Choosing compassion over empathy

While it sounds righteous and good to show empathy towards others, it isn't quite the same as showing compassion. It could even create a bigger gap between a professional and a client. Let me explain.

To show someone empathy, is to feel what the other person is feeling and expressing an understanding of that, such as I understand that you're upset.

To show someone compassion, is to be able to relate to the emotion that the other person is feeling, through having had a similar experience, such as I have also felt upset, when others have said nasty things about me.

When I did research to my thesis in Working life science, a couple of months ago here in Sweden and online, I found that Tania Singer had made a study to compare how a person showing empathy, risk becoming burned out as well as can sound insincere and therefor cold, while someone showing compassion, was rather experiencing warm feelings and a good level of energy, and built connections. This through activating different areas of the brain, where empathy produced anxiety with the suffering the other was feeling, while compassion produced a warm and caring feeling, since it was grounded in altruistic love. A state able to reach through meditation.

There's no point in saying that you understand what someone is feeling, if you're going to hurt them anyway, whether personally or through authoritarian abuse. It seems like a trend to pathologize others emotions, instead of letting them be what unites us as people. To listen to another person without judgment and with full presence, is a completely different thing. To me it's even so, that the more emotions we feel and can express verbally, the more we feel present and alive. And the more we're present in our hearts and less only in our heads, the more healthy we are.

The study about empathy vs compassion, can be found here.