274 - Compassion
More than being nice
The world needs more compassion right now. Compassion, while related to empathy, is specifically defined by a sense of shared suffering, often in conjunction with “a desire to alleviate or reduce the suffering of another.” Compassion can be shown by supporting a friend who is sad, organizing or donating to support victims of disaster, volunteering, offering to help someone carry their groceries, etc.
When we talk about someone suffering, we tend to think of death or abuse, but suffering can look like a lot of things, even insignificant things, like traffic, aches and pains, bosses, clients, or coworkers being rude, guilt about making a mistake, or groceries being out of stock. Often, it’s easier to be compassionate about something large and traumatic instead of these small things, even though we still deserve it.
Being compassionate in a relationship
As with most things, compassion in relationships can be executed in both a healthy or an unhealthy way. Unhealthy examples of compassion are:
Always feeling as though the other person is hurting you intentionally.
Feeling personally hurt by your partner’s bad mood.
Feeling as though there’s no flexibility in your rules or agreements.
Feeling as though it’s your job to fix your partner’s bad mood or feelings.
A healthy compassionate relationship looks like:
The ability to empathize with your partner and adjust your expectations as needed.
Trusting your partner to be understanding if you’re having a difficult time.
Maintaining healthy boundaries, which are rarely needed.
Why is it so hard sometimes?
It’s easy to focus internally on yourself and assume everyone around you is in a neutral state, which can impact your ability to empathize. Additionally, a lack of self-compassion can make it harder for you to be compassionate to others, so make sure you’re practicing it with yourself as well. Media can also have a negative effect, as well as the fact that our culture tends to emphasize more on how we’re different than how similar we are. From the time we’re children, we’re taught that competition should be valued over cooperation, and are very attuned to reacting when we think someone is getting something they don’t deserve. Add on to that the fact that we’re taught to view people as simply good and bad rather than complex, whole creatures, and you have an extensive list about the setbacks we experience when trying to practice compassion.
Balance is key. Remember that compassion doesn’t equal forgiveness, and that you can empathize and have compassion for why someone might treat you badly, but you don’t have to allow them to continue to do so. We can’t control how others treat us, but practicing compassion can alleviate some of the extra suffering we might experience afterwards. Lastly, if you call someone out on doing something bad, make sure it’s with the intention of helping them change for the better.
Compassion exercises
Here are a few exercises for you to practice feeling compassion. They’re simple, but practice makes perfect, and feeling compassion is sometimes a muscle that needs to be flexed.
Commonalities Exercise
Repeat the steps to yourself:
“Just like me, this person is seeking happiness in his/her life.”
“Just like me, this person is trying to avoid suffering in his/her life.”
“Just like me, this person has known sadness, loneliness, and despair.”
“Just like me, this person is seeking to fill his/her needs.”
“Just like me, this person is learning about life.”
Metta Meditation
Practice Metta meditation, first introduced to us by Annalisa Castaldo in episode 222:
“May you be happy.”
“May you be healthy.”
“May you be safe.”
“May you be at ease.”
Find small acts of kindness
Recognize that everyone is suffering.
Find a small thing someone could do to ease YOUR suffering.
Do that thing for someone else, like holding a door, smiling at someone, letting them go first, speaking a kind word, listening to someone, doing a chore for them, being understanding of a bad mood, etc.
Cut-Thru Technique
Inner Weather Report: Assess your current emotional state, and see how much sunshine you can generate just by acknowledging your feelings.
Move remaining feelings of discomfort to your heart, and let them stir up there, mixing in as much of your positive energy as possible.
Take yourself outside the situation and be objective about it. What would you say to someone else in your situation?
Examine the difference between caring and caring too much, and figure out where you might be over caring.
Think back to your objective advice to yourself, and if there’s anything you can enact right now, do it!
Additionally, the Healthy Minds Program, an app for iOS and Android, is free for individuals and is a great resource for mindfulness.
Transcript
This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking about what the world needs now, and no, it is not love, sweet love, it's compassion. Compassion is related to empathy, but it's a little bit different. In this episode, we're going to be discussing what it means, why it's important to practice both with our loved ones and with everyone, and then a little bit about how to actually do it in real life, even though it can be hard.
Dedeker: Love, Jase.
Emily: How to do the compassion?
Jase: Yes, how to do it?
Dedeker: Jase, you wrote down a really nice Dalai Lama quote here.
Jase: Yes. Let me read some Dalai Lama here.
Dedeker: Your best friend. Dalai Lama?
Emily: Yes, I forgot that you guys were friends. You were buds.
Jase: My close personal friend who I saw across the stadium once. If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. You know what?
Emily: There you go.
Jase: D Money, as I call him, it's true. It's true. He knows what he's talking about.
Dedeker: He's keeping on the DL.
Jase: Maybe D not money? Yes, see, I don't know. It seems like attachment to--
Dedeker: Yes, not money.
Emily: He wouldn't do any money. How about D Dog?
Dedeker: Like D Happiness. I don't know. It needs something that doesn't sound very cool ultimately.
Jase: Right. I'm like is there--
Emily: Working title. Someone give us a better one in the comments.
Jase: Yes, we'll workshop it later. Someone--
Dedeker: We can start with the D Lama and just start there.
Jase: That's good actually, yes. Anyway, D Lama, he knows what he's talking about. I'm going to read it one more time. If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. Hashtag truth. That was the last part of his quote. It got cut out from where they wrote it online, but I'm sure he said hashtag truth right after that.
Dedeker: Hashtag truth. Signed sincerely, D Lama. All right. What is it that we mean, that the D Lama means by the word compassion? Well, this is what I can tell you from Wikipedia. Compassion is an emotion that is a sense of shared suffering, most often combined with a desire to alleviate or reduce the suffering of another or to show special kindness to those who suffer. Compassion essentially arises through empathy and is often characterized through actions, wherein a person acting with compassion will seek aid those they feel compassionate for.
I guess what strikes me about this particular definition is that there's a lot of emphasis on the direction--
Emily: Suffering?
Dedeker: Well, suffering, the direction going from you towards other people. It's a lot of focus on other people's suffering.
