Essay 2: Is It Compassion Fatigue, Sympathy Fatigue or Empathy Fatigue?
Why differentiating between Sympathy, Empathy, Compassion & Pity is essential for counter-colonial spiritual praxis and sustainable "activism."
This is the 2nd essay in a 4-Part essay collection. Read Part 1: Clarifying Energetic Fatigue (link) here.
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Collection Contents
Essay 2: Spiritual Reward
clarifies the role of "spiritual reward," ego, survival & thriving in “showing up.”
Word Count: ~1,706 || Reading Time: 7-9 min
Text-To-Speech: https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/
Additional essays in this collection
Essay 1: Clarifying Energetic Fatigue (link) explains the differences between sympathy, empathy, compassion & pity and the value of differentiating them
Essay 3: De-Centering Empathy (link) centers dignity over suffering & offers nuance on personal decision making, upholding systems
Essay 4: Spiritual Praxis connects all of this to discernment, divestment & energetic diet
Essay 2: Spiritual Reward
Here’s where we left off:
Aligned compassion reduces the likelihood that:
we’ll reinforce inequality and violence through our actions
our connecting actions will be manipulated for capitalist gain
and it increases the likelihood that we will burden-share sustainably because our actions feel spiritually rewarding.
Energetic sustainability is key in combatting energetic fatigue.
The idea of being rewarded for giving might make folks uncomfortable. “Transactional” relationships are often demonized as impure in imperialist capitalism, for good reason: these transactions often reflect power imbalances that disconnect us from empathy.
However, I resist purity politics at all costs. I’m not convinced purity should be a goal in human relationships, especially when purity-as-a-goal so often fuels racism, ableism, mysogyny (and ultimately genocides based on these). The issue, from my perspective, is not the transaction itself, but the context:
does this particular transaction situate me within dehumanizing violence?
does this transaction situate me within regenerative mutuality?
I believe it is not only okay, but necessary, to expect our acts of compassion to be spiritually rewarding. I would rather each of us be driven by spiritual alignment than material domination, even if we stumble through transactional attachments in the process. Why?
Because I hope it will lead us more frequently to situate ourselves consciously and deliberately within regenerative community care instead of replicating non-consensual domination within our relationships.
There is a subtle difference between "being rewarded for" and "experiencing spiritual reward" that might endear those who resist transactional behavior.
“Being rewarded for” relies on external validation.
It feeds fear-based and insecurely-attached egos whose hungry stomachs need to be fed by others’ praise. A reliance on external validation can make our internal radars unreliable in contexts where each of us carry varied capacities and traumas.
Now, egos are not bad; they are self-protective.
Often what we need to protect ourselves can be at odds with what we need to be in alignment with our core values, especially while surviving capitalism. We often have no choice but to motivate ourselves by external validation when our survival under imperialist-colonial-cisheteropatriarchal-capitalism depends on doing work that simply does not fulfill us.
A major reason I stopped teaching children in classrooms is that I could no longer justify training children to value their participation in the world according to capitalism when I could see clearly how much harm it caused them—and I was constantly reminded how much harm it caused me as a Black, socialized-as-a-Black-girl, queer & trans, undiagnosed-neurodivergent, childhood sexual assault survivor whose mom died in 2nd grade. Some of that harm caused by well-intentioned teachers can never be repaired.
When we have experienced survival as at odds with our own self-love, it often means that in response to witnessing harm, we attempt to regulate our nervous systems by engaging in trendy actions that activate our sympathy and pity because they yield us social validation; we may only find out later that these actions didn’t actually result in compassionate care.
For example, often when international crises flood our news feeds and we donate even to reputable organizations, we find out that the organization cannot access the funds or aid cannot reach those in need or organizations mishandle the money.
People on the ground who have access to social media tell us directly that they never received any aid or that their aid packages contained unsafe foods, culturally inappropriate foods, and materials that don’t stand up in their climate. I have seen this happen in every crisis I’ve followed as an adult.
Yet, many of us continue these reactions anyway because we’ve learned a sense of safety in that figurative gold star that comes with “doing something.” As mentioned in Essay 1, doing something for the sake of doing anything falls under the pity category. We sometimes become more desirous of the external validation that temporarily alleviates our own pain than of actually having an helpful impact.
This makes us susceptible to misdirecting our energy toward less impactful ends and inevitably yields disappointment by catapulting us head first into the wrong end of the cliche, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
This can make people feel stuck, which is a quick way to become energetically fatigued. Moving and going nowhere—or worse, sinking deeper in the quicksand—is depressing for anyone.
