How to be more compassionate

Derek R. Brookes
3 min readSep 22, 2023

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We all know what it is like to suffer. When we were in that state, we desperately wanted those around us to do everything they could to remove our pain.

Yet we have also experienced situations in which we have failed to act to alleviate the suffering of others — even when we knew there was something we could have done.

How can this be? How is it that we failed to act?

What seems to have been lacking is the emotion of compassion. It is only when we feel for ourselves something of the pain that others are feeling — imagining what it is like to be in their shoes — that we become motivated to alleviate their suffering.

For most of us, this shift in the balance of attention will not come naturally or easily. We are more inclined to focus on ourselves, even at the best of times. So this outward focus will require a great deal of effort and determination. In particular, it will mean adopting the strategies below:

1. Separate their pain from your own: We need to differentiate between our own feelings of distress and the pain that is being experienced by the person for whom we feel empathy. Confusing the two is partly what leads us to focus on our own pain and forget that someone else is hurting. It’s as if we imagine that we are the only one suffering in this situation. The person for whom we feel empathy is no more than an obstacle in the way of our own pain relief. We might even think of them as the cause of our suffering. Were it not for their suffering, we would not feel so distressed!

2. Focus on the disparity between your feelings and theirs: It is crucial to remember that, when we experience empathy, we are only a mirror — not the reality. What we are feeling is only a reflection of someone else’s lived experience, not our own.[iii] Yes, these ‘mirror feelings’ are uncomfortable and disturbing. But they are usually not a patch on the real thing. Empathy does not replicate every detail or dimension of another person’s thoughts and feelings. When we witness another person in pain, we do not experience exactly the same quality or degree of suffering. If we can keep our minds fixed on this disparity, it will be harder to prioritise the alleviation of our own distress.

3. Tend to your own wounds first: It is likely that we can feel empathy when we see others in pain only because this triggers memories of our own painful experiences. The problem is that, in some cases, witnessing the suffering of another person may evoke memories of pain that, while similar, are even more severe than the pain we are observing. For example, we might see a parent lightly smacking a child; but then find ourselves overwhelmed by emotions that spring from the far more violent and cruel beatings we experienced in our own childhood. In such a case, there are two things we can do: First, we need to follow the first strategy above and separate our own pain from the pain of the other person, so that the two are not confused. Second, we need to be honest with ourselves. If our own remembered pain is so intense that we cannot focus on anything else, then we must tend to our own wounds first. Otherwise, we will be driven to relieve their pain as a means of relieving our own, which is likely to do them more harm than good.

These three strategies should help us to regulate our own distress so that it does not absorb all our attention. They will also make it far more likely that our experience of empathy gives rise to other-directed emotions, such as sympathy and altruistic concern. Put another way, these strategies will tend to elicit feelings of compassion.

This is an edited extract from my book, Beyond Harm.

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