[teampractices] Empathy vs compassion, when helping others

[Max Binder]

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!  :-)
>
>
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