Jase: I think that's the key difference between it and something like empathy or sympathy, which is more just about either imagining what the other person is feeling or feeling the same thing that someone else is feeling. This is more specifically about identifying how we share suffering in a way and then seeking to alleviate the suffering in others. I do think that's-
Emily: Yes, I do feel it.
Jase: -a key part to it.
Emily: Like it say an all-encompassing feeling of we're all in this together to a degree, that there is a sense of challenge that the world puts on us as a collective people. When you think about somebody maybe, I don't know, being an asshole in a moment, you can say to yourself, "Well, they probably have something going on. They probably have some suffering that they're going through. Maybe I need to be compassionate for them at that moment."
Jase: What are some examples of compassion?
Emily: Well, supporting someone who is upset, like a friend or a family member or your loved one.
Jase: Right. I think that's a clear one because it's like you know the suffering, it's clear, you see it, and you're supporting them however that is, by helping them with chores or just being a shoulder for them to cry on or something. I think we can get that one, you're supporting someone who is very clearly suffering about something specific.
Emily: On a larger scale, you could do something like organizing or donating to support victims of a disaster, like disaster relief, refugee relief, anything along those lines.
Jase: It's not just someone that's directly connected to you, but someone further away but you're still moved to want to do something to alleviate that suffering.
Emily: Yes, or volunteering?
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: I guess a pretty classic example of if your neighbor has a death in the family of like cooking for them for a while, bring supper to them or doing things for them or not or I think the other approach being like giving someone space and time when you know they're going through something really hard. Well, that could be a partner. I guess that could be a neighbor. That could be someone further along the six degrees of separation, I suppose.
Jase: Right. I suppose it could look something like say that neighbor was on a committee with you in the neighborhood and you don't enforce those deadlines on them that you had for this project you're working on. You're like, "Let me pick up some of the extra slack," or like, "Let's not worry about getting that done right at this second. It's is all right."
Emily: An example you wrote down was offering to help someone carry their groceries. Right now, I know, for example, people who are immunocompromised, friends of theirs are going out and actually buying groceries so that they themselves don't have to go into a potentially bad place that might give them an infectious disease. Things like that are good for this period in time, for example.
Jase: I think what I like about that example of carrying groceries is this is not carrying groceries for a friend or for your mom or someone else, this is for a stranger if you see they're struggling or something. What I like about it in terms of our discussion about compassion is it shows that it's for a stranger. I also like that-- When we talk about this definition of compassion that has a lot to do with shared suffering and then also this desire to alleviate suffering, that suffering sounds like a downer, but it really covers this very broad range from an acute, specific suffering like we said earlier, the death of a loved one or being sick or something that's clearly suffering that we all can look at the go, "Yes, that's suffering. I know that one," to this little, every day, somehow seemingly insignificant sufferings that we all experience to different degrees and more or less at different times.
Something like being stressed out because you're running late or you have all these groceries and no one in your family was able to help you or you're having to do this by yourself and it's too much for you to carry. It's just like these little things. I love that this concept of seeing that we all suffer is really beautiful because you see it's this whole spectrum from this tiny little minute things all the way to something very catastrophic.
Dedeker: Along that spectrum are the tiny everyday sufferings of commute in traffic-
Emily: What's that?
Dedeker: -of the aches and pains that come up from having a human body. People being rude to you, feeling rejection either romantically or sexually or professionally or whatever. I think there's also the more subtle things like guilt and shame, suffering from the guilt and shame of having made a mistake or slipped off in some way or the guilt and shame of treating someone not very well in your past or things like that or also the guilt and shame that comes along with rejection. Rejection itself is not just painful in itself, it's also the guilt that comes along with it.
Jase: I love that you mentioned shame too because it-- We've talked in the past, I think before about how guilt and shame are these different sorts of things, but even the suffering can come from these internalized feelings of shame we have about just being who we are if that's not something that we were taught was acceptable or that we think is acceptable or that we worry maybe it's not.
Dedeker: Newsflash for you, good news, we're going to do an episode about shame.
Jase: Cool. All right.
Dedeker: Y'all do you know about this yet, but, yes, I have the guest booked already and everything. It'll be great.
Emily: Lovely.
Jase: I love it. Okay. Great.
Emily: Well, stay tuned for that in the future.
Dedeker: Anyway, I think what strikes me about thinking about the whole spectrum of possible suffering that we go through as human beings, which seems like an endless list, but what strikes me is that it seems to me that it's easier to be compassionate to ourselves and maybe also to others as well. I think mostly it's easier to be compassionate to ourselves when there's like "big suffering", like the loss of a job or the loss of a loved one or something like that.
Jase: With injury or sickness or something.
Dedeker: Injury. Some people, I think, still struggle with that for sure, offering self-compassion even in those times. I feel it's harder for these everyday little things, to offer compassion for those things.
Jase: Yes, definitely. I'm thinking about the guilt and shame ones specifically. Those are ones I know for me, for myself, a very hard time being compassionate with myself about those feelings, whereas I might cut myself some slack if I'm sick or if something really stressful has happened. If those feelings are coming up, it's harder to cut myself slack for those.
Emily: Yes. When we're looking at compassion, it is a big deal in the world. There are a ton of articles out there written about it. People have been teaching it like the Dalai Lama, maybe in his previous lifetimes and now too, for thousands of years. We also may discuss Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior. When was that written, Jase, do you recall?
Jase: It's pretty recent. It's in the 20th century.
Emily: Okay. In the 20th century. It's been taught for millennia, definitely, many millennia. There has recently been more research actually done on it. Unfortunately, there's-- well, maybe fortunately or unfortunately, wherever you lie in that spectrum, there are no drugs to sell that just give you compassion. There is less funding out there for studies being done on that specifically, but the results that we do get from these studies are really interesting. There was a study done in 1998 on the impact of a new emotional self-management program on stress, emotions, heart rate variability, DHEA, and cortisol. It was published in the Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science.
Jase: It's a hard title to say, isn't it?
Emily: I know. It's just the multiple challenging words at once. It studied 45 participants and measured their DHEA and cortisol levels as well as the nervous system. What's DHEA?
