A while ago I received an email from a reader in response to an article I wrote on here called Kindness is stronger than Love.
She asks whether having too much empathy, too much pity for others, can be bad for us and she describes some of her own experiences:
"I guess I do get stuck in Headmind and dwell on the horror of their experiences (e.g. when people are ill & are not getting the care they need). I imagine it happening to me and feel all the horror and fear that I would feel in their situation. I have been in awful situations myself healthwise & it brings back all the feelings I had then. I also get very strong emotions of anger at how people are being treated and I feel powerless to help. If I do actually think of something that might help and I spend time researching things and writing letters etc., I get more & more distressed about it all and can’t get it out of my head. If my intervention helps, that is some comfort, but if it doesn’t produce the results I would like, I get even more distressed.
I don’t feel their pain physically, just emotionally, and I feel very uptight about it.
Examples:
- Supporting a close friend with terminal cancer. I had a severe relapse the day after she died.
- I can’t bear to watch any TV shows about hospitals or doctors, as it brings back memories of my bad experiences and frightens me that I might get some of the nasty illnesses they show.
- Another example (not empathy this time) is if I come up against faceless bureaucracy I get so frustrated and angry I can’t seem to switch Headmind off."
My answer to this question is based on three insights I have had:
- There is a difference between compassion and pity
- Compassion comes from Bodymind, is based on empathy, lives in the moment, and seeks to help
- Pity comes from Headmind, is a disguised form of worry, and is really based on self-pity.
As the word indicates, compassion is an emotional state. Bodymind produces emotions when it urgently needs to guide us towards actions. Bodymind will do this when it sees that either a) we are under threat or b) those we care for are under threat.
In an article I wrote about the death of Princess Diana - Crying for Diana - I made two related points. One was that compassion has a social function - it binds us to other human beings. And so long as we are not psychopaths our brains are wired up for us to connect to the suffering of others and to try and do something to alleviate it. The second point was that when we are not in a position to intervene (because the suffering we hear about is transmitted through the news, or through novels and plays) our tears have a cleansing function - we cry away our self-pity. That can be positive.
What can be unhealty is when Headmind goes over and over the trauma it imagines others might be going through. Like, worry, that leads straight to the Anxiety response. And instead of empowering us to heal others it actually does the opposite: it paralyses us with guilt, resentment, helplessness.
The same goes for our response to injustice. When we come from a place of compassion it is because we are directly motivated by anger to come to the aid of people who are being abused by those in power. But rage is based on overflowing frustration - an emotion Bodymind uses to tell us to walk away because there is nothing we can do to change the situation.
And that's the real key for me:
- Compassion comes up spontaneously in the moment as we realise that the real-life people we care about need help in that moment
- Pity comes up when hear things at second hand, or we are not directly involved and so can't really help. It is not an emotion but a worry. It doesn't directly help you or the other person.
First image by kyz
Second image by Marlith
