The book More Than Two talks several times about compassion. The word appears 100 times in the book. Compassion, we say, is a necessary part of a successful relationship.

On another forum, someone recently asked, “So what is compassion?” And it occurred to me that we talk about compassion assuming everyone knows what it means, but we don’t really talk about what compassion is, or how we exercise it.

So maybe it’s time to fill that gap.

The dictionary isn’t terribly enlightening. If you look up “compassion” in the dictionary, it will probably say something like: “The experience of pity and concern for the suffering or misfortune of others.” Look up “pity” and it says: “Feelings of compassion caused by the suffering or misfortune of others.” That circular definition does not exactly illuminate the subject with a bright light that can shine as a beacon for the ages.

So I want to talk about what compassion really is. Before I do that, though, let’s first talk about empathy.

Human beings are born narcissistic little monsters. It has survival value. We cry when we’re hungry. We don’t know or care that mom might be asleep or busy or whatever; in a literal sense, we are capable only of thinking to and responding to our own needs. We are, as infants, not even capable of realizing that other people have needs, desires, or an internal life.

Over time, ideally, we learn empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand that other people are just as real as we are, to understand that other people have needs and desires, and to be able to imagine what it is like to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and see things from their perspective. As we grow up, it becomes natural to most of us, but only to a certain point. Most people never become really good at it. We empathize with people we like, or people who are part of our group. We don’t empathize with people we don’t like.

Compassion is the ability to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes, imagine things from their perspective, and then to feel kindness for them and seek understanding of them even if what they do is harmful to us, goes against our needs and desires, is at odds with our own experience, or hurts other people. Compassion is empathy on steroids. It’s the ability to understand the view and perspective of someone we don’t like, or someone who is doing something we think is bad.

Compassion requires that we have good personal boundaries—that is, that we are able to advocate for and defend our own needs. If you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes and view them with kindness and understanding even if their needs are contradictory to your own, but you can’t assert or advocate for your own needs, you risk allowing them to take advantage of you, or becoming codependent. Compassion lies in viewing someone in the best possible light, understanding their needs, looking upon them with kindness—all without allowing them to manipulate, control, or abuse you. You have to be able to understand and even value someone else’s perspective without becoming a doormat. As Brené Brown has written, the most compassionate people tend to have the best boundaries.

So the essential prerequisites of compassion are empathy, boundaries, and the willingness to see others in the best possible light even when they are being hurtful. Not an easy combination, which is why so few people are compassionate.

An example of compassion is compassion for an abuser. Most people will say things like, “A guy who abuses his wife is a monster” or, “Abusers are just bad people.” The truth is, abusers aren’t monsters. They’re human beings. And abusers don’t abuse because they wake up one day and say, “Hey, I know what I want to do today! I want to abuse someone!” Abusers abuse because they are in pain. They are looking for an answer to their pain, and the answer they come up with is control. They abuse because they need control. They need control because they are suffering.

Empathy is what allows you to imagine yourself in the abuser’s position. Compassion is what allows you to understand that an abuser isn’t a monster; an abuser is a person who is in genuine pain. Boundaries are what allow you to assert that the abuser should not be excused because of pain—that yes, the abuser is in pain, but abuse is not okay, and the abuser must still be held accountable for it.

So why do any of this? Why would you want to understand the perspective of someone who is doing something harmful?

Because compassion is what stops you from doing horrible things.

To an abuser, controlling others seems like a reasonable way to deal with fear, pain, and insecurity, because the abuser is acting without empathy or compassion. The abuser does not put himself in his victim’s shoes. The abuser feels pain when the victim doesn’t obey his control, but the abuser does not look at the victim with kindness and understanding. He does not try to comprehend the victim’s needs, or to understand why the victim is resisting his control.

People who say abusers are monsters are wrong. If you reassure yourself that only monsters abuse, and you tell yourself that you are not a monster, you will conclude that clearly that means you are not an abuser…even if you abuse others! The same goes for people we care about: if we believe only monsters abuse, then clearly when we see or hear about a loved one committing abuse, it must be something other than abuse.

Compassion is a tool that reminds us that other people are similar to us, and that means we, and people close to us, are capable of great evil if we do not watch ourselves carefully.

Abusers do not believe they are monsters. In fact, many abusers see themselves as victims. Compassion is the tool that lets us avoid that mistake. It is the thing that allows us to connect with other people in ways that help promote treating them without malice.