Jase: DHEA is a hormone that's produced as part of the adrenal gland, adrenal system. It's a precursor to a lot of other very fundamental hormones like testosterone and estrogen and stuff like that. It's something that peaks in early adulthood and then declines as we get older. A lack of it is associated with a lot of things having to do with aging, also potentially depression or osteoporosis or various other things.
Emily: Having more of it is good in terms of anti-aging?
Jase: Right. There have been some mixed results in terms of DHEA supplements, but having a higher natural DHEA is generally considered a good thing.
Emily: I see. This study had one group practice compassion exercises, and that group found a 23% reduction in cortisol and a 100% increase in DHEA, which is-- that's a lot. That's amazing. 100%, goodness. Compared to the control group which wasn't practicing these compassion exercises. They scored more highly only on positive effect scales.
Jase: Positive affect aspect scales.
Emily: Affect.
Jase: Just kind of that you're like emotional wellbeing. The study has some limitations, but this is one that when people talk about compassion, they love to whip this out because the numbers are staggering. 100% increase in DHEA and there's 23% reduction in cortisol.
Emily: It was only 45 people, though.
Jase: Only 45 people, which means in this particular study, 15 people were the control group and 30 were the study group that was doing these mindfulness and compassion exercises. It's a small study. However, they're pretty remarkable results regardless. There's at least something here, even if you couldn't guarantee that this would be exactly true for everybody.
Dedeker: Yes. I'm surprised by these results. I guess on the surface, I'm like, "Yes, wow. I guess that makes sense." Like if you're just more compassionate and more loving and more empathetic, it makes sense that you'd get these benefits, I suppose. I guess it's really good marketing to say that compassion helps you stop aging.
Emily: Very good marketing. I don't know if --
Dedeker: It does surprise me, though, because I think when you break compassion down, it's not necessarily a pleasant feeling. I don't think. It's not a happy feeling, it's not a happy emotion. It's not one that I would associate with like, "So relaxed and free of cortisol," and also looking younger and more fresh like a daisy. When I think about compassion, it's like you're coming up against either your own suffering or other people's suffering and feeling empathy with that and taking action towards that.
I can see that that might feel good to a certain extent. It's not exactly like I think, an enjoyable experience ironically, even though I think we tend to categorize compassion in kind of the big old bag of positive emotions.
Jase: Right. Yes. I think that's a great point. I think that's something that I'm hoping our listeners stick with us on this episode because, yes, compassion isn't the sexy thing to advertise because it's not about escapism. It's not about suddenly you're going to feel great all the time, but it has been shown to have this very drastic overall holistic effects on your well-being because part of the compassion exercises they were doing in this, and we're actually going to learn one of them toward the end of this episode, but the exercises they did is not just about feeling compassion but also about then what do you do with that? How do you enact that in your life in a way that is positive? That's where the big change happens.
Emily: I just wanted to take a second and talk about the difference between gratitude and compassion then, because I think gratitude-
Jase: That's a good one too.
Emily: Yes. Gratitude tends to be thought of in this way of life, "Okay, be grateful for three things today and in doing that over and over again, we'll just infuse your life with more happiness and betterness and stuff." The way in which we're talking about compassion is that that's not necessarily the case, that maybe over a long period of time, it will be better for you overall. It's not going to be that quick fix of like, "I'm thinking about how much I love my cat right now," or "I'm thinking about how grateful I am for the roof over my head or something." It's a different thing. It's not as personalized. It's more outward rather than inward.
Jase: I think the other key part of it is that compassion involves action, like in the definition the Dedeker read from Wikipedia, "It's then about then doing compassionate things and enacting compassion in the world." From the research and the studies that I read about in preparing this episode, that's where a lot of the benefits come from actually. It's not just in thinking about compassion but in doing compassion.
Emily: Yes, that's a different distinction, I think than gratitude, which is like let me just think about it and be grateful for something and then that'll make my life better. Yes, I like that distinction.
Jase: Yes, I'm glad that you brought that up because that is an important distinction to make that we haven't made clear yet in this episode.
Emily: Yes. Where I think some people might initially think that they're the same thing but they're not.
Jase: Yes, good point.
Dedeker: Let's talk about, what does that look like in relationship specifically? What does it look like in a relationship where compassion is a norm versus where it's not so much of a norm? I feel like if we're looking at the negative side of this, of like the relationships where there's low compassion between partners, of course, it seems like there's a huge spectrum there. We could go all the way to intense abuse and probably theorize that there's probably not a lot of compassion going on there but it feel like when we start getting away from that, into the spectrum, into more normal everyday examples, what do you all think?
Emily: The idea that your partner is out to get you, I know that I've use that example a lot, but there are times in a relationship where something happens that's triggering to you in a way and automatically you go too, "Well, my partner is actively hurting me" rather than having maybe compassion for "Well, maybe they had a rough day at work or something," or, "Maybe I need to internally look at how I'm feeling right now and why I'm triggered by X, Y or Z thing," something along those lines perhaps.
Dedeker: Again, I want to put in the caveat of not an abusive situation though.
Emily: Sure.
Dedeker: Because I don't want anyone to think that they need compassion their way out of an abusive situation.
Emily: Yes.
Jase: Let's get to that in a second because I think that that healthy compassion is different from what some people might think of as compassion, which is letting everyone get away with everything and not having any boundaries. I do want to be clear that that's not healthy compassion either. I do think that's worth looking at the extremes there. On the low compassion end, I think a situation that can come up where low compassion can be involved even in an otherwise fairly healthy relationship is when it gets challenged when both of you are under stress at the same time, but it's easy to get in your own head about your own stress but assume that no one else must be feeling as stressed as you are.
Like with your partner while the kids are screaming in the backseat and it makes you more tense or irritated with each other or I was thinking, Dedeker, when you and I were trying to find an Uber after we went to a concert in LA and you ended up walking for 45 minutes.
Emily: Oh my God. The exact same thing has happened to me.
Dedeker: There was a lot of suffering that night.
Jase: There's a lot of suffering.
