Understanding Compassion

Second in a series of five posts

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
Jack Kornfield, American Buddhist monk and educator

In my experience, compassion is not defined correctly in the concept of compassion fatigue.
The word compassion is used to include other emotional stances, ranging from empathy to sympathy to pity and even to despair. Compassion, on the other hand, recognizes the suffering of another as a reflection of our own pain. Our desire to alleviate the suffering of others must come from a balanced place if it is to be sustainable.

Sustainable compassion for others includes both me and the other person. My compassion for other people arises from my own compassionate self acceptance. When I don’t have compassion for myself, then what arises from me in response to another’s suffering maybe sorrow, or empathy, or pity, but it is not compassion. Buddhists train in compassion because it is a skilled state, requiring us to discern it from other states that may imitate and undermine it. As a skilled state, “compassion is viewed as a power for purifying the mind of confusion, for inner healing, and for protection of self and others.” Thus true compassion replenishes itself, and does not get fatigued.

This skill of cultivating sustainable compassion in caregiving professions is rarely taught. Leading traumatologists suggest that people who are attracted to care giving often “hail from a tradition of other-directed care giving. Simply put, these are people who were taught at an early age to care for the needs of others before caring for their own needs.” As children, we may have been praised for being nice and listening well to other people. Our own need to be seen, listened to and cared for may not have been as well met. It may have made sense to be seen as caring if we wanted to be seen at all.

Caring for others is a calling, but it can also be driven by a creative adjustment, a largely unconscious defensive strategy that allows the giver to avoid awareness of grief and trauma related to early disappointment, neglect or abuse. We may come to caregiving professions with a distinct lack of compassion for our own selves. We may be using other directed care partly to avoid painful aspects of our own needs. This is the path to burnout. The journey of the caregiver must include confronting the limits of this avoidant strategy. It must include coming to love ourselves as much as we love other people.

(2)Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are, Jack Kornfield
(3)Compassion in Buddhist Psychology, John Makransky, PhD Chapter Four in Compassion and Wisdom in Psychotherapy, edited by Christopher K. Germer and Ronald D. Siegel, Guilford Press, 2012
(4)J. Eric Gentry and Anna B. Baranowsky