Categories: Ethics

5 Comments

Joyful Girl · February 7, 2015 at 4:19 pm

Love this!

mjb · February 7, 2015 at 7:18 pm

This was great to read. I love Brene Brown! She was the first person to explain the differences between empathy, compassion and sympathy in a way I could really understand and pass on to others (I’m a social worker, too).
As it is with things I often come across, this post is well-timed. First – I’ve never considered myself an “abuser” or even a person who has done “abusive” things. I have, however, done thoughtless things or impulsive things that have ended up causing someone else pain. Just recently, I was really careless about posting a rant against my poly partner and his girlfriend. Our partner is also our Dom. As with a lot of things, ours are complicated relationships that have managed to stay alive for a surprising
2 1/2 years. I almost tanked my part of it, by posting something I thought was going on a private wall, but, alas, it was on a friend’s wall, as well as my own. (Note to self: just because I’ve been on Fetlife for 3 years, doesn’t mean I’ve really paid attention to how posting on walls work, plus I was really, really pissed off, so I wasn’t thinking straight).

The long and the short of it is that I dislike my Dom’s other submissive/girlfriend. Ironically, everybody who knows them, including myself, see their relationship as much more vanilla than he and I and the only problem with that is in how he treats her. There is no hierarchy in our dynamic, though, at first, I was a default secondary because during my first year with my partner, I lived out of the country and we only saw one another 4 times during that year. We also tried to make our dynamic a triad, which quickly failed upon my arrival back in the States when his girlfriend realized that he was serious when he said he was poly and that he was going to continue things with me. She had trouble switching gears and viewing me as more of an equal and not in a secondary relationship with her primary one. It took our Dom a while to accept that she and I were not only not going to be “sisters,” but that we didn’t like one another. A slew of problems have ensued, which have been made around the fact that he and I try to communicate, but they do not and probably will never do so. I’m his first sub who believes in communication, sometimes to his dismay and she is rather emotionally stunted, has super low self-esteem, which she covers by being a complete know-it-all, pushy and always right. I knew her before I got together with her boyfriend and didn’t like her then, but I tried very hard to make it work, so our Dom would be happy. Underneath her abrasive and often passive-aggressive exterior is someone who I could like, but she needs eons of therapy, which she does not thinks she needs. A major stumbling block is that I’ve heard a kajillion years of psychotherapy and between the both of them, they’ve had one session – and that was my Dom’s attempt at getting help. Oh, did I mention they are codependent in a way that makes the mutual friends I have with my Dom, quite ill and most of them will not spend time with him if she is in tow. Luckily, they both live in the suburbs and go to a different social group and parties and I live in the city, etc.

Once our Dom exhausted all of his efforts to get us to at least tolerate one another, it was so over and I was awash with resentment towards her and towards him. The one topic that he had trouble talking about was, not only my issues with her, but how his reactions to her BS, negatively affected me. If she did something that made him angry, which is usually around the kind of poly drama that should’ve ended at least my relationship with him. After all of this time and no matter how much it was processed, she still feels jealousy when we are out together! She will still say “you spend more time with her; I felt abandoned at the party” (even though it was officially “my weekend” and there had been a protocol in place to deal with that situation, etc. So, basically, if she aggravates him with something like that, he ends up treating me, as if I said the same thing or acted the same way, etc…I could give example after example, ad nauseum, of how upset this has made me, but I’ll put myself out of my own misery by saying that he and I would talk about it; get on the same page with one another, than she’d act out again, he and I would talk it out, around and around. Meanwhile, when he and I together – just us – it is so close to everything I want in a Dom, I have never wanted to give it up, no matter how horrible she has been to me.

Except for this one day that I had hit my tipping point. I don’t even remember what happened at that day, at that moment when I wrote some bad stuff about him – which I only partially meant, but spit out such vitriol at her, that it stunned me to hear my Dom read it back to me, when someone alerted him to the fact that I had posted one long horrible sentence telling our Fetlife circle that I thought he had no back bone and she was the most hateful, stupid, manipulative, can’t hold a candle to me, in terms of my integrity (cough, cough), ethics(more coughing), ability to communicate in an intelligent fashion, beyotch( final, hacking cough!).

