Empathy, Understanding and Compassion

Empathy is closely related to compassion, but empathy both precedes compassion and is a pre-requisite for compassion. When we feel empathy for someone we are getting emotional information about them and their situation. By collecting information about other people's feelings, you get to know them better. As you get to know others on an emotional level, you are likely to see similarities between your feelings and theirs, and between your basic emotional needs and theirs. When you realize that someone else's basic emotional needs are similar to yours, you are more able to identify with them, relate to them and empathize with them.

All humans share similar emotional needs. (See human emotional needs) The wide variety among our needs is mostly a difference in degree, rather than in type. For example, we all need to feel some degree of freedom, but one person may need more freedom than another.

Compassion can be defined as a combination of empathy and understanding. Greater empathy gives you greater information, and the more information you have on something, the more likely you are to understand it. Higher emotional intelligence makes possible a greater capacity for such understanding. Thus, the logical sequence is as follows: Higher emotional sensitivity and awareness leads to higher levels of empathy. This leads to higher levels of understanding which then leads to higher levels of compassion.

Haim Ginott wrote that "It takes time and wisdom to realize that the personal parallels the universal and what pains one man pains mankind." Now we might add that it also takes highly developed emotional intelligence.

Empathy and Conscience

Those who are not in touch with their own feelings are not likely to have a sense of conscience. They may feel no remorse, no guilt for causing harm to others. As could be expected, studies show that such people are unlikely to respond to rehabilitation.

One thing which could easily cause a person to lose touch with his own feelings and to lose his sense natural sense of conscience is an extremely painful childhood and adolescence. Such people have experienced so much pain that they shut themselves from it. This pain may have come from physical, sexual or emotional abuse. The end result though is similar. They do not experience their own pain, so they have no compassion for the pain of another. Nor do they have any empathy.

They are also likely to be extremely needy. In other words they have many, and deep, unmet emotional needs.. As adults, they will have developed elaborate defense mechanisms in an attempt to block the pain coming from both these unmet needs and from the guilt they would feel if they allowed themselves to feel.

As Freud helped us see, attempts to defend our brains from psychological pain usually involve the cognitive parts of the brain. For example, common defenses are rationalization, justification, denial, intellectualization, moralizing, preaching, proselytizing, self-righteousness, projection, suppression, etc.

In the absence of a conscience, behavior must be controlled by fear, threats and punishment, or by separation from society. This comes at tremendous social cost, and evidently is ineffective, given the overcrowded prisons and rising fines.

It seems that laws are really only needed when conscience has failed. We might say that the more laws a society needs, the less emotionally intelligent.