Emily: It's like 1:00 AM, what the hell. You can't find an Uber to save your life.
Jase: Right. We ended up getting short with each other during that and had to take a couple moments to be like, "We're both feeling this. We're both stressed about this. This isn't something that the other is doing to us. We're in this together." I think that's an example of when compassion can be running short.
Dedeker: I feel like if you feel like in your relationship there's no flexibility in the agreements that you make, if there's rigidity in the relationship, I see this come up with a lot of clients, but I've also been there if I'm being totally honest, but sometimes in a relationship that's maybe more toxic or not working out, so great, there can be this compulsion to really bend over backwards with the emotional labor just in order to be able to have the relationship function, and I do feel like that's sometimes a product of not having a lot of compassion or empathy for each other, not having flexibility, really, or not having that ability to give leeway or benefit of the doubt to your partner.
Jase: Yes. I think our society teaches us that a lack of compassion is acceptable or normal too in a way that our companies work. The companies that we interact with everyday. I have this memory of taking to a company where they renewed my service when I didn't want them to and they said they'd emailed me about it and I said they didn't. One of those. We've all been in some version of that situation, right?
Emily: Entertainment Weekly. I swear to God. How many times they've reupped my thing and I didn't want it.
Jase: I was talking on the phone with a customer service person, and their answer to everything kept being, "The system says this and this is the rules, there's nothing I can do." At one point, I was like, "Okay. You keep saying that but corporations aren't these entities that run themselves as much as we treat them that way. There's humans there. You're a human. I'm a human. Let me talk to someone else then who can do something about it." Eventually, I did. It took me several days of talking with customer support on this, but this is going to be a few thousand dollars worth of money that I didn't want to spend.
Anyway, the point is that we're taught to think that way, that sort of like, "That's the rules. There's nothing I can do about it." I think we tend to do that in our relationships if we rely on rules too of this like, "These are the rules we made. We both signed these agreements or whatever it is. Tough. There's nothing I can do."
Emily: These have been examples of somebody doing something to you, but I think, personally, also, with unhealthy compassion and relationships, you personally may feel like it is your job to fix your partner's feelings or emotions or their bad mood or the way that they're acting, et cetera. That can be an example of unhealthy compassion in your relationship.
Jase: Right. That's what we're talking about before. We might say, "You're being so compassionate and understanding of them," when in reality, you're taking responsibility too much for their feelings or taking everything they do personally and lacking a compassion for yourself or a healthy balance with that too. Yes, that's a good example.
Emily: Let's move on to what examples of more healthy compassion and relationships look like. Initially, when I thought of this, I was thinking of just two metamours finally getting to meet each other for the first time and having a face to a name as opposed to just this faceless person out there that you're very frightened of but being able to actually meet someone and see someone and have compassion for them and perhaps what they have going on in their lives and just recognizing the humanity in each other.
Dedeker: Yes, definitely. I've seen some really, really beautiful things come out of working with clients on this stuff, of situations where maybe as metamours, we feel a little bit competitive or maybe we didn't start out on the right foot but when we're finally able to recognize each other's suffering to a certain extent and give each other some leeway, some really, really fantastic wonderful things have come out of that. I think that's a really good example.
Jase: Yes. If I can be a real philosophical for a moment.
Dedeker: Please do.
Emily: By all means.
Jase: I think that, at least in opinion, I feel like, we've talked before on this show about humanizing other people and once you recognize that other people are humans too, that things change. You stop feeling quite as much like they're out to get you all the time or they must have all their stuff and I'm the one who's a mess. We have lots of different versions of this, but I feel like what we mean by recognizing the humanity in someone else is really this compassion. It's like noticing how we both suffer in similar ways. I don't know. I think there's something beautiful about that. That's part of the human experience, I guess.
Dedeker: Definitely. I do think a part of having a healthy sense of compassion in relationships is that you're able to maintain healthy boundaries, your partner is also able to maintain healthy boundaries. There are boundaries that are there and are enforced but they're not needed as a defense at all times, I suppose.
Jase: Yes. Like we talked about in our conversation with Mia Schachter of this idea of if you're to the point where you're having to really get into whose responsibility is it, this boundary is getting crossed and whatever, we're already way too far past where we should be for a healthy relationship here. Boundaries are this last line of defense and not something that should be the constant thing that you're bouncing off against with your partner. I think that if that is happening, a lack of compassion or the unhealthy too much compassion kind of a thing. I almost don't want to call that compassion but this over--
Emily: It's like noble suffering. Like, "I'm so noble for suffering more."
Jase: Right. It's like trying to do their suffering for them rather than trying to alleviate suffering. Ironically making more suffering not only for yourself but also probably for them because of the toll that that takes on you. In a relationship with healthy compassion going both directions, you still have boundaries and you can still be clear with your partner about what it is that you want and what you expect, but as long as this compassion is actually happening both ways in the relationship, there's also a certain trust that my partner isn't going to just do as much as they can get away with.
I think that's a belief we've been taught about relationships that's also very unhealthy in any kind of relationship whether it's monogamous or polyamorous or anything. This idea that if left unchecked without rules to keep us in place, we would get away with as much as we possibly could. I think that's based on this idea that none of us have compassion. That's a shitty world and those are not relationships that I want to have.
Emily: Totally.
Dedeker: Definitely.
Emily: We're going to continue on with our discussion on compassion and ways in which you can enact it in your own life, but first, we are going to talk about some ways that you can show us compassion by giving back to the show so that we can continue to give it to you for free.
Jase: All right. We have a sense of a little bit about what compassion is and why it might be important. I think we'll keep delving into this a little bit more but something that we need to talk about is why is it hard. Why is it so freaking hard? Because a lot of people out there on the more woo-woo side of the internet, talk about, "Compassion's so natural. It's our natural state." I love it. I love that idea, but it doesn't feel very true in daily life. At least not sometimes. I think sometimes it does.
Emily: Drive on the LA road like it never feels like it's something that people around here think of or care about.
Jase: Right. I guess, to start off on that, I think something is that I do think compassion in our modern-day is harder. Interestingly, I actually think it's getting a little bit easier, but I think something that makes compassionate harder-
Dedeker: Wait, harder but harder than what? Harder than when?
