I am spending a lot of time entangled in the difference between empathy and compassion.
Our current world praises empathy as the ultimate superpower. I think it’s because we spent so long suppressing it–both feelings in general and intuition. The old systems have been encouraging us to suppress the power that comes from being able to sense what is happening beneath what is being said. Maybe we needed to praise empathy for a while. Maybe we needed to swing all the way in that direction because so many of us, especially women, were told for so long that our emotions made us weak. That our sensitivity made us dramatic. That our intuition was irrational. That our ability to feel a room, read energy, sense what was unspoken, or carry grief in our bodies before we had language for it was something to overcome. So for now, we praise empathy. We call it a gift and we say the world needs more of it.
It is a gift. I believe the world needs more feeling, more intuition, more emotional honesty, and more willingness to sit with dark passengers like rage and grief, to meet them with tenderness and truth.
But I wonder if empathy is where we begin, and compassion is where we are meant to land.
When I think about empathy, I think about this idea that feeling someone else’s feelings is the end-all, be-all. That the highest form of love is to feel what another person feels. To take it on. To enter their emotional state. To live in it with them. What happens when we do that though is that we tend to take on that person’s emotions as our own. We start living inside an emotional state that may not belong to us. We become drunk in emotion. We lose the thread of what is ours and what is theirs. We make decisions from the feeling instead of from the truth beneath the feeling. We try to fix. We try to rescue. We try to alleviate someone else’s suffering because we have started experiencing their suffering as our own.
I don’t believe empathy is love. I think empathy is absorption.
What would be more interesting is if we valued compassion. Meaning we are aware of another person’s emotions, but we do not take them on. We meet their emotions with understanding. With love, patience, kindness, non-judgment. We stay close without collapsing, open without becoming consumed. We walk beside them while they feel what they need to feel. We empower them to feel and resolve their own suffering. We give them the dignity of their own process. I think this is what we are truly after, but because we are spending so much time overemphasizing empathy, and because we are not trained with the tools of compassion, we often cannot understand the difference between these two things.
That difference matters, especially for women because we are stuck, often, in emotional loops that make us hypersensitive in a detrimental way. We take on the weight of the world. We experience exhaustion, burnout, guilt, shame. We carry the emotions of others with us until they start to bog us down and cloud our ability to use our own intuition. We become so full of everyone else that we cannot hear ourselves. And then we call that empathy. We call that being loving. We call that being good. We call that being available.
What if being available to everyone else is sometimes the very thing that makes us unavailable to ourselves?
Like many children, I was very sensitive. Sensitive in the way that I could feel the energy of others before I could explain that I could feel the energy of others. I could feel moods. I could feel tension. I could feel the shift in a room before anyone said anything out loud. I could feel what people were not saying. And I had zero tools to do anything with those readings, so all I did was take them in. I took in the energy of others. I took in their sadness, anger, disappointment. I took in their needs, their discomfort, their pain, their pressure, their expectations.
While we all deal with taking in the energy of others in different ways, my way was to become overstimulated and overwhelmed. I withdrew from people. I became scared of my own power. At the time, without knowing that, I blamed other people for pushing their feelings onto me. I also insulated myself from my own feelings because I was scared of feeling anything at all. I was living in a prison I built. A prison where it felt unsafe to feel the emotions of others, and where it felt unsafe to feel my own.
Empathy can result in different responses from different people. I may withdraw. Others may lean in harder. Others may become fixers, rescuers, caretakers, peacekeepers, performers, people-pleasers. But regardless, the overwhelm becomes the same output. We are overwhelmed by emotion.
When I returned to emotion after suppressing for so long, my emotions were very big and needed a lot of attention. That mattered to my fledging steps of reclaiming myself. I needed to feel. I needed to let rage move through. I needed to let grief have space. I needed to stop pretending that my body was fine carrying everything I had pushed down. I needed to feel my own emotions as step one. I needed to connect with others as step two. All of that was important.
I am realizing now that the next teaching I am facing is this: I cannot keep people’s emotions locked up inside of me. I need to release them.
As I started to open, I also started leaning into all of the emotional energy around me. I was being consumed and controlled by my own sadness, and also the sadness of others. My own anger, and also the anger of others. My own grief, and also the grief of the people I loved, the grief in the room, the grief in the world. In it, we would rise in emotion, but we were not alchemizing it into anything helpful. We were feeling it, validating it, and letting it be big. Again, that was necessary, but feeling is not the final step.
Feeling is sacred, but living inside the feeling forever is where we get lost.
This is where I think the wellness industry stops too soon. It teaches us to embrace the feeling. Feel the rage. Feel the grief. Feel the sadness. Feel the tenderness. And yes, absolutely. Feel it all. I am in no way saying we skip the emotional importance. I am attempting to emphasize that there is another step. An important next step.
