Empathy and compassion are close but not identical terms, and their shared and different components can be explained in several ways. Generally, empathy relates to being able to understand and share the feelings of others, while compassion adds an active dimension, or at least a motivation to alleviate the suffering of another. In this constellation, empathy is part of compassion.
Another way of differentiating between the two relates to feeling with someone or feeling for someone. Being empathic is feeling with someone, for example, when you feel the sadness of a friend or pick up on someone’s anxiety. In the case of compassion, or feeling for, you recognize someone’s feelings or situation and care for them, without necessarily feeling what they feel. Another difference lies in the scale of emotions, where empathy can relate to any emotion, and compassion typically relates to suffering. The word compassion originally comes from the Latin ‘com’ and ‘pati’, literally “to suffer with”.
We know that psychedelics amplify emotions in general, and both empathy and compassion have been related to the psychedelic experience more specifically. Emotional empathy can be related to enhanced openness and to the blurring between self and other. While research on this matter is still quite young, according to a recent literature review, emotional empathy is amplified by psychedelics, “allowing us to share in the joy, sorrow, excitement, or pain of others”. Depending on set and setting, this can result in an emotional overload. Think, for example, of feeling empathy for someone who is experiencing grief or anxiety during a psychedelic trip. Extreme identification with such feelings can be overwhelming.
Empathy has a cognitive component as well, which is the mental capacity for understanding others’ thoughts and emotions. This aspect of empathy allows us to comprehend various perspectives and can help in fostering mutual understanding and respect. According to the literature review, psychedelics do not have a significant effect on cognitive empathy. So, strong emotional empathy does not imply cognitive understanding, potentially making the situation even more difficult to handle.
As the scientific investigation of compassion gained more ground in recent years, a scientific definition and a measuring scale were developed around the term. Gu et al. break the concept of compassion into the following five dimensions: “(a) recognizing suffering, (b) understanding the universality of suffering, (c) feeling for the person suffering, (d) tolerating uncomfortable feelings, and (e) motivation to act/acting to alleviate suffering.” As this definition reveals, suffering is a key component, and feeling compassion means dealing with “uncomfortable feelings”, with or without the involvement of psychedelics.
Compassion is a complex and delicate feeling to deal with. On the one hand, practising compassion facilitates an ability to stay with difficult emotions; on the other, being exposed to suffering over a long period of time can have a depleting and even demoralizing effect. People whose work exposes them to suffering on a regular basis, such as health care professionals, human rights activists, and social workers, might experience compassion fatigue, a cumulative physical, emotional, and psychological effect resulting from the long-term exposure to trauma and suffering.
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