Essay 3: Is It Compassion Fatigue, Sympathy Fatigue or Empathy Fatigue?
Why differentiating between Sympathy, Empathy, Compassion & Pity is essential for counter-colonial spiritual praxis and energy work.
This is a continuation of Essay 2: Spiritual Reward (link)
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Contents
Essay 3: De-Centering Empathy
centers dignity over suffering & offers nuance on personal decision making, upholding systems
Word Count: ~2,451 || Reading Time: ~10-11 min
Text-To-Speech: https://www.naturalreaders.com/online/
Additional Essays in This Collection
Part 1: Clarifying Energetic Fatigue explains the differences between sympathy, empathy, compassion & pity and the value of differentiating them
Part 2: Spiritual Reward clarifies the role of "spiritual reward," ego, survival & thriving in “showing up.”
Part 4: Spiritual Praxis connects all of this to discernment, divestment & energetic diet
De-Centering Empathy
Here’s we left off:
“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?”
As I mentioned in Essay 1, I hold both compassion and pity as energetic actions, either of which can result from an overflow of the energetic sensations of sympathy and/or empathy.
Compassionate acts facilitate care that alleviates harm multi-directionally: the people we care for compassionately experience healing at the same time that we do; this compounded healing often rejuvenates our respective energy stores and reacquaints us with our capacities for rest and creativity, fueling more acts of compassion, and leaving a trail of care in our wake.
Acts of pity rarely heal, if ever. However, they may provide temporary resources that compassionate actors need to carry out their care. Pity does not connect the one who acts with the one who receives: it tends to reinforce an inequitable relationship of dependence that makes the giver feel accomplished and the recipient feel…pitiful.
While it is an imperfect analogy, it often feels to me that compassion falls along the lines of teaching a person to fish, and pity falls along the lines of giving a person a fish.
We live in a pervasively inequitable world: often people really do just need to receive a fish. Compassion and pity do not negate each other. Yet, those of us who dream of a world that disables the vicious grip of racism, classism, cisheterosexism, ableism and all of their offspring must find ways to situate ourselves in an ethic of compassionate care, which can fuel sustainable change, rather than an ethic of pity, which hardens the invisible borders between us.
I experience moments filled with the kind of rage I can only describe as ancestral when I hear people claim compassion and care in the same breath as inaction: “I do care, but…”
“I care, but…
But…not enough to…”
And this is ultimately why I wrote this essay collection. I believe firmly that language helps us tell the truth as much as it helps us lie. I believe even more firmly that we lie to ourselves far more often than we lie to others—often because it allows us to feel honest while being dishonest. Again, I understand this impulse as self-protective, not evil. Yet, if we continue to tell ourselves that doing nothing to alleviate others’ suffering still qualifies as “care,” then care becomes a meaningless word.
When we can’t distinguish sympathy, empathy, compassion and pity in ourselves, we become equally pulled in the direction of all of them, preventing us from moving in the direction of any of them. Energetic fatigue sets in—and in the desire to feel in control of our own energetic movements, we often move in the more surface level directions of sympathy and pity.
I do not believe sympathy and pity are bad; I do believe they are simultaneously more energetically accessible to most of us and less capable of motivating the intra-community and cross-community healing needed to address the deep-seated complex traumas carried by generations of survivors and victims of capitalism.
That is ultimately why I believe we need to understand how to move from compassion without relying on empathy. Sometimes sympathy is all we can access. Sometimes pity is all we’ve been taught.
There’s the added nuance that many neurodivergent people do not experience empathy in conventional ways. Yet, most NDs desire compassion as much as neuronormative people. We all need ways to engage our compassion without relying on empathy.
So, where to start?
There are two scales of compassion in my book: One is intimate and community-based, and one is distant and society-based.
Distance is not bad; it's just a reality. By definition, we cannot be intimate with all people of all different backgrounds and experiences. Intimacy requires familiarity. Anybody who lives in a culturally and socioeconomically diverse city knows that we are not in community with everyone we are in society with: We share bus seats, freeway lanes, sidewalks, grocery aisles, coffee shop lines, city parks, hiking trails, beaches, and other public spaces with strangers of different skin tones, unfamiliar mother tongues and garb, varied accents and hair textures—and thank goodness.