Jase: Than in the days when we lived, where everyone that we knew and interacted within our life was in a community of people that we knew face-to-face, that we knew their names and their families and that sort of thing, which was all of our existence up until just the last maybe few hundred years, probably, less than that even. Then, especially, as we moved into this time where we're in cars, where when you bump into someone in a line, there's, at least, a human and a face there, but when it's a car, it's just this car, they're not a human, they're just this thing out there that's out to get you. It's easier to not have compassion for those people because there's a barrier between us.
With the internet, there's actually-- I remember years ago, learning about this study, talking about flaming on the internet. That's what it was referred to at the time.
Dedeker: Oh Gosh, back in the flame. When it was flaming, gosh, what's that?
Jase: We call it being a normal person on the internet, now.
Dedeker: Yes, basically.
Jase: Flaming was a term for just being super aggressive and mean, basically, of just erupting in flames as it were . It used to be called flaming, is when you were just an asshole on the internet. Like getting overly emotional and attacking people, essentially. As part of the study, they were looking at the difference between when you're interacting with people and having a discussion on a difficult topic face-to-face versus having that same discussion through a computer screen. Basically, looking at how-
Dedeker: Now, why did they need to study this, first of all?
Emily: I wonder.
Dedeker: I can tell you the results right now.
Jase: Exactly. I think we can all tell you the results right now. That's because this was in the '90s, or whatever. Anyway-
Dedeker: Oh, that makes sense before it was we were young and innocent back then before we know.
Emily: We didn't know the internet was going to bring us--
Jase: The hell that we had unleashed on ourselves. I remember at the time when this research was going on and when people on the news were loving to talk about this stuff, one of the things that they were mentioning was about emoji. This was when we were first starting to use the little sideways smiley face, emoticons and not even emoji, that hadn't been invented yet. They were talking about using those things added just this hint of humaneness of like, human facial expressions to it, and that that elevated the degree of nuance that we could use to communicate and the degree of humaneness that we could use to communicate.
I think it's not surprising if you look at that, why now emoji is-- there's tons of emoji, and that's a premade thing. It comes on all our phones and all our devices, and it's like built into it because it's like, "Yes, we need this because the internet strips away a lot of our humaneness from each other." We need these little things to add it back in. The reason why I said I think it might be getting a little bit better, is that as internet bandwidth and technology has increased, we do have more of the ability to do video calls and have our faces attached to things, like do little things to add a little bit of the human back in so we're not just all our '90s hacker usernames in the chat room.
Dedeker: I think we could debate this because--
Jase: We could. I think we, at least, have the option now. Reddit is still the trash pile that is Reddit because it's just usernames and texts. Anyway, I feel like we've got off track here. I think what makes it hard is that it's easy to get focused on our own suffering and then assume that everyone else is neutral. If there ever been short or being a jerk? Well, they're just doing that because they're a jerk and not because they're going through something. Whereas I think, we will sometimes feel very vindicated in being a jerk to others, because it's like, "Oh, well, I've had this terrible day." Or like, "Nothing's going my way." Or we might not say to ourselves in such trite terms, but we think like," Oh, yes. I was justified in being like that," but we don't ever give anyone else the idea that they might be justified, even if it had nothing to do with us. Does that makes sense?
Emily: Yes.
Dedeker: Yes, I think that's just one of our quite natural cognitive biases as we're much more likely to give ourselves a pass for bad behavior or having a hard time than we are to give to somebody else, whether that's a stranger on the internet or on partners. Something that I think that's definitely come up for me as, as for thinking about why compassion is so freaking hard. I don't have a lot of self-compassion and I've definitely learned-
Emily: Really?
Dedeker: You say really like you're super surprised.
Jase: Yes, why are you surprised?
Emily: I am.
Dedeker: Jase is shaking his head, Emily is surprised.
Dedeker: Not that you were --
Dedeker: Well, now I have some questions about the vast and different ways that both of you are perceiving me.
Emily: Not that you let yourself off the hook all the time, but I think you have a lot of self-efficacy. For whatever reason, I think that those two like go hand-in-hand.
Dedeker: Different though. That's different. I do because I would be more likely to agree with you. I do think I have some high self-efficacy, but compassion, maybe not so much.
Emily: Maybe you just don't let yourself off the hook for, I don't know, taking a day off or something, for example.
Dedeker: For nothing. Nothing.
Emily: More like you're really diligent. Basically, everything. Sure, okay, fine.
Dedeker: Well something I've learned about myself, and I'm constantly learning this many times over, that basically the extent to which I am not compassionate with myself or I'm harsh with myself or critical of myself or judgmental of myself, is pretty much the same extent to which I am all those same things everyone else in the world. It's almost like a one-to-one really. I've learned that I haven't done much about it but I have learned it. Now that's a thing.
Emily: Is it something that you want to do something about?
Dedeker: I do. Yes, I do. There's a reason why I freaking meditate and try to go down these Buddhist rabbit holes. It's not just for funsies, it's not just because I'm bored. There's a purpose here behind all this.
Anyway, I don't think I'm the only person with that problem of having a lack of self-compassion. I think this is a perpetual problem with a lot of people. I don't know why that is. We could wax poetic or philosophic about what it is about our particular culture that encourages people to not be very self-compassionate, but we don't get to go there now. I do think that one factor of that is that our culture often encourages us to focus on the differences between ourselves and others and to focus on the separation between ourselves and others. Especially, in American culture, in Western culture, that's so individualistic, and with this high, high emphasis on independence, that does sometimes breed a sense of not really needing to have compassion for other people as well. There's less of a sense of a collective, less of a sense of shared suffering. I think it's a lot about our individual suffering.
I think that's also supported by the fact that the media that we consume, I don't mean like the news media, necessarily, but just the media we consume for entertainment, for a long time has required us to turn off compassion in order to enjoy it. I don't know about all of you, but I do feel like the older I've gotten, the harder and harder time I have with watching violent things or scary things or sad and depressing things. I don't know why that is. I don't know if it's just from having more trauma or maybe slowly, eventually getting more empathy as I get older, but I know I have a much harder time with that these days
Jase: This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. In order to enjoy a lot of media, we have to turn off our empathy, at least, if not our compassion. I was just thinking about this when, Dedeker and I, we were watching an episode of The Highlander, the series from back in the '90s.