For this reason, I think it’s critical that we move from a place of internally-driven spiritual reward. When spiritual reward is internally-motivated, we are more likely to pause long enough to ensure the actions we take are actually compassionate, regardless of whether or not anyone validates us for taking them. This minimizes fatigue because the positive feedback we experience from seeing someone’s circumstances actually improve makes it easier to continue acting.
We do have to sit longer with the discomfort of our own perceived helplessness, but in that pause we often listen better and find a more useful direction. The struggle here is that we might find ourselves going against the grain, which can be terrifying if we’re used to external motivation making us feel “a part of something bigger.” However, because that external validation primarily feeds our self-protective egos rather than providing the spiritual reward of effective care work, it often doesn’t last. It simply can’t stand up against the weight of watching our actions not have the impact we desire.
That said, for multiply traumatized people, feeding the ego can quite literally keep us alive. So, I practice (imperfectly) holding back judgment of marginalized people driven by ego as they scramble to survive. Even when our egoic drives lead to ineffectual behaviors or even abuse, I try to apply judgment to the behavior itself, rather than for a person's drive to self-protect in an environment that also fails them.
I want for all of us to know what it feels like to thrive, not just to survive—for us to be on the receiving end of sustainable compassionate care instead of boom and bust cycles of pity and despair.
Thriving does require that we are attuned to Spirit's ability to love itself within us even when no external source can validate it's worth. Experiencing spiritual reward allows us to share someone's burden of suffering not because we feel guilty or desire a reward. Instead, sharing the burden becomes the reward itself because it reacquaints us with our own inner power, our own healing needs and our divine self-love. Each of these are generative forces that combat the depleting nature of energetic fatigue.
When we reserve our acts of compassion for people, places and times that are spiritually rewarding for us, rather than spiritually taxing, we are more likely to show up in community continually, even when nobody praises us for it. We remain in the trenches of care because being in community with our comrades is simply where it feels best to be.
I want to show up for my Black, queer, trans, disabled, neuroqueer, mad, fat, displaced and impoverished kin because I am happier doing so that not doing so.
This is in part why I stopped identifying as an "activist." It always felt as though I wasn't doing anything at all if I didn’t call my actions “activism.” In reality, as a member of many marginalized communities, I am simply being the best friend and neighbor I can be. I don’t personally like the trope of “we’re all activists in our own way,” because it is far too often an excuse for people who are not actually having a compassionate impact to believe that their inaction or misguided actions are equivalent to the sustained work of those who fight tirelessly for our rights.
I’m okay admitting I am not something. I let go of what I am not so that I can more fully be who I am.
It took me a long time to accept that I am not meant to be dedicated to systemic harm reduction and structural political work. I am not meant to destroy this system or manage it’s processes (another reason I had to leave the classroom); others are, and I am truly SO grateful for the work they do that I cannot.
So what am I meant to do?
I am meant to build the radical alternatives to the system that we will need when this one collapses.
I am meant to prepare people to be spiritually empowered to create fundamentally better systems as we navigate the fall.
I am meant to prepare people to rebuild compassionate systems in spiritually aligned ways.
I am meant to love and care for and provide a spiritual home for those who will be left behind by others—because I know the devastation of being left behind (even by the people who thought they fought for me).
When I accept that I am a writer, an educator, a space holder, a pollinator, a builder, and a caregiver, I am more likely to seek opportunities for compassion that engage those elements rather than ones rooted in actions that drain me and reduce my ability to feel sympathy, empathy or compassion at all. Then, I am more likely to show up consistently for activists who put their bodies, hearts and spirits on the line for me. They will need physical, somatic and spiritual care to keep going, and I will be there for them.
My great aunt Leona, who died 3 months shy of 100 years old, once told me that she could not join the protests with Dr. King when she was in her 50s because, “if someone hits me, I’m hitting them back.” This still fills my heart. She instead did office work for the organizers so that they could continue effecting their strategy of non-violent protesting.
To sustain our compassionate actions, we must know who we are meant to be and how our actions fuel that truth. If there is anything grassroots movements need now, it is sustainable, community-centered engagement from dedicated practitioners, not occasional and temporary bursts of ego-centered & guilt-relieving action that cannot be relied upon in those moments when folks have no more left to give—but the suffering continues anyway.
But this sounds like Compassion with Empathy, no? So why was the original essay titled Compassion without empathy as an advanced spiritual-political practice?
This is the end of Essay 2: Spiritual Reward.
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