Diversity is energetically liberating; those who fear it fear liberation itself.
We can’t escape the fact that our actions within society impact people with whom we are not intimate. We can become easily confused about how to respond appropriately to such difference—largely because we are not taught how to. Increasing familiarity with the lived experiences of different cultures, sexes, classes, body types, etc is certainly admirable and recommended. Yet, I posit that we absolutely have the capacity to engage in compassionate care even when we do not know another’s experience.
Too often, the assumption is that we must understand people's suffering before we can act to minimize it. But what about suffering we can never understand in our bodies, in our bones? What about suffering we cannot empathize with simply because we have never experienced something similar?
As a multiply-marginalized person:
I do not expect cisgender people to understand what it is like to be transgender; I do expect cisgender people to leave my dang civil rights all the way alone.
I do not need heterosexual people to believe I am just like them (spoiler alert: I’m not and don’t want to be.); I do need them to stop treating my sexuality as a threat.
I do not need white people to suffer with me; I do need to them to stop criminalizing my culture and then profiting from it themselves.
I do not need allistic people to understand autism; I do need them to stop villainizing it to justify genocide.
If, as a suffering person, I require empathy of all those who can help me suffer less, I need to engage in one of two actions: make those people suffer as I do or educate them about my suffering.
The former turns me into a person I simply do not want to be. The latter is an absolute waste of my life force. I was not put on this earth to spend my days teaching race 101, gender 101, disability 101, and all the related 101s to every guilt-ridden person of privilege who started “doing the work” way too late in life.
I do not want people to relate to me based on my suffering; to require this is to attach myself so strongly to my own suffering that I cannot let it go. In a world that requires empathy for compassion, suffering becomes currency to be traded—pimped out—for survival. It obscures the lines between sympathy, empathy, compassion and pity, fueling pity and making compassion difficult to recognize.
Black people know too well that our social media posts about our joy fail in comparison to those about our pain. Migrants know too well that social media posts about their bleeding children succeed, and social media posts about finally receiving adequate medical care yield fewer donations. When we become obsessed with temporarily relieving suffering, we become addicted to suffering itself. Compassion is meant to reduce suffering; compassion must reduce suffering, or it is not compassion by my book.
In other words, people should not have to experience poverty to understand that nobody deserves to have poverty imposed on them. Disabled people deserve ramps and elevators, not because people feel bad for us, but because we are human beings. I wear a mask even if I am not high-risk, because I believe high-risk people deserve to be able to ride the bus and get groceries without me risking their life...because they are human beings.
Human rights, as the name implies, should be provided based on peoples’ inherent humanity, not on other peoples' collective ability or willingness to suffer with them intimately. People need affordable housing & gas prices, accessible & safe buildings, reliable utilities, and high quality food & healthcare more than they need peoples' sympathy and empathy.
I am, under no circumstances, calling for a reduction in empathy; I agree that we need more of it. I am acknowledging that in a highly segregated society, we simply cannot have authentic empathy for everyone who requires our compassion, and this should not stop us from acting compassionately.
In a spirituality with a counter-colonial ethic, action based on human dignity must be prioritized over action based on human suffering. Without this, we will ensure that extreme suffering remains the standard of action because we will never be inspired to act without it.
We often default to pity when empathy is difficult to locate. So how do we learn to default to compassion instead? One of the most difficult practices for people in times of heightened fear is to take burden-sharing action even when they do not feel empathy or sympathy. For example, so many people have forgone masks in the middle (yes, we're still in the middle!) of a pandemic, because they have begun to believe that chronically ill, elderly, disabled, and poor people count as "acceptable" deaths in favor of resuming capitalist production.
Any time we decide a person's life is less valuable than another person's profit or convenience, we are not operating from spiritual reward, but from egoic self-protection. Unfortunately, that ego has developed its understanding of “self-protection” in a violently racist, classist, ableist, cisheterosexist, homomisic & transantagonistic society. When valuing our success by capitalist standards, these values—these isms—are exactly what the ego will seek to reproduce.
