communication context.  I thought I'd mention that
>>>    within that context, saying "*I know what it’s like down here, and
>>>    you’re not alone" *would not be considered empathy.  And actually,
>>>    none of the statements on the engagement scale would be considered empathy
>>>    either, by that definition.  This is not to say that there isn't a time and
>>>    place for saying any of these things--just that it would fall outside the
>>>    definition of empathy in the NVC context.  Instead, empathy within
>>>    NVC seeks to attend to each individual's experience as uniquely their own
>>>    and mattering for its own sake.  The goal of the person offering empathy is
>>>    purely to support the other person in clarifying the feelings and needs
>>>    alive within them.   So, we're trained to find another way to reflect a
>>>    sense of companionship than by saying, "I know what it's like down here,"
>>>    because another person may not feel that you _do_ know what it's
>>>    like "down there," even if you've been through something very similar (and
>>>    ultimately, neither of us can fully know the other's experience).  Also, by
>>>    tacitly bringing up my own experience, there may be an unintended subtle
>>>    shift away from permission/space for the other person to process their own
>>>    experience for their own sake.  Likewise, if the person _feels_ alone, it
>>>    may be interpreted as dismissive/invalidating if someone else tells them
>>>    that they're *not* alone (I've had this experience myself).
>>>    Reflecting back, with kindness and without judgement, that you hear that
>>>    they are feeling alone can sometimes create a much deeper felt sense of
>>>    companionship, since you've given priority to being with _their_ individual
>>>    in-the-moment experience.  In general, the goal in an NVC-style empathy
>>>    practice is to avoid agreeing, advice-giving, me-too-ing, story-telling,
>>>    distracting, reassuring, helping or anything other than reflective empathic
>>>    presence.
>>>       - Since I've been practicing NVC in a fairly diverse group of
>>>       people in the training program I'm in, there is a lot of very honest
>>>       feedback provided about how privilege and bias affect empathic exchanges.
>>>       I've now heard several people of color share that it is very triggering for
>>>       them when they hear a white person say anything along the lines of  "I
>>>       relate to what you shared" when they are expressing pain around racism.
>>>       I'm sharing this because it is such a good example of the unintended impact
>>>       of language intended to be supportive.  Feedback along these lines has very
>>>       much motivated me to learn to offer a more non-interfering but still deeply
>>>       engaged form of empathy.  It very often increases the sense of safety in a
>>>       way that I'm grateful for.
>>>       - Another BayNVC teacher, Kathy Simon, says that over decades of
>>>       practicing NVC, she has sometimes been moved to try to offer people help
>>>       with their suffering instead of offering them empathy.  She said mostly
>>>       what she has learned is that if she can offer sustained empathy, people
>>>       generally don't need help because they come to an answer within
>>>       themselves.  She says that when they do come to answer themselves, they
>>>       carry it with a quality of depth and revelation that is simply not there
>>>       had she tried to tell them the same thing.  So, she encouraged us to pause
>>>       and check in when we have the urge to attempt to relieve someone of their
>>>       suffering and to consider whether it might be supportive to offer empathy
>>>       instead (which she considers as a more, not less, engaged form of response).
>>>
>>> Food for thought!  I love to read the contributions to this thread!  :-)
>>>
>>>
>>> *Marti JohnsonProgram Officer*
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>
>
> --
> Dan Duvall
> Software Engineer, Release Engineering
> Wikimedia Foundation <http://wikimediafoundation.org>
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