Is suffering from the pain of others excessive empathy?

Have you ever been terrified to learn that someone was very sick? Have you ever suffered with a friend because someone very dear to him had died? Have you ever been paralyzed by the realization of how much pain and suffering there is around us? Is it common for you to suffer with the pain of others?

Suffering permeates human life. Some are easier to deal with, others are the result of extreme injustice, which makes it very difficult for us to understand them. Empathy is a missing gift in the world. Including, she can be a beautiful antidote to suffering. What better thing than having someone empathetic by your side when you’re going through something difficult?

On the other hand, at the same time, sometimes this ability to have empathy leads us to a state of empathic distress, or empathic burnout, which is when I suffer together with another or even more than him in the face of his suffering. Somehow people consider this noble: “I love you so much that I’m even suffering with you”. But is this really healthy?

Suffering the pain of the other: what can be behind

Empathic distress is a trap because it doesn’t manifest itself because you are putting yourself in the other’s shoes, or necessarily worrying about them, it arises from your personal anxiety, which is stimulated by the other. Therefore, it can make us want to control the other’s life, “if you suffer, I suffer, so you better not take too many risks”. You basically don’t want the other to suffer because you want to spare yourself suffering. In the end, your interest in the other does not arise out of a love for him, but out of a concern for yourself.

If we analyze well the empathic affliction we will realize that what we suffer is from self-centeredness. Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard says that “when we are primarily concerned with ourselves, we become vulnerable to everything that can affect us. Prisoner of this state of mind, the self-centered contemplation of the pain of others undermines our courage; it is felt as a burden that only adds to our distress. In the case of compassion, on the contrary, the altruistic contemplation of the suffering of others multiplies our value, our availability and our determination to remedy these torments”.

In these moments of extreme distress, we need to understand the importance of practicing compassion alongside the practice of empathy.

How to have more compassion?

First step: understand that the pain of the other belongs to the other

It’s not to think that and already fall into the opposite extreme that we shouldn’t care about the other since his pain is not ours. Beware of this binary mind!

In compassion the focus is totally on the other, not on you. So when someone else is wrong, you better be well and whole to be able to help. There’s nothing wrong with making this separation, because it’s what can keep you at your center even in the midst of so much distress. Imagine a mother taking care of her child admitted to the hospital with a serious illness. Is it better for this mother to be able to show herself strong and loving to her son or to let her pain and despair succumb in front of her?

Second step: wishing the other to be free of suffering

But there begins a great confusion. We think getting rid of suffering is: if I’m sick, I get healthy. If I’m poor, I earn money. If I’m needy, I start dating. Of course, it’s nice to resolve more solid aspects of our life, but it’s so easy to become hostage to these things and live a postponed happiness “when it happens x I’ll be happy…”
Wishing people to get rich, married, beautiful and healthy is little. This is not wishing them to be free of suffering, as they are not freeing themselves from the cause of suffering.

And the biggest cause of suffering is attachment to the idea that we shouldn’t suffer. Therefore, another very important step of compassion is: remembering that suffering exists.

Yes, it seems like an obvious statement, but it reminds us that the real cause of suffering is the fact that we don’t accept it. Suffering is part of the human experience, it permeates all of it. It broadens the soul, as Viviane Mosé says, and has a process within us.

Understanding the nature of suffering makes us more ready for life, not just for the good, but for the whole package.

When we gain intimacy with suffering, we are not as surprised by it anymore. And again, here’s the warning: don’t confuse compassion with indifference. Understanding the nature of suffering makes us more ready for life, not just for the good, but for the whole package.

Therefore, I wish that you, people with a good heart and who go so far as to suffer along with others when they suffer, free yourself from suffering and its causes. And may you have a lot of wisdom to deal with life’s mishaps.