Dedeker: You have really given us away here, babe.
Jase: It's been our lockdown date time.
Emily: I've been watching TNG.
Jase: Oh, really? Next Generation? Wow.
Dedeker: Wow.
Emily: Yes. It's great.
Jase: Nice.
Emily: Captain Picard.
Dedeker: That's great. I didn't know that we were both going down this '90s TV show and the soldier training together.
Emily: Star Trek is like '80s into '90s, but yes, totally.
Dedeker: Same to Highlander?
Jase: I guess Highlander started in '92.
Dedeker: The movie was in '86?
Jase: That's true. We did watch the first three movies so far.
Emily: Wow.
Jase: We're still working on it. Anyway, this is not our Highlander podcast, although stay tuned for that.
Emily: Don't give him any rope here.
Jase: What I was saying though, is we're watching this episode. The core theme of this episode was that our hero, Duncan MacLeod, was with his friends, and this guy came in to try to get vengeance on one of those people. The conversation was sort of about this, like, "No, no, you can't just go take your vengeance. This is the person. We need due process. We need to see how this is going to go. You can't just take justice into your own hands." That was the message. Yet immediately after that, our hero who is making that argument goes on through the episode killing mercilessly all of the bad guys' henchmen, who I'm assuming we're just hired men who are here to help their friend.
It's this weird like we're trying to have this compassion for one character
whose name we know and who's had some lines. Then we immediately have to turn it off and completely ignore that compassion for all these unnamed people that we're killing. If you think about that, that's all of our movies and media, like action movies and things like that.
Emily: The Bible.
Jase: The Bible and Shakespeare. It's been a long time, we've been doing this one a long time. If they're not our heroes, we turn off that compassion and if they are, we're supposed to turn it on. I think if we didn't turn off our compassion, it might just drive us crazy. It would be too much to handle. It's like we do need to have that skill, unfortunately, just to survive in the world where we have access to learn about all the horrible things happening all over the world. Yet, I think we can go too far where we lose our ability to have that and turn it back on.
Emily: I don't know if y'all saw the movie Okja, but that shit was really hard for me to watch because it's about the meat industry to a degree. It is in essence and they have a whole scene of animal killing and it's really awful. It feels similar to that in a way that I guess we each have, our compassions that are easier or more difficult for us to turn on and off. Of course, when you watch Lord of the Rings and see Gandalf riding through and all of the killing of orcs and human alike and other beings, then it's easy to just see a crowd and not even think about what's happening there.
Dedeker: I mean, we could get into a nerdy debate about whether or not orcs are worthy of compassion at all-
Emily: Well, I don't know. I guess maybe not.
Dedeker: Sorry, I'm in the middle of rereading Lord of the Rings right now so I am primed, I'm primed to have this debate.
Jase: She will have this debate.
Dedeker: I don't want to have it.
Jase: Stay tuned for our compassion in the Lord of the Rings podcast.
Emily: There he goes again. Well, you kind of touched on this a little bit, Dedeker, but because we are such an individualistic society, we also are a very competitive society. We value a lot of competition in our lives over this cooperation. To me, I think of in more Eastern culture or in Asia, because all three of us have lived in Asia for various times and thinking about how very much it's like the collective there as opposed to just the individual, it puts you in a different mindset when you are amongst that, I think.
Dedeker: Well, it's kind of dependent on culture. I don't want to make a blanket statement about all of Asia.
Emily: No, of course. I'm not thinking of China and Japan, which we've been to for sure. Also, we, I think, as a society are taught to view people as like good or bad, and that's it. Just black or white.
Jase: Our movies do that too. They're the bad guy so you don't have to have compassion for them.
Emily: Totally.
Jase: Okay. Did either of you ever watch the DVD bonus features for-- It was one of the Austin Powers movies from way back.
Emily: I can't say that I have, but I've heard about it.
Jase: This was actually very upsetting to me. I know it's supposed to be funny and I guess it's more of this British sort of funny. It was these little bonus scenes where they were after scenes in the movies where henchmen get killed in random ways, like getting knocked into the pool with all the mutant piranhas in it, or getting rolled over with the steamroller. Do you remember these things?
They were these comedic silly scenes in the movies. Then they have this whole scene that they filmed with a lot of the actors from the movie for the bonus content on the DVD of them calling their families and telling them and having their funerals and being all sad about this person dying. It's done in this kind of over-the-top way and it's a little bit funny, I guess, but I remember watching this as a high schooler with my friends, maybe even a middle schooler, I forget how old I was at the time, but being legitimately upset by it and being like, "Yes, this sucks."
Emily: Oh, this reminder that all these people were human beings also.
Jase: Right. Anyway, that just popped into my head right there. The fact that in that bonus, they were essentially making a joke out of the fact that we don't have compassion for these characters, which in itself is maybe kind of an amazing statement.
Dedeker: I think it was at Ed's. Oh gosh, I'm going to forget the comedian's name. Demetri Martin who makes that joke about, like, "We should make a video game about all the people that you kill in these very violent video games and call it Super Busy Hospital."
Emily: Jeez. Oh my gosh.
Jase: It's terrible.
Dedeker: All the kind of that same level of humor of making this dark joke about the fact that we don't really have compassion necessarily.
Emily: That's why I prefer Zelda and Mario. If you are killing something, it's like a weird orc type of thing again.
Dedeker: Okay. That's the subset of our podcast, like the Goombas deserve compassion or empathy.
Emily: I don't know. I don't think so.
Jase: The philosophy of Goombas podcast .
Emily: That's where it always comes back.
