Now enter a conversation of compassion and empathy. As a counseling professional, I have been raised on a steady diet of empathy. As a category and a construct, empathy has shown up in many counseling texts: those that taught me counseling theories, counseling skills, and set the larger frame of the counseling profession. I didn鈥檛 have much reason to give this a second thought until I ran across the work of Martin Buber, whose I and Thou (1971) does not necessarily tolerate empathy as an option if one is seeking to be present and to engage in a holistic dialogue with another. As I listened to Buber鈥檚 call to 鈥渢he space between鈥� the I and the Thou wherein 鈥渙ne person happens to another鈥� and where all of meaningful life and existence is found in the moments of meeting between one and the other, I found myself asking the question: what is the difference between empathy and compassion? Might a pursuit of empathy exclude the moments of meeting Buber pointed to? Might compassion, or that which Jesus seemed to live and breathe in the Christian scriptures, offer a greater likelihood of the meetings of mutuality and reciprocity that Buber envisioned?

In asking that question, a group of students and I completed a review of the counseling literature pertaining to empathy and compassion, and we found that the field and its constituents seemed as uncertain as I was. Sometimes these terms were used interchangeably, but other times they seemed to reference rather different things.

As a counselor-educator, I began to wonder about the efficacy of teaching and learning one over the other, and as a Christian, I couldn鈥檛 run from my understanding that Jesus did not teach empathy, but rather, compassion.

The word compassion comes from the Latin compati, and it means to 鈥渟uffer with.鈥� In surveying the literature on compassion, it is the 鈥渨ithness鈥� that is made possible in and through compassion that I find to be the most compelling. Researchers (Bibeau, Dionne, & Leblanc, 2015; Fehse, Silveira, Elvers, & Blautzik, 2014; Fernardo & Consedine, 2014; Greenberg & Turksma, 2015) have tethered compassion not just to a felt experience, but also to a desire to move towards and/or to connect with another who is experiencing pain and suffering.

Empathy is, in part, about the alleviation of pain for the person providing it, whereas compassion extends to affiliation and the rewards of social connection (Klimeckii et al., 2013; Stickle, 2016). Can you hear the significant difference here? One alleviates the pain of the 鈥済iver鈥� (not the receiver!), and the other brings reward through connection (withness).

The everyday definition of empathy I鈥檝e been handed through the years is a willingness to place oneself in another鈥檚 shoes. Even though empathy can be both simple (cognitive) and complex (affective) (Bussey et al., 2015), I can say my working experience with it through the years has trended towards the simple or cognitive, with its task being largely to understand the experience(s) of another. If one surveys social scenes across the United States of America, they may see cultural awakenings happening in places where people are acknowledging the impact of Western colonization and the ways it has led to the , including (but not limited to) BIPOC folks. What is more, if one looks at the scientific methods used in the West, one will also see the privileging of understanding over experience, with the former resting on the laurels of data quantifications, and the latter dismissed as 鈥渨oo woo鈥� or nonempirical. Pair an impulse to colonize with a tendency to reify (to see a piece or part of someone as the whole of who they are) by way of empiricism and one might just get a field of helping professionals who see it as their job to empathize with those folks they serve, rather than a field full of folks who have purposed to move with the withness of desire. Empathy may end up as another (intended or unintended) casualty of colonization and of oppressive systems bent towards maintaining the status quo of power. The helping professional鈥檚 felt sense of spirituality in their work may dissipate, leaving them with little but a hollow shell of roles and obligations.

Common to the helping and healing professions is the , or what has been commonly referred to as compassion fatigue. My wondering is whether this may be a misplaced construct and if the greater likelihood is that one would experience empathy fatigue, rather than compassion fatigue. If empathy requires me to leave my own sense of locatedness and join with another where they are, then I may run the risk of leaving my own personhood behind. This was Buber鈥檚 contention (1971): to engage with another (鈥渢hou鈥�), one must locate oneself firmly in an 鈥淚.鈥� Dialogue can only emerge in the spaces between two people who are firmly rooted and rooting in their own experience(s). Empathy may require less of an 鈥淚,鈥� and more of a 鈥測ou,鈥� which could very well drain the system of the person looking to afford care. What is more, the 鈥測ou鈥� of another can quickly turn towards objectification (reification), with empathy becoming a moment of object-to-object transaction rather than a subject-to-subject experience.

