"I believe the two writers are describing sympathy (I feel what you feel)
rather than compassion. Compassion starts with a sympathetic reaction to
another's plight or experience and, seeing the bigger picture, takes a
supportive action. The action might be to tolerate, foregive or, more
overtly, to interveen. Without action at some level, we are only voyeurs
at a train wreck."
I agree with your drawing a distinction between compassion and sympathy...
as a practicing therapist, I find that it is important to help others draw
another distinction between sympathy (as you have defined it) and empathy.
The distinction is that with empathy the receiver does not become
identified with the feelings of the other with whom they are in contact.
Such identifications are the basis of co-dependency as they are vestiges
of a childhood process wherein a clear separation of boundaries has not
been made with the mother. Also such identification in sympathy (as
distinguished above), often leads to inappropriate actions in that they
tend to further serve the dependencies. In fact, I would say that it
leads to manipulation on both sides, which has been discussed in the
thread on Resistance to Change.
As for compassionate action... an empathetic perspective leads to a more
compassionate approach because it offers the other a model of self-respect
(with clear boundaries) which encourages the other's own development of
self-respect and freedom from dependency.
It is rather like good Object-Oriented Design in software engineering,
wherein the software architecture is based upon classes of objects for
which there are "crisp" boundaries. The resulting software is far
superior to architectures wherein the boundaries betweeen software
components are muddled.
Cheers, Doug Seeley
-- Dr. Doug Seeley: compuserve 100433,133... Fax: +41 22 756 3759 InterDynamics Pty. Ltd. (Australia) in Geneva, Switzerland "Integrity is not merely an ideal; it is the only reality."