Jase: Okay. All right. Before we go too far off-topic on all our other podcasts we're going to make, what does a healthy balance look like? I'd say, first of all, just to sum up a lot of what we've talked about so far is that having compassion doesn't equal letting anyone else do whatever to you and not having boundaries. It doesn't mean always forgiving people no matter what they do to you. That's not what we're talking about here. I do want that to be clear because I feel like sometimes, when people have concerns about compassion or people who try to teach compassion, that's the place they come from.
It's like, "Oh, what? So I should have stayed with my abusive ex and just had compassion for him?" It's like, "No, no, no, that's not the same thing. Not the same thing." That's number one.
Dedeker: I always try to encourage people and encourage myself honestly to compassionately have a firm boundary. I think that a lot of people, I know myself for sure for a long time, kind of default to this sense of like if I enforce a boundary, that's automatically going to be conflict or it's automatically going to be the end of my relationship. That may be true, that may very well be true but also, when you have a boundary and you need to let someone know, it doesn't have to be combative. It doesn't have to be mean. It doesn't have to be aggressive necessarily. It is possible to be very compassionate while still saying no or while still saying, "This is a boundary for me."
Jase: Even when having a breakup, you don't have to make them the bad guy in order to have an excuse to break up. You could still have compassion while doing that. I know that can be hard, but that's a good example.
Emily: Why don't you like the term forgiveness?
Jase: Oh, I wrote that in the notes, didn't I?
Emily: Yes.
Jase: We'll do a whole another podcast about that. I think I just find the whole concept to be just a very slippery slope because a lot of people like to talk about the power of forgiveness and what have you. I think that I don't like that term because I don't think it's specific enough. I feel like it has a lot of different meanings because we talk about things like debt forgiveness, meaning, well, that money is just gone now, you're not going to get it back because you've forgiven that debt, or we talk about forgiveness for something, meaning, there's now no penalty for it.
Then we also talk about forgiveness in the religious sense or more of the philosophical sense of not holding on to hurt that someone else has caused you, and we call that forgiveness. I guess I just don't like that it's just-
Emily: It's so not encompassing?
Jase: -so not specific because I think some of those things can be healthy and some can be unhealthy. I don't like saying, "Just forgive people." Let's try to also not maybe equate compassion with forgiveness necessarily because that's not a very specific thing.
Emily: Okay. Well, a good balance of compassion and I guess sticking to your guns and having healthy boundaries is the realization that we can't control how other people treat us. This is something that I feel like I've come more to terms with as I've gotten older too. Maybe some people out there just like, "Fuck it. I don't give a shit anymore. Things can roll off of me a little bit more easily." Maybe that can be true as well, but also understanding that you can decrease some of the extra suffering that you experience. Maybe if somebody is unkind to you simply by having compassion for them.
Jase: And for yourself.
Emily: Yes, and for yourself. When we call someone out, then that might also be compassionate in a way because we can be doing it with the intention of helping them change. That's very difficult for me. I'm not good at calling people out that often, or maybe I'm just like, "Let me wrap that up in a really nice bow and try to make it look not like I'm calling you out in any way." It is important to do it for various reasons.
Jase: Depending on the situation, that might be the more compassionate way. I think the thing with calling out or calling in or whatever you want to call it, it's possible to do that in a very destructive, hurtful, not compassionate way. Honestly, that's the way I see it done most of the time, and it sucks. It sucks. I think it especially sucks because a lot of people assume like, "Oh, this is the thing I've been told is a good thing to do so I'm not going to do it and now you just feel good about myself even if it's being done with no compassion."
Emily: Poorly.
Jase: Yes, it's done unskillfully, as they say in Buddhism. I think it's an opportunity if you are finding yourself in a situation where you do want to call someone out or come to someone's defense, whether that's online or in person with a coworker or something, is that there is a way to do that that's compassionate and there's a way to do that that's not compassionate. Now, the moment we've all been waiting for. Some exercises. How do we actually freaking do this? How do we do this?
It all sounds great and it's fine to sit here and listen to this podcast and go, "Yes, I'll be compassionate to someone who cuts me in line at the store because I don't know what they've got going on and I don't want to suffer extra for myself because of them, and I also don't want them to suffer even more and then cause more suffering for other people." That's all well and good to think it, but then it's hard to actually do it in real life sometimes.
The first exercise that we want to talk about here is this one involves a certain-- You kind of have to catch yourself first so maybe it's easier to do after the fact. Say, something like that happened or someone cut you in line and you get upset about it regardless of how you acted, whether you didn't say anything, whether you got angry at them, whatever happened. When you think about this later is to challenge yourself to think about, "What do me and this other person have in common?" The mantra with this, what I like about it is that this applies to everybody.
It goes like this. You just say, "Just like me, this person is seeking happiness in their life." Then step two is, "Just like me, this person is trying to avoid suffering in their life." Step three, "Just like me, this person has known sadness, loneliness and despair." Step four, "Just like me, this person is seeking to fill their needs." Step five, "Just like me, this person is learning about life."
Emily: That's lovely.
Jase: I love that it's so simple and yet, if you actually try and do it- and I recommend to actually try this. Try this thinking about someone who's done a small hurt to you. They were just a little rude, they said something unkind, something small. Start low stakes. Just try going through this. Maybe we'll put this in the show notes. If you go to our website, you can find this. It's just recognizing that they're also seeking happiness. They're also trying to avoid suffering in their life. They've also known sadness, loneliness and despair. They're also trying to fulfill their needs and they're also learning, just like you are.
Dedeker: It reminds me of something about the Gottman Institute, actually. It's just this tiny little tool that they throw away, honestly. They just kind of stick it in as an afterthought on some of their exercises and stuff like that, but I think about it a lot. It feels very similar to this commonalities exercise which is specifically when you're in conflict or you're trying to work out conflict with your partner, the things that you think your partner is doing wrong or being bad at or in some way.
See if you can find those qualities in yourself as well, or if you can think of a time when you had those qualities as well and likewise, the things that you feel like you're doing right and the reason why you feel like you're righteous and the feelings that you feel are mostly justified. See if you can see those qualities or those feelings with your partner as well. As far as the tool goes, obviously, it's not necessarily going to fix all your conflicts right then and there, but it does help to create this foundation of compassion that hopefully will help you be able to unknit that a little bit easier and from a little bit more of a generous place, perhaps.