Subsequently and with many tears and painful consequences that (hopefully only temporarily) lost me my collar, although we are still together and have spent hours talking about how my resentments bubbled over. He has actually forgiven me for what I said about him, because he knows where it all came from now – but he also knows that I meant every single word I said about her. And I couldn’t and didn’t deny it! This woman has been through a lot in her life, though we were never good enough friends for her to tell me about it; she was abused by her father as a kid and is just out of a horrible 20 year marriage with someone who she described as passive-aggressive. To me, he sounds like an uncommunicative male-type, with a very low sex drive and quite boring according to her. Did she deserve to read my hurtful words? Nope. WAs it time for me to put my cards on the table with my Dom and somehow get him to acknowledge when I said she said nasty things to me and would never be satisfied until she has him all to herself (although, she know how another person in her life – you’d think it would’ve helped with her clamp on him, alas, it has not.) Yes. It was way past time for me to tell him and take the risk that he wouldn’t want to deal with me after my run down of resentments. As it happens, this mess created the opportunity to give him a rundown of my resentments having to do with how he treats her versus me; she’s the delicate flower, who needs protecting as if she will break with the slightest pressure; even though, when I could get my emotions in check, I told him that she is a survivor and way stronger than he gives her credit for; and that by coddling her and not holding her accountable for her words and deeds, he is was creating an untenable situation for me.

If I had been able to say my rant, but follow it up with a pinch of compassion, it would have lessened the impact on her – hopefully, in the process, showing her that while she is not my favorite person in the world, I understand that she has battled a lot in her life and it has made her very insecure and frightened and she has counteracted that with petty nonsense.

The part of what you said that really resonated with me is how you said that you don;t have to like the person to feel compassion for them. How true. Unfortunately, I’m not there yet. There this unpleasant part of me that is not exactly happy she read those words, but not sorry, either. The good news is it should strengthen the understanding my Dom has of my struggles and that I’m not immune to the things that she says that “don’t bother him.” I think he has a better understanding that while it doesn’t bother me, it has created a huge problem for me.

Perhaps my “blunder” was the universe doing for me what I could not do for myself, which was to go to my Dom and risk a breakup, rather than to continue pretending that I was ok and above her BS. All that did was pull me into a going on six month depression relapse and, since this happened, really and insomnia. It is quite a challenge to feel compassion for someone who has such an impact on my Dom that he can’t see what’s right in front of his face.

I pray that this has made my Dom and I stronger and has opened some communication doors that he has been not been willing to step through before this blew up. I do have some hope that he and I can survive my stupidity, since before this happened, I feel as if we took another step in deepening our connection through some awesome rope suspension scenes. The fact that I lost my collar has made me sad every day. Even though it means something a little different to us that the “typical” collar, as the Dom taking back his collar typically signifies the end of the relationship,but he is showing an amazing amount of compassion for me! The night I gave them back to him (I have multiple collars for different settings) I presented them in a tissue papered box on a bed of cotton, I was sobbing so hard, he kissed me on the cheek. This kind of thing is not in his usual repertoire – gentleness like that – I felt like he was saying to me that he didn’t like what I did (hence, the return of my collars) but he stills understands and cares about my pain. At the end of the day (and this long-winded, overly detailed post), he showed me why I can’t let this go, either. I know he’s hurting, too and I feel horrible, but he could still find it in him to comfort me.

I would like to give my thanks to Franklin for starting me off on this opportunity to process some of this here. I’d also like to thank anyone who read this entire post. I welcome any comments, good, bad or otherwise.
mjb

    Cennith · February 25, 2015 at 4:36 pm

    I read it all. Just wanted you to know you’ve been heard. To quote a very eloquent man “Life rewards those who move in the direction of greatest courage”

      mjb · March 4, 2015 at 7:16 pm

      Thank you, Cennith!Thanks for sharing that quotation with me. It, too, is well-timed.
      It’s also nice to know that my lengthy posts are being read and not just sent into the void!

Liz · February 10, 2015 at 2:27 pm

The timing of your posts never fails to amaze me. While I’m dealing with the reality of my partner dating an abusive person and trying to talk to him about that AND remain compassionate towards him, reading something like this is enormously helpful. It helps me to feel less crazy, like I’m doing the right things (not demonizing her, not pushing him to break up with her, clearly communicating that she is doing things that are very, very bad), and just…the strength to keep trying.

Thank you for writing such wonderful, clear, thoughtful posts.

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