Compassion

An dynamic element of Self-Energy

When your view of people is not distorted by the parts of you that fear or need them, you are not as affected by the ways they protect themselves. Then your curiosity can lead you to see behind their anger and distancing and learn about the hurt they are protecting.

To clarify what it is meant by compassion, I want to contrast it to pity and empathy. With pity, you see someone suffering and you feel sorry for him or her, but at the same time of part of you is glad that person isn’t you. Your mind is busy thinking of reasons why you wouldn’t make the mistake here she made that led to the suffering. Pity involves both a protective distancing and a measure of condescension Your sorrow for the suffer comfortable place of separateness.

When you feel empathy, you see a person suffering, and because you have a certain level of self-awareness, you know a part of you suffers in the same way, so you identify with a suffers pain. At some level, that person is the same as you. Empathy opens your heart and produces a strong desire to help the person. The danger with empathy, however, is that if you identify too much, you will feel pressure to relieve the other’s misery. You can’t tolerate your own pain, so you can’t stand for the other to spend any time suffering. The other common consequence of having too much empathy is to distance from the other person because his or her pain makes you hurt too much.

When you feel compassion, you see a person suffering, you feel empathy for him or her. And you know that the other has a Self (Self Energy) which, once released, can relieve his or her own misery. If people relieve their own suffering, they learn to trust their own self, and they learn whatever less as the suffering has to teach them. Compassion, then, leads to doing whatever possible to foster the release of the others self rather than become the others healer. With compassion, you can be openheartedly present with sufferers without feeling the urge to change them or distance from them. This kind of Self-presence will often release their own self. (There are of course situation in which the other Self cannot be released while he or she is overwhelmed by physical pain or illness. In those settings, the compassionate thing to do is to treat those conditions first but also holding the attention that relief leads to more Self-leadership.)

Also, as you become increasingly Self-lead—increasingly aware of the ocean and not just the waves—the sense of separation between you and the others is reduced. The desire to help people who suffer, as well as those who create suffering, arises spontaneously with the increased appreciation of our interconnectedness. It arises from an intuitive understanding that suffering of others affects you because, at some level, the other is you. (For most people, this is not a conscious thought, they just feel drawn to do something more meaningful with their lives.)

These lines from the poem by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (1992) to capture compassion that arises from awareness of interconnectedness:

“I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones, my legs as thin as bamboo sticks, and I am the arms merchant, selling them for deadly weapons to Uganda. I am the 12 year old girl, refugee on a small boat, who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate, and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving. Please call me by my true names, so I can wake up, so the door of my heart can lift open, the door of compassion.” (pp 123–124)

From Dick Schwartz, Internal Family Systems Model, pp. 38-42

With great appreciation for Level One Training and IFSinstitute.com

Compassion

An dynamic element of Self-Energy

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CALMNESS

CURIOSITY

CLARITY

COMPASSION

CONFIDENCE

COURAGE

CREATIVITY

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