Jase: The reason why I said try this first, maybe after the fact, after some little thing has happened that you noticed yourself get upset about is because it gets you in the habit. It gets you to just try it at all. The challenge is just getting your mind to even think these thoughts at all. Once you've done that, maybe especially if something else happens that's similar to that, you've practiced having these thoughts. The next time someone cuts you in line, maybe there'll be that pathway in your brain that goes, "Oh, right, those things." I still might say something about it, but maybe I will do it in a more compassionate way, understanding that they've also got their own stuff going on.
That's the idea behind that one, is just this little exercise you can do to just notice what you and another person have in common or the Gottman version of it too where it's just like the reasons you feel so justified, imagine applying those to the other person.
Dedeker: Similarly, another exercise, it's something like metta meditation or loving-kindness meditation. We talked about meta meditation, specifically metta for your metamours in our first episode that we did with Annalisa talking about applying Buddhist principles to non-monogamous relationships. I think if you google loving-kindness meditation or metta meditation, you''ll find a lot of-
Jase: That's metta with two Ts.
Dedeker: -two Ts, yes. You'll find a lot of instruction. The most common version of a metta meditation practice is that you first offer loving-kindness to yourself, then you offer loving-kindness to someone that you care about who's close to you, an ally of yours, then you offer loving-kindness to an acquaintance, then you offer loving-kindness to someone that you have no feeling about whatsoever, someone who's very neutral and then you offer loving-kindness to an enemy, someone that you have a hard time with. and then you offer loving-kindness to the world at large. I think I may have mixed it with a few of those stuffs but you get my drift.
That's supposed to start with yourself first. The thinking, I think, originally, being that it's easiest to love yourself, and then you go progressively harder from out there.
Jase: If that is first step is hard, offering it to yourself, a lot of times, I've seen this taught of starting by offering it to someone who's very easy for you to feel compassion for, like a puppy or a kitty or a baby. Someone in your life-
Dedeker: Your child.
Jase: -who it's easy for you to think those thoughts about, and then yourself because sometimes, that's not so easy.
Dedeker: I think the newer modern-day version is kind of doing the gateway of starting with someone where it's easy to actually have those feelings for. As far as what it actually entails, for some people, it entails just thinking and feeling it. Usually, the practice entails kind of saying a mantra, something along the lines of, "May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you be safe. May you be at ease."
If those things resonate for you, great. My own metta meditation practice, I customized many years ago to say things that resonated more with me, both when I was directing it towards myself and towards others so I highly recommend people play with that to figure out what actually feels significant and useful for you as well.
Emily: The next one is going to be finding small acts of kindness. First, you realize that everyone is suffering, absolutely everyone on this planet in one way or another. All beings, really, are in one way or another. You think of, "What is something small that I can do to help ease someone else's suffering?" and then you do that for someone which could be really simple like holding a door open for someone, smiling at someone.
It might be a little bit harder with our masks on, but something kind in that way, or letting someone go ahead of you, a kind word to someone, listening if someone needs a shoulder to cry on or just someone to hear them in that moment, even doing a chore for someone, or being understanding of a person who's close to you that's in a bad mood in that moment.
Dedeker: I feel like all these things, we've gotten so much messaging I think from the time we were children about small acts of kindness and being kind to people and things like that.
Emily: Pay it forward.
Dedeker: Paying it forward and stuff like that. I think the real challenge here, because I think it's easy in a cognitive level is we're like, "Yes, sure. Totally. Yes, definitely. We should all do that." I think the real challenge is more in unknitting our habits around the moments when we don't give kindness necessarily. Unknitting our habits around what we do in the moments when it's hard to be kind to somebody in a small way. When you're busy and you're power walking down the street to get to somewhere, would you still open the door for someone or let someone go first?
Emily: Cutting someone off in traffic or being really upset you if somebody is rude to you in traffic. I'm great when you're face to face, but not when there's that wall of cars between you.
Dedeker: The same thing in your relationships is just taking note of when are the times when you have difficulty having compassion for a partner or difficulty being kind to a partner. Again, starting on this small scale I think just to make it a little bit easier. I think that's really interesting exercise of first kind of getting aware of what our habits around the times when we kind of slip out of kindness and compassion.
Jase: There's a particular-- I forget the name of it right now, but there's a compassion course that I was hearing about recently that ends the course with this challenge. I forget if it's just one day or if it's for a week but basically, every day, you think about and come up with something that you can do to better the world. It's not like, "Oh gosh, I've got to sell all my belongings and move to some other country and build wells or something." It could be something little as well.
It's whatever's possible for you is to think about like, "What good could I be doing?" and then do it and just commit to this certain amount of time of doing that, whether that's donating to a charity or picking up litter or opening a door for someone. It could be any of these things we've been talking about, of just thinking like, "What is in my power to do right now?" Basically, what they find when people actually do this is that it's addictive because it feels good. We talked before about the research.
There's been lots of research showing that we actually can be just as happy or happier to do these acts of kindness, whether it's donating or any of the things we've talked about, then, like, just as happy as receiving a gift or money, sometimes even happier. It's like you are also getting a benefit from this. Hopefully then also creating this ripple effect that goes outward making even more of that.
For our listeners, if you feel interested, give that a try and see what it feels like to find what that is, whether that's doing any of those things that we talked about. Maybe right now while you're stuck at home, something like donating even a little bit to a charity could be a great way to do that. I also wanted to mention just real quick, for those of you who are interested, there's an app called Healthy Minds Program. It's an app, it's through some organization that's part of a university. The reason why I recommend it is because it's free for individuals. If you're using it for your company, they want you to pay for it.
For any individual, it's totally free. There's no upsells inside of it. It's not like all the meditation apps out there that then wants you to pay extra for all the different meditations. It's totally free. I've used it a little bit and it's been nice. If you're struggling, might be a good resource for you. All right. In our bonus, we're going to go on and we're going to talk about one more exercise for offering compassion as well as discussing that a little bit more, some more nuance and some of our own experiences. If you're a patron, we would love to see you there for that bonus episode.