The Cost of Compassion

10 February 2021

Late in January, a newspaper headline caught my eye.  But it caught a particular and developing part of my eye, the part concerned with the “hows” and “whys” of being fully human.  That headline was “Who cares?  We all should.  Empathy and compassion cost nothing.”  I questioned the final assertion about empathy and compassion being cost-free.  Here’s why.

The author’s example was a family-based crisis in which her ailing brother was denied the right to have a compassionate family member with him while he received dire medical news.  The medic who denied him this right, when the brother said he didn’t know if he could cope responded with “Who cares?”   The author, Lisa Machado, rightly questioned the origin and value of that hurtful response.

What was happening within the hospital staffer who responded so harshly?  Here are a few hypotheses: 1) Stressed to the max.  Simple tiredness, exhaustion, and frustration at being sometimes helpless in what must seem to her an endless stream of serious need.  2) Fear of investment.  If that nurse invests her compassion in Machado’s brother, she may believe that compassion is then unavailable to her self, her children, or other loved family, friends, or colleagues.  Underneath that fear is a (mistaken) assumption that life is a zero-sum game i.e., you only have so many resources, they’re not renewable, and you spend them where YOU want.  3) She’s embittered.  Bitterness, in my experience, is related to resentment.  She resents the forces driving this pandemic, the forces preventing her living the life she wants, and/or she resents herself for not taking steps to foster change.  How are these remedied?

The stress requires some diligent self care and compassion.  The fear of investment is more challenging.  If you believe that when you win someone else loses, in equal proportion, you probably become extremely defensive.  After all, if a colleague’s gain is your loss, what the hell?  What did I do wrong?  It’s a pinched soul that sustains this view of the world.  Pinched souls don’t arrive via gestation, they arrive anytime afterward following harm or neglect, in repeated doses.  If you are denied sufficient attention, love, encouragement...you hurt for years (or life) trying to understand what happened, why, and if there’s anything to be done. 

This plays right back into either Frankl’s logotherapy (blogs from January 2021) or Dweck’s growth mindset (Perfectionism II, 30.ix.2020).  If you believe there’s something to be done, get on with it, get some therapy that absolves you of most of the guilt...you’re on your way to opening up to the world and leaving that pinched soul behind.  The point is, that’s work, a lot of work and none of it is free of costs in time, money, and sustained effort meaning...empathy and compassion have costs.  And they’re considerable.  So, the next time you encounter a pinched soul, exercise your own empathy and compassion as that soul probably never intended to inhabit such a confined form.

Dan Chalykoff provides one-to-one counselling concerning life direction, addiction, and change. Since 2017 he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery: danchalykoff@hotmail.com