Journal of Sacred Work

The difference between compassion & pity is the difference between Love & condescension.

   In the summer of 1997, despair overtook me. As the result of an acquisition, I was fired from my position as Chief Operating Officer of a publicly-traded company. With proceeds from the sale of the company, I had the freedom to do anything I wanted. But, after years of working, I could think of nothing to do. 
   This, of course, made no sense. Neither did it make any sense to my friends that I would feel depressed. "You’ve got a wonderful family, your health, and plenty of money," one dear friend said to me. "What have you got to be depressed about?" As most caregivers would already understand, the seeds of depression had been planted…

   Perhaps, we all need to feel needed. Suddenly, I felt useless. I looked
around at my life. My wife, happily employed as a journalist, certainly
didn’t need me. Both our children were on their own.
   It was then that I entered the toxic whirlpool of self pity that draws one down to a painful isolation. All day long, every day, and in the middle of the night, the same self-pitying thoughts attacked me. I was no longer needed. I was useless. I was a jerk. At age fifty-three, no one would want to hire me. I was a failure. Even worse, I was irrelevant. My life was over.
   The ego-centered irrationality of most of these thoughts didn’t matter. What mattered was the way my mind kept repeating these self-pitying thoughts hundreds of times a day. The corrosive effect of this thought pattern eventually led me to seek help from a spiritual therapist who, in many ways, saved my life.

   My therapist never disputed my feelings. Instead, she handed me the great gift of compassion. "How difficult this must be," she would say. "You are so strong and talented and here you are bereft. How hard."
   She told me what a kind, sensitive and artistic soul I was. She told me how strong and capable she thought I was. One part of me argued with her, the other part heard her and gradually began to accept her Love.
   I learned, from this lovely woman, the gift of self-compassion. She didn’t call it that. She simply demonstrated it to me. Yes, I had been hurt. Yes, I would heal. Yes, some part of the world needed my gifts. It was just a question of how and where.
   At the beginning, it was so difficult to accept her compassion. I didn’t feel worthy of it. Slowly, I learned to tell myself what she was telling me – that I was, in fact, a kind, sensitive and even artistic soul. I was a talented leader, a child of God.
   Gradually, my strength and determination began to return, not because someone told me to "Get tough," but because someone recognized the agony in my heart and had the courage to join me there. Soon after, I found new energy and, with persistence, a new joy as well as president of a large hospital system in Nashville, where I live to this day.
   The difference between compassion and pity is the difference between Love and condescension. In self pity, we actually look down on ourselves with disdain. In self compassion, we become our own caring friend. We recognize the hurt we are experiencing, treat it with kindness, and manage to find nobility and strength out of it.
   As someone once said, "Pity stops and stares, compassion stoops and cares."  When someone says, "Look at that poor soul," we know they are looking down in condescension. The same is true when someone says, "I thought I had it tough until I remembered some people have cancer and others are starving." Innocent-seeming on the surface, these statements are nothing more than ways some have of ranking themselves above others. Do we have to feel better off than someone else in order to feel okay?
   The greater truth is that all of us are both suffering and filled with the potential for joy. When we feel kicked around by the world, it’s natural to retreat to the closest thing we can find to our mother’s lap. Sadly, this may lead to the false comfort of drugs, alcohol, food, sex, or gambling.
   Self compassion, on the other hand, leads to the best kind of mental health. Self compassion is the gift of allowing Love’s energy to flow into us as well as through us. To accept that we are loved is to enable us to pass Love’s energy on to others.
   This is not a matter of duty. There is nothing about this that is connected to a "should." In fact, my telling you that you are loved may feel meaningless. What counts is that we all develop the capacity to receive the gift of Love that is always there, waiting patiently for us to open the door and let it in.
   Is the difference between self-compassion and self-love meaningful to you? How do you practice self-compassion?

-Erie Chapman