After feeling, we must look at the emotion as an observer. Now that we have felt it, we must step outside of it and witness it with compassion. We must be able to do this for yourself. Do this for others. We must be able to witness the emotion so you do not live in it. Witness it so you can alchemize it. Witness it so you can move through it. Witness it so you can take action because of it, instead of being controlled by it. The emotion can move us closer to true alignment, but only if we learn how to relate to it. Only if we learn how to feel it without making it our whole identity. Only if we learn how to honor it without handing it the steering wheel. Only if we learn how to listen without obeying every impulse that rises from it. Emotions are powerful, but the power is not simply in feeling them and then making a decision from that space. The power is in feeling them and then recognizing their equanimity amongst the rest of the emotions. The power is in understanding that all emotions are neutral.
We are not taught this. Instead, we learn to categorize emotions as good or bad.
Joy is good.
Anger is bad.
Peace is good.
Grief is bad.
Excitement is good.
Fear is bad.
But that is too binary. It is too human of us. Emotions are more nuanced. They are information. They are movement. They are weather. They are energy asking to pass through the body. If we could see all emotions as neutral, we would not become less emotional. We would become more capable. We would become less afraid of emotion. We would have the ability to move through it rather than avoid it, suppress it, or live inside it. We would stop being controlled by emotion because we would stop treating every feeling as a crisis.
This is where compassion feels different than empathy.
Empathy absorbs.
Compassion reflects.
Empathy says, I feel what you feel.
Compassion says, I can stay with you while you feel what you feel.
Empathy can make me porous.
Compassion helps me stay clear.
I have been taught tools like shield. Block yourself from others. Protect your energy. Put up a wall. I understand why people say that. Sometimes protection is necessary. Sometimes a boundary does need to be a wall. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is remove ourselves from what is harmful. But I do not like the shield as the main metaphor. The shield puts a defensive spin on sensitivity. It says other people’s emotions are something I need to guard against. It makes the world feel like a threat. What I am learning does not feel like shielding. It feels like compassion. It feels like the ability to understand someone’s emotions from a place of non-judgment without taking those emotions into my body as mine. It feels like unconditional love without self-abandonment. It feels like giving someone else the space to learn through failure. To realize their own emotions. To meet their own suffering. To develop their own capacity. To resolve what is theirs to resolve. There is so much more power available to me when someone else’s grief is not something I take on, even for a short while. It is much more productive when I can sit with them and be a stable container of safety.
A mirror. The mirror does not absorb. The mirror does not shield. The mirror does not harden. The mirror does not collapse. The mirror does not become the thing in front of it. It reflects. It reveals. It stays clear enough to let the other person see themselves. I do not want to block people out. I want to stop taking them in as mine. I do not want to become less sensitive. I want to become more discerning. I do not want to stop feeling. I want to stop storing what was never mine to carry.
Before this realization, my body has been carrying pain from not only suppressing my own emotions, but over-feeling the emotions of others and never releasing them from my body. I think my body used sciatica to bring this into my awareness. Pain on the left side, the feminine side, the receptive side. The side that takes in. The side that learned to feel, hold, accommodate, absorb, and carry. My body finally said there is too much here. Some of this belongs to you. Some of this belongs to people you love. Some of this belongs to rooms you walked through as a child and never knew how to leave behind. Some of this belongs to the world. This cannot stay locked inside you anymore.
Compassion is teaching me how to release. Compassion is teaching me that I can love someone without carrying their pain. I can witness someone without rescuing them. I can understand someone without becoming them. I can be moved without being consumed. I can stay open without leaking out of myself. This feels especially important for women because so many of us were first told we were overemotional, and now, in an attempt to prove everyone wrong, we are leaning into being overly emotional as if the emotion itself is the answer. And again, I understand why. It has been suppressed for so long. It is necessary to feel rage. It is necessary to feel grief. It is necessary to reclaim the body. It is necessary to stop apologizing for having a full emotional range.
But I feel compelled to reassign the end goal that is being shouted to us because I do not think the reclamation of emotion is complete if we stop at expression. I think the reclamation becomes powerful when we learn to feel, witness, integrate, and choose.
That is the piece I am interested in now. The space after feeling. The breath after the wave. The moment where I can say: This is here. This is real. This deserves love. And I do not have to become it. That is compassion. For myself. For others. For the world.
Empathy is the doorway. Compassion is the container.
A container without walls. A container without shields. A container with a mirror clear enough to reflect the truth. A container where I can sit beside someone in their grief and stay rooted in my own body. A container where I can love without collapsing. A container where I can feel without drowning. A container where I can finally understand that my sensitivity was never the problem. The problem was having no place to put what I could feel. Compassion gives me a place. It gives the emotion space to move. It gives the other person back to themselves. And like all healing, it gives me back to myself.