The "acceptable" deaths will always be the most marginalized, especially when we consider intersectionality: the people most likely to be chronically ill, disabled, unable to socially isolate, unable to pay for adequate medical care and safe housing are Black and Brown folks, transgender folks, gender-based violence survivors, and anyone else with an increased likelihood of living in poverty.
To "accept" these deaths is to actively participate in racist, classist, and sexist genocide. For this reason alone, it can be dangerous for us to rely first on empathy in order to burden share, to compassionately care.
I want none of us to intimately know the dangers of being medically, economically, and sexually vulnerable to violence. I do want us to recognize that those of us who are vulnerable to violence deserve compassionate care without people having to really know what it’s like to go through it, too.
In these cases of distant and society-based compassion, the care work needn't be intimate and time-consuming. Wearing a mask doesn’t necessarily bring us more intimacy with anyone. Again, this is about people we are not in community with. To practice compassion without empathy is primarily to say, "even if I hate you or feel nothing for you or don't understand you, I will not only not violate your rights, I will fight for them, too." If we reserve societal compassion only for those with whom we are intimately empathetic, we will lose the capacity to communicate across communities.
To practice compassion without empathy might look like truly accepting that other people experience the world differently than we do, and are harmed more severely than we are, even if we don't have a personal understanding of how. Often, we don't have (and can’t gain) that understanding—not because it can't be understood, but because our privileges have segregated us from the impacts of our behavior. That segregation often encourages our egos to prevent our own understanding of “others” for the protection of our power and of our oppression-governed sense-of-self. Pity reinforces this.
Understanding the difference between compassion and pity can change how we make personal decisions that either uphold or dismantle systems. Sure, these decisions can include sharing things on social media, voting and purchasing power, but they must go well beyond that. In an imperialist-capitalist regime, our counter-colonial decisions must include uncomfortable decisions about the resources that maintain class privilege and personal power based on race, ability & gender.
Our reality is that many people who share loudly on social media can’t be bothered to actually make the kind of structural changes in their lives that divest them from the systems they are railing against.
This includes divestment from or a fundamentally different way of engaging in integral systems like property, schooling, gender segregation, and language learning. It's not just about consumption or who is currently in charge, which are surface-level, not root-level, concerns.
Writing Black Lives Matter in a social media bio is not as meaningful as it seems if the person’s real estate practices contribute to the mass displacement of Black and Brown families caused by gentrification. US Settlers might shout Free Palestine and ASAB from the rooftops, but the sentiment is muddied by deep hypocrisy if they own property on stolen land while ignoring the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women movement and the unhoused people in their own neighborhoods, most of whom are survivors of systemic violence.
I’m not saying it’s meaningless to speak up while we act imperfectly. I am saying we need to think more deeply about our positionality before claiming a level of compassion we are not actually living out.
Engaging in fundamental, structural shifts in how we enact counter-colonial care—or radicalizing—can't happen without a strong spiritual practice of grief and loss, which includes practices of grounding, cleansing and protections. Without these, the strain of change and engaging with the unfamiliar becomes overwhelming. When we are overwhelmed, we fall back on what we know, and what we know is colonialism.
Without centering a grief practice and honoring what we lose when we shift from an ethic of pity to an ethic of compassionate care, we strengthen our attachments to the oppressive systems that cultivate the suffering that overwhelmed us in the first place.
I navigate this grief in a few ways:
The pessimistic me says, "experiencing the end times proves this capacity to radicalize has already been lost!"
The optimistic me says, "we can always re-radicalize and restore this cross-community compassionate care!"
The realistic me says, "our capacity for compassionate care will continue to come and go cyclically until we collectively accept that we don't need to be a part of a community to take care of communities based on human dignity"
So what does this have to do with a spiritual practice? I’ll discuss this in the final essay, Essay 4: Spiritual Praxis.
This is the end of Essay 3: De-Centering Empathy
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