I find great encouragement in Brene Brown鈥檚 findings (2015), that levels of compassion positively correlate with healthy . In other words, the withness of compassion can bring or perpetuate a sense of health and wholeness within a relationship. When two people get to be people and to experience the belonging that such withness affords, the possibility of health, healing, and restoration grows. I believe the realities of COVID-19 have opened a wormhole wherein helping professionals will be required to engage with a sense of withness that pre-COVID practice did not require. Though I don鈥檛 know all of what this will mean or may look like, I already find it happening in my conversations with others. Maybe the crisis of pandemic is the very thing that has been needed to (re)orient a field that has skewed in the direction of power (empathy), rather than desire (compassion). Maybe, when it comes to helping professionals, the urgency of this pandemic will necessitate attention and care first for oneself so as to promote care for another (Bibeau et al., 2015), thereby opening spaces for those helping professionals to move past the alleviation of pain that empathy offers to the reward of affiliation made possible through compassion. Pandemic seems to (re)turn each of us to ourselves and to the potential to (re)orient to our desires, and my hope is that it will also (re)orient and (re)turn the fields of helping professionals to their constituents with the health made possible in and through the withness of desire that sits at the heart of compassion.

References

Bibeau, M., Dionne, F., & Leblanc, J. (2015). Can compassion meditation contribute to the development of psychotherapists鈥� empathy? A review. Mindfulness, 7(1), 255-263. doi:10.1007/s12671-015-0439-y

Buber, M. (1971). I and thou. (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.). New York, NY: Touchstone.

Bussey, K., Quinn, C., & Dobson, J. (2015). The moderating role of empathic concern and perspective taking on the relationship between moral disengagement and aggression. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 61(1), 10鈥�29.

Brown, B (2015). Rising strong: The reckoning, the rumble, the revolution. New York, NY: Random House.

Fehse, K., Silveira, S., Elvers, K., & Blautzik, J. (2014). Compassion, guilt and innocence: An fMRI study of responses to victims who are responsible for their fate. Social Neuroscience, 10(3), 243-252. doi:10.1080/17470919.2014.980587

Fernando, A.T. III, & Consedine, N.S., (2014, August). Beyond compassion fatigue: The transactional model of physician compassion. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, 48(2), 289-298.

Greenberg, M. T., & Turksma, C. (2015). Understanding and watering the seeds of compassion. Research in Human Development, 12(3-4), 280-287. doi:10.1080/15427609.2015.1068060

Klimecki, O. M., Leiberg, S., Ricard, M., & Singer, T. (2013). Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience,9(6), 873-879. doi:10.1093/scan/nst060

Stickle, M. (2016). The expression of compassion in social work practice. Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work: Social Thought, 35(1-2), 120-131. doi:10.1080/15426432.2015.1067587

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Fast forward 6+ months and the tenor of conversations have shifted. Disaster models now predict high levels of anxiety, depression, and as we move through this stage of our nation鈥檚 current plight. Home-based school startups have gobbled up the time and attention, if not hope, of many families throughout the United States. Parents are tired and overwhelmed, and kids are often overly energetic, listless, or both. Deep-seated tensions between partners have nowhere to go but out into the air that is already rife with fear and anxiety, grief and loss. Many single folks have sunk further into the isolation and loneliness that already resided within them, craving even the basics of touch, of a non-virtual smile (one would have to take off their mask to provide such), and wondering when and how opportunities to connect will again be available.

No matter your place, . This pandemic is taking our breath away, both literally and metaphorically. In the face of such a crisis, how do we engage a conversation about self-care?

For years now, I have been giving lectures and talks with titles such as this one, claiming the deadness of self-care as it is often conceptualized and sometimes practiced (or not). Like so many 鈥渢hings鈥� in the West, self-care has been commodified, commercialized, objectified, and turned into an accomplishment. Either that or it has become code for sleeping in or finding other means of shutting the proverbial world out: distraction, if not dissociation. What we truly need鈥攑urposeful, personal, and process-oriented engagement鈥攃an be scant.

In working with the literature on self-care for helping professionals like myself, I鈥檝e come to my own working definition of self-care. Self-care is the working out of one鈥檚 need and desire to experience belonging and connection. But are belonging and connection even possible in the midst of a pandemic? In particular, how about for those folks who face the intersectionality of multiple pandemics: COVID-19 and ?

As a counselor, I鈥檓 aware that conversations about self-care are typically tagged to terms and experiences that bear a negative connotation, such as burnout, vicarious trauma, or compassion fatigue. In other words, practitioners often start to talk about self-care once it鈥檚 鈥渢oo late鈥� and they鈥檝e run out of steam; self-care becomes something to pick up at the corner store on the way home from work. What is more, because as a society we have problematized our pain, many self-care strategies and practices are meant to medicate one鈥檚 pain. Rather than learning to listen to our pain and to where it might lead us, self-care roadmaps point to unrealistic, pain-free destinations full of trim bodies and Zen-like temperaments. For those of us that have spent any time in the church, our sense of the word 鈥渟elf鈥� may have also been skewed, becoming something to give away (鈥渂e selfless鈥�) rather than something to be filled and stewarded.

My belief is that if conversations around and practices of self-care are going to gain any traction, especially in a pandemic, we need to refresh our understanding of the following elements: self, need, and desire.

We now know enough, through the work of epigeneticists and those who study the impact of generational patterns (traumas, 鈥渟ins,鈥� and related genetic predispositions) to say that our sense of self is deeply embedded in our people: in who we were, where we were, what we鈥檝e experienced, and how we鈥檝e gotten this far. If you come from a people whose humanity was stripped or maligned in some way, then your efforts to live as a self will bear such marks. If you come from a line of 鈥済ivers鈥� who have taught you that ministry and service are godly and required, then the infilling of one鈥檚 self will seem perplexing if not problematic. In other words, the code to (self-)care to some degree resides in the light switches in our DNA. To that end, we could think of self-care as 鈥渃ellf-care.鈥� Our lives and the lives of those who have come before us have turned on/off possibilities for engagement often before our conscious minds have even had a chance to orient or chime in. In such times and in such cases, self-care is over before it begins.

As I look at the differences between needs and desires, I see a blend of what connects us and also what differentiates us as image-bearers of God. Needs are common to us all: We eat, we sleep, we defecate. Needs are designed to be met. We need a place to connect and to belong, and we will go to great lengths in search of such. It is our needs that reveal our commonality or oneness as beings that are interdependent and interconnected. Everything connects to everything, and everyone (every body) connects to everyone (every body).

In contrast, it鈥檚 the particularity of our desires that make each of us who we are. Desire is at the root of personhood and personality. It鈥檚 what gets us up in the morning, and it鈥檚 what puts us in touch with that which is larger than us. Desire embeds itself with meaning and purpose. And if the purpose of desire is desire, then the wheel of desire is always moving in the direction of regeneration, transcendence, and making contact with the Infinite/Eternal. It is at the heart of what it means to be a spiritual being.

Contrast desire with expectation. Expectation is hollowed-out desire. Expectation turns gift to guilt. In a season of so much loss (pandemic), capitalism revs its engine of dissatisfaction and signals us to ramp up our expectations of ourselves and how we鈥檙e navigating this season. Many people (at least to whom I鈥檓 talking) end up worse for the wear, and further separated not just from the or taken, but even more so separated from the lifeline of their desire.

We can do better than this. Or better said, we can be kinder than this. When we downgrade desire from its seat with the Divine to that which consumeristically compels us, we end up with a bunch of nice smelling bath salts and soaps that we are often too tired to use (and who has a bathtub clean enough for that, anyway?!). In my mind, we need to begin to track differently the trail of clues our system (mind/body/spirit) offers us as we seek to steward our needs and desires. WiFi connections have disconnected us from heart centers and minds that are designed to mirror each other, and we鈥檝e been left to respective worlds wherein much of our experience can be described by Sherry Turkle鈥檚 term (2011), 鈥渁lone together.鈥� We must (re)orient to our pain and see it not as something to be put off or fixed, but rather as a voice worth listening to.

I鈥檇 like to propose that a pandemic is not the time to try to enact 鈥渢raditional鈥� practices of self-care. Such propositions bring guilt, not rest, recovery, or any sense of belonging. As we head into the darkness of a pending fall and winter without a vaccine, I鈥檇 like to suggest the following:

• Remember who you are by way of the stories of your people: What pain has come to you by way of your lineage? How can you interact in such a way that honors your ancestors and therefore your self in the process?
• Toss out expectations: Place them in the recycling bin or compost pile where your desires can (re)emerge as that which orients you and brings you life. That said, don鈥檛 reach for tomorrow, today鈥檚 got enough troubles of its own.
• Obligatory plans for the holiday season should be replaced with a focus on today, and on what might bring you a sense of fulfillment in the now.
• Consider adopting a pet, or if you have one, reach out to them as much as you can! The touch of another living being is what we鈥檙e designed for.
• Allow the phrase 鈥淚t鈥檚 going to be OK鈥� to turn from a promise that things will work out to an offering of connection and belonging with those you love.
• Listen to your pain and allow it to guide you. Trade fixes for fondness. Practice saying, 鈥淭his is me鈥︹�� as you interact with the parts of you that struggle with the dis-ease that鈥檚 in the air and in our bodies.
• Practice acknowledging your limits, for limits remind us of our need and desire for belonging and connection.

This is not a list of 鈥渢hings鈥�-to-do鈥攚ho needs another one of those? What I offer instead are processes to engage and take part in: practices in remembering and reconnecting. As we say in my house, 鈥減ractice your patience鈥� when needed and continue working it out.

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