[teampractices] Empathy vs compassion, when helping others

Tue Feb 28 04:25:08 UTC 2017

"Empathy seems to be internalizing someone else's feelings."  When I hear
this, it suggests a lack of clarity about who is feeling/experiencing what,
which strikes me as outside the goals of either empathy or compassion as I
understand them.

In an NVC training I attended last week, we worked on self-awareness in
empathy through a spatial navigation exercise. I'm sharing it because I
think it's helpful in regard to the boundaries around being present to
someone else.  On the floor in front of the person practicing were three
circles laid out kind of like dance steps:  closest to the person is the
circle labeled "empathy for the self," and farther away, equidistant, are
one labeled "empathy for others" and another labeled "self-expression."  In
the practice, which is specifically about engaging with another person,
empathy for the self is considered foundational, like the trunk of the
tree, and both empathy for the other and self-expression are derivative,
like the tree branches (this exercise is sometimes called the "tree of
life").  One of the purposes of the exercise is to maintain a steady
awareness of one's own feelings, as an empathic listener, as separate from
the feelings of the person to whom you are offering empathy.  If one were
feeling painfully or uncomfortably flooded by an experience of
"internalizing someone else's feelings" (I think it's important to
recognize that such feelings belong to the listener, as a response to the
feelings/experience of someone else, rather than being someone else's
feelings), then the training would suggest stepping out of the circle of
empathy-for-others or self-expression and back into the circle of
self-empathy.  From there, one would make a choice about what to do
next--which might include the choice to disengage, perhaps until there were
sufficient spaciousness to freely be available to someone else's
experience.  This kind of gets at what Dan was saying about compassion for
others as a natural consequence of compassion for oneself.

The trainer (Kathy Simon) said that Marshall Rosenberg (the originator of
NVC) said he envisioned the act of giving empathy to someone else in the
spirit of children offering food to ducks--with a sense of both full
freedom and full connection, such that it is impossible to distinguish who
is the giver and who is the receiver.  If it's not working this way for me,
my intention is to slow down and sort out what is going on.  When it is
working this way, in my experience, however, even if the person to whom I'm
offering empathy is talking about, say, their deep, dark depression, there
is still a subtle quality of well-being that emerges through the empathic
connection itself.  It feels good and I go away with a clear sense of
having received something from the exchange.

Following Sarah's allusion to Carl Rogers, he says something similar about
empathic listening in this YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0Xv6Tb2k0E

Transcription:

You've heard much in this conference about the skill of empathic listening.
I simply want to underscore what has been said because I believe it plays a
large part in our future. I've come to believe that a very sensitive
listening is one of the most powerful forces for growth that I know.

When I can let myself enter, softly and delicately, the vulnerable inner
world of the other person, when I can temporarily lay aside my views and
values and prejudices, when I can let myself be at home in the fright, the
concern, the anger, the tenderness, the confusion which fills his or her
life, when I can move about in that inner world without making judgments,
when I can see that world with fresh unfrightened eyes, when I can check
the accuracy of my sensings with him or her, being guided by the responses
I receive, then I can be a companion to that inner person, pointing to the
felt meanings of what is being experienced, then I find myself to be a true
helper, a welcome companion, an aide to growth and health.

Listening seems such an easy word. I find it a lifetime task to achieve
true listening, and a task well worth the effort.

(the rest of the video… including because I enjoyed it, too)

There's another very subtle factor in the healing relationship which I have
experienced, and that I would call presence. It's certainly known to
physicians. Dr. William Henry Welch, speaking of his father, said the art
of healing seemed to surround his physical body like an aura. It was often
not his treatment but his presence that cured. I, too, have experienced
this. When I'm at my best as a group facilitator or a therapist, I discover
this characteristic. I find that when I'm closest to my inner intuitive
self, when I'm somehow in touch with the unknown in me, when perhaps I'm in
a slightly altered state of consciousness, then whatever I do seems to be
full of healing. Then simply my presence is releasing and helpful. There's
nothing I can do to force this experience, but when I can relax and be
close to the transcendental core of me, then I may behave in strange and
impulsive ways in the relationship, ways which I can't justify rationally,
which have nothing to do with my thought processes, but these strange
behaviors turn out to be right in some odd way.

At those moments, it seems that my inner spirit has reached out and touched
the inner spirit of the other. Our relationship transcends itself and has
become part of something larger. Profound growth and healing and energy are
present.

This is another video in which Carl Rogers elaborates on empathy, but I
don't have a transcription for this one:

https://youtu.be/iMi7uY83z-U

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