What so many people miss when they think about the meaning of compassion, is that there are two parts to it.
You see, we all tend to bandy about the word without thinking through what it means. Most often, people use the term interchangeably with ‘sympathy’. To be compassionate is to show someone sympathy.
But is compassion just another word for sympathy?
Well, can form a part of compassion, but it’s not quite the same thing.
Compassion is made up of two components.
Part one is being emotionally sensitive to someone else’s suffering. It’s the emotion that one feels in response to the situation someone is in. And the emotion can be anything – from sadness for what the person is going through, to anger or assertiveness in taking a stand on a particular view. Feeling sympathy or empathy with what someone is experiencing is quite a natural response.
However, that response, in and of itself, isn’t compassion; you need the second component.
Part 2 is having the desire to alleviate that suffering – to see the person move through to the other side of suffering and to go on with their life with joy.
And it’s that second part that is often missing when most people talk about compassion. It’s the motivation to see the person shift out of their suffering.
Simply staying in a space of suffering alongside another person – on its own – is not exercising compassion. It may be holding and demonstrating sympathy or empathy, but without the desire to see the person shift out of their suffering, then all we see is two people who are now are wallowing in the same suffering.
The purpose of compassion is to see suffering end, along with acknowledging and responding to the immediate suffering that is being experienced.
We need both parts of the equation in order to hold genuine compassion for someone.
Leave out the emotional sensitivity to someone else’s suffering, and we can become a blunt instrument, pounding at someone to “get over it”. And leaving out the desire to help shift that person out of their suffering, well, we become an enabler to keeping them stuck in their suffering.
