Facilitating Compassion

The following paragraphs describe some of the key elements and skills required for compassion:

Mindfulness

If you are interested in taking steps to becoming more compassionate, mindfulness is a great place to start. Mindfulness has been practiced as a foundation for compassion for thousands of years. Simply defined, mindfulness is a healthy awareness of our present-moment thoughts, emotions, and experiences, with an attitude of openness, curiosity, and acceptance. (See our Mindfulness Module to learn more!) If we can start with simple, real awareness, that alone can often begin to change our attitude about others and relation to them. (Mindfulness does seem to be a cornerstone of so many other components of well-being!) When doing compassion training in CFT, much of the early phases are devoted just to mindfulness. Practicing mindfulness helps give us a grounded perspective from which we can then intentionally bring in compassion. Mindfulness and compassion are complementary but distinct processes in psychological health; a common Buddhist metaphor compares them to the two wings of a bird: two different things, but working very closely together.

The Nature of Suffering

A prerequisite to compassion is identifying suffering, and being able to identify suffering requires some knowledge about its nature. Suffering is always personal, individual, and unique. Suffering is the “state of severe distress associated with events that threaten the intactness of a person” (Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, 2009, p. 399) - socially, emotionally, physically, or psychologically. It can also come through self-conflict, loss or change of purpose, or resistance to that loss of personal intactness. Suffering can occur in relation to any aspect of a person.

Physical pain or symptoms (often the most visible type of ‘suffering’) do not necessarily equate to suffering. Suffering implies a cognitive component, often including our thoughts about the experience and our resistance to it. Suffering typically includes what the person believes about the symptoms (‘I am dying”) or what is anticipated in the future (“I will feel like this forever”). Bodies alone (excluding the mind) don’t think about the future nor do they ascribe meaning to things - bodies experience pain, people suffer. This is a universal human experience.

Knowing When Others are Suffering

Once you know accurately what suffering is, you have to be able to tell when others are suffering. If you cannot see suffering, you cannot show compassion. You must be able to see it even when common manifestations may not be present. Being able to see the deeper expressions of suffering requires skills that take time and practice to cultivate. Once you can see it, you’ll become more familiar with it. You can see its more apparent forms (like crying) and less apparent forms (including selfishness, fear, disappointment) and how they are related. That familiarity helps us to accept suffering instead of running from it. It also helps us know how to respond effectively.

It can often be difficult to know when someone else is suffering. It’s difficult because suffering is, by nature, highly personal. The individual may not even recognize that they are suffering, or they may attribute it solely to external circumstances. They may know they are suffering but may not know how to express it. We often claim to know of others’ suffering based solely on the fact that we feel compassion for them. (For example, “If that happened to me I would not be able to go on.”) This is the only way of knowing suffering when the people are divided from you by space or time - when they are not present. However, this ‘blind’ compassion doesn’t take into account that often people suffer even when the onlooker doesn’t deem their cause great enough, or that onlookers might believe suffering is present when the sufferers have already risen above it. Our innate compassion can be a good starting point to seeing suffering; however, the Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology (2009) notes that “the most underutilized method of discovering that people are suffering is to ask them” (p. 399). The best ways to know that others are suffering is to learn about suffering, its nature and symptoms, and to engage with the individual.

One other important step to knowing that others are suffering is knowing when you are suffering. Your own suffering is the most accurate and personal example you have. You have to be able to recognize dukkha in your own experience, because it is difficult to be completely open to others’ suffering but blind to our own. Understanding your own suffering greatly facilitates your ability to help others with theirs.

Identification

Once you know that another person is suffering, then comes the part when you feel for them and have a desire to alleviate their suffering. But how does that come about? Compassion occurs through connecting with someone by identifying with them. This includes putting yourself in another’s position, sharing their inner life, and recognizing that they are like you. This identification makes us feel for them and motivates us to relieve their suffering. Identification begins early. Even in the first days of life, an infant will mirror facial expressions and body movements of the mother.

It’s often easier to identify with those who are very similar to us; however, widely different individuals still recognize a common humanity with one another because of shared human traits. For example, everyone has a similar body with similar functions, so we can identify with bodily suffering. We can identify with parental suffering or that of children, because we know of and have been parents and children. We also all have a basic knowledge of the human condition - birth, death, needs, desires, etc. Hebrews 5:2 (KJV) says that “[Godly men] can have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way; for that he himself also is compassed with infirmity.” In other words, we can have compassion on those different from us because we all are imperfect - we have shortcomings, just like they do. Because of all these things we have in common, we can come to identify even with those from different cultures and backgrounds. Our ultimate goal is to be able to have compassion for all beings; true compassion is not selective.

Just Like Me: Olivia's Story

Olivia relates: "I was a freshman in college and remember walking back to my dorm one day in the fall. I passed a girl who was wearing leggings and a normal length shirt - there was nothing covering the leggings, especially where they were tightest and most revealing. This may sound silly, but I attended a religious university with very specific dress standards to which this girl’s outfit was likely not in compliance. I saw this girl and immediately judged her, thinking she didn’t have any standards and that all she wanted was attention. Somehow, miraculously, in that moment, I thought 'just like me. This girl is trying to be pretty, just like me. She wants to fit in, just like I do. She wants affirmation and attention, and those are things that I seek constantly, too.' In that moment, all my angst melted away. I didn’t see her negatively anymore, but almost as a friend, because now we seemed to have so much in common. I think we could feel this way about almost everyone on the earth if we looked for all the